The Rainsong Jabberwock

Rainsong

I know not if there has ever been 

An incident in the past

Where the poet sat down to 

Write a poem about poems

About how he is inspired to write 

By one thing or the other

To dedicate them all as inspirations 

And to lock them away as gems

In an old trunk that he keeps 

In the corner of a forelorn room

Only to awaken the next morning 

To open the treasure chest

Be inspired again to come up 

With something new – a new jewel?

As he works away in lonesome joy 

To better his yet artful best

I imagine he will ignore hunger and thirst 

And sleep and dream

Just so he doesn’t interrupt 

Himself in his unending travels

For we both know he will stop 

When he can write no more

Till his fingers don’t stand limp 

And his mind no more unravels

 

I know not why I called this the rainsong

For it has nothing to do with rains

Nor does it concern itself with a song

It’s just to relieve some fictional pains

 

You must forgive me

For wasting your time

But I will only hope

You noticed that it rhymed

 

I never really understood why

The poems I heard as a child followed a pattern

They never had any a meaning to them

And there seemed nothing to learn

 

‘Tis not often that I write

Something such as this to while away

What’s left of some little time I have

Before a test later in the day

 

But it somehow always feels good

To do something sans requirement

Just for the heck of it all

And this line must rhyme with Kent

 

Ah, poetry.

 

I just felt like writing a poem and calling it ‘Rainsong’. And I don’t know why, but it feels good and wholesome at the end. Perhaps I will sit down, later in the day, and waste time trying to infuse it with some metaphorical meaning.  

Blessed Death Psychedelium

Most of my posts concern themselves with how perception varies from person to person, and how understanding (of anything and everything around us) is innately tied up as a Gordian knot with it. It takes an Alexander to cut through it, and that is what constitutes self realisation. Anyway, today, I was pondering on death. All my previous contentions were as to how the experience of living seems to be the same even though its perception is varied. On stumbling upon the concept of death, I understood the meaning of the inevitability it carried around dignifiedly. Even though what we make of everything that comes between birth and death is different, the beginning and the end remain the same for everyone. They cannot be changed nor altered, and remain perpetually unasked for; a part of the package, if you will.

Suppose that there is a table. On that table are two objects, for example two wooden cubes – one painted blue and one painted red. If the table were to represent reality, and the cubes represent birth and death, you are now witness to the way I take to these phenomena. In one of my previous posts, I had described about the concept of Maya and Brahman in Hinduism. Maya is the universal illusion, whereas Brahman is the Universal Truth. Truth and realism are one and the same – although their perception is not. Truth is an absolute concept. If person A says person B is not speaking the truth, then it may or may not be an assumption on A’s part that B is not speaking what constitutes A’s realism. In other words, A sees something in one way, and the bone of contention happens to be that B does not see things in the same way. If the ability to conceive varied perception was unavailable, then realism will cease to exist. Only the Universal Truth will be present and understandable. 

However, the untruth and illusion are not the same. The untruth is the negation of the truth. On the other hand, illusion is the perceived truth – or realism as we see it. Therefore, under our perusal, we have:

1. Truth
2. Illusion
3. Untruth

Birth is truth. Death is truth. Realism is illusion. The children of Maya are not necessarily illusions. The can of deodorant in front of my eyes is illusion. The fragrance it emits is true. The lava lamp above the shelf is illusion. The light it emits is true.

That being established, I now come to the concept of the soul. The soul, as it were, is true if one wants it to be. I want it to be. Why? Going by my argument:

• Core argument 1: There is only One Absolute Truth.
• Core argument 2: There can only be one True perception of it.
• Parallel argument 1: we are all part of the same Universe.
• Parallel argument 2: we all concur to the same Truth because of CA2 and PA1.
• Parallel argument 3: Sight (or visual perception) of the body that contains the soul is varied.
• Core argument 3: One perception of the Truth recapitulates that the body outside the soul is illusory.
• Parallel argument 4: I think therefore I am; the illusion I perceive as being around me is so because I think that it exists. In other words, the illusion exists only because I do. If I were not here to be able to perceive it, then the illusion itself does not exist anymore.
• Core argument 4: An element other than the body constitutes the Truth.

The soul is a hypotheses drawn from these conclusions – like in a physics laboratory, a graviton is hypothesised and simultaneously believed to be existent just so particle physics agrees with its Newtonian counterpart. So, getting back to the topic at hand, I believe the soul to be existent. As a side note, I would like to stress the independency of the soul as such from religion and religious beliefs. Pondering on one’s existential truths need not have anything to do with God or any of His minions. Yes, I am a religious and God-fearing man, but that only means my Absolute Truth takes the form of a Supreme Being. To some, it may be moral values. To some others, it may be power. It can be anything. But everything that has nothing to do with the form of the Truth doesn’t have to be religious.

To be sitting on the floor of a 80 sq. ft. bedroom and contentedly typing away on a Razer (Arctosa!) keyboard is my realism. And thus is born life: as each one of us takes to Maya and Brahman in a unique way, we come across perceptions and experiences. Just as my senses bring to life the illusions of Maya, my experiences tell me that I am walking on the road that is life. Just as my experiences tell me that changes are happening and that I am finally blessed with the ability to track them, my death will tell me that my soul will break free from the container that is the body. Some people take to these things warily, and I don’t blame them. If we had been born such animals with the inability to look downwards at our paws, then mathematics would have been a distorted and bizarre dream. We are because we think. What we think of is up to ourselves. I believe in there being a Universal Truth. To a person to whom such a thing is absurd, his realism and his truths and untruths will lie elsewhere. The beauty of it all is that such things as the Truth and the Untruth will always exist in one form or the other. Our realism, as a last word, exists because of perception but, more so, in the self-assertion that whatever is perceived is real.    

The Theory Of Everything

I’m a student of mechanical engineering in Dubai. I don’t know how I landed up here, except that I didn’t perform so well in my Class XII Board Examinations back in India. Anyway, I’ve always known I’m very creative – apart from being told the same thing by others. My ideas have always been out of the box, but only when I ideate openly. I’m more of a follower than a leader, and if given the opportunity to be a leader, I would prefer to work on the backstage. In other words, I like being the puppet master! So much said, my ideas have always involved the changing of perceptions. The way we look at the world is a solipsistic concept, and if one were to utilise that concept, ideation becomes extremely easy, especially if you’re asked to come up with ideas that no one else can possibly think of. The school of solipsistic thought has to do with the philosophy which theorizes that there exists only one mind, that of the realiser. This thought has profound basis because of the imperciptibility of an other mind  – other than through the actions and speech of the person. 

Like I was saying, I’m a student of engineering. What does that have to do with creative ideation? Let me tell you. Every field of work and every branch of study involves the necessity to have something proven in order to document it and facilitate recollection and reproduction later on. In order to prove something, we must be able to hypothesize. We are given some amount of infallible data, and is up to us now to come up multiple conclusions of an event which involves, solely, that data. This is fact. However, the involvement of this fact varies amongst subjects. In science, the data as well as the outcome (input and output) have to conform with each other. In philosophical studies, the input conforms to what is perceived, and the output, to what is observed. As a student of science, I am now in a position to explain every scientific phenomenon observed around me. By this nature, I find it difficult to think out of the box sometimes. When science finds itself able to explain phenomenon A conclusively, the experimenter will conclude that science will also explain phenomenon B – independent of the question as to whether phenomena A and B are related or not. If I were to stretch the analogy to factual science and, say, theology, I find myself stumped.

• There doesn’t exist a theory of everything.
• My knowledge in one field, which seems to be a quanta of data that suffices to supplant me with everything I need to live with, appears logically incompatible with what I need to know for myself.

Science, I think, is a way to explain something that has already happened or is still happening. Although it has been able to predict the end of the world and things like that, it shuts up when it encounters matters of deeper meaning, such as self realisation.

• Science is physical: it explains evolution.
• Science is NOT mental: it cannot explain civilisation.

We are human beings, and as human beings, it is only natural that we are curious. But being in possession of something as the mind (and, of course, the opposable thumb), we are inherently meant to explore and discover. And science, somehow, falls short of that. Existence is something that is not only ours, but also belongs to everything we perceive and observe around us. We, the living, did not ask for it. It is the same as with knowledge, understanding, emotion, ideation, thought and investigation. All these sub-surface elements come together to define our experiences; they mould together to outline memories which, upon true recollection, constitute as our past. Our future is an open road. The only thing left to do in between is to live. Through cognition and communication, we are able to work towards goals. We know not whether that is what we want, but we only hope. These limitations cascade into one another, ultimately rearing their unsavoury heads in perfection, certainty and controllability. My point is not to discard science, but to enhance it by combining it with what we need to know. Agreed, there is an insurmountable want to know everything, but there are also such things as probabilities. Investing trillions of dollars into the LHC was not folly per se, but there is something missing in that – a missing factor if you will – whose absence recapitualtes the inability to generate the world’s interest. To put it simply, my only questions are: will we all be happy and satisfied if we know everything there is to know? What of the inner self? What are we doing that we know for sure, and beyond all doubt, that will keep us happy and satisfied?

My question is not an argument. It is only as a question should be, and I am only looking for an answer.

LOTR Quiz

While out for some sheesha with a couple of friends, I dared them to ask me any question from LOTR – the book as well as the movie – and challenged them that for every question that I got wrong, I would pay them Dhs. 10 (with, of course, the understanding that they knew the answers too). Except for one question which had to do with a bit of the movie’s trivia, I got all answers right, even to the extent of correcting the questions themselves. The other two gave up on it and decided to go online in order to stump me. To their dismay, the net showed up nothing close to tough questions – except of for one quiz which had to do with the years in which things happened. So here it is, my own LOTR, Hobbit and Silmarillion quiz – and I’m going to make it as tough as I can! 

Enjoy!

Questions I

1. While camping for the first time after Rivendell, Saruman sends a band of flying crows as spies to the Fellowship’s camp to find out their plans. What are these crows called and where are they from?
2. How does the Orc army at Pelennor Fields better know the Hammer of the Underworld?
3. What is the House of Aragorn called after he is declared King at Minas Tirith?
4. The Mouth of Sauron, who is seen in the last book (an the movie) is sent as an emissary of Sauron to meet the Last Alliance at Morgul Vale. In the book, what does Tolkien say is his ultimate intention?
5. Name the only three of the Istari mentioned in the book.
6. Name the City of Trees where Galadriel and Lord Celeborn reside.
7. When the Fellowship is touring Lothlorien, what do they see for the first time from atop Cerin Amroth?
8. Before it was calle ‘Lothlorien’, what was the city’s original name?
9. Before symbiotically pairing up with Sauron to guard the pass of Cirith Ungol, whom did Shelob serve?
10. Who captains the ship at the Grey Havens, which ferries elves from Middle Earth to Valinor?

Answers I

1. Crebain from Dunland
2. Grond (or, the Wolf’s Head)
3. Telcontar
4. To obtain the keys of Isengard
5. Saruman, Gandalf and Radagast
6. Caras Galadhon
7. Dol Guldur
8. Laurelindorenan
9. Morgoth Bauglir
10. Cirdan

Questions II

1. Name Arwen’s two elder brothers, who are not mentioned in the movie.
2. Who prophesized that the Witch King of Angmar wouldn’t die at the hands of a man?
3. Gwaihir is the Lord of the Eagles. Who is his lieutenant?
4. Feanor crafted the Silmarils, which trapped for eternity the light of which two trees?
5. In the Mines of Moria, Gimli finds the tomb of Balin son of Fundin in which room?
6. Gandalf falls down fighting against a Balrog of Morgoth over the bridge of ______. Fill in the blank.
7. Who slew the first dragon, Glaurung, that was born from the desires of Morgoth Bauglir?
8. Ancalagon the Black was slain by which forefather of Elrond?
9. While Elrond chose immortality, which brother of his became one of the Men of Middle Earth?
10. Name the island where Sauron was imprisoned before he returned to set up fort in Mordor.

Answers II

1. Elladan and Elrohir
2. Glorfindel
3. Landroval
4. Laurelin and Telperion
5. Chamber of Mazarbul (or, the Chamber of Records)
6. Khazad Dum
7. Turin
8. Earendil the Mariner
9. Elros
10. Numenor

Questions III

1. In the first instalment of the movie, when the four hobbits are camping at night with Strider keeping watch, Frodo asks Strider who the woman is whom he is singing of. Who is the woman and who is her lover?
2. Galadriel possesses the Ring of Adamant. What is it called in the Elvish tongue? 
3. Who possesses the Ring of Water?
4. Which is the first month of the Shire calendar?
5. At the Council of Elrond, Gandalf vetoes the idea that the Ring be given to ___ _____. When asked why, he says ___ _____ will never understand the importance of the Ring, and it will lie with him, unable to tempt him, and eventually, when the Nazgul come to his doorstep, he will perhaps hand the Ring over to them. Fill in the blank.
6. Name the only two Ents mentioned by name in the book.
7. Morgoth, in his hatred of the Elves of Valinor, bred which race of cannibalistic warriors as a mockery?
8. Who is described in ‘The Silmarillion’ as the Supreme Being who created the Universe?
9. To which breed of horses does Shadowfax, Gandalf’s prized steed, belong?
10. Amongst the plunder of the trolls, Thorin Oakenshield and Gandalf find two famed swords. Gandalf takes for himself the one named Glamdring; which one does Thorin claim?

Answers III

1. Luthien, Beren
2. Nenya
3. Galadriel
4. Afteryule
5. Tom Bombadil
6. Treebeard and Quickbeam
7. Orcs
8. Eru Iluvatar
9. Mearas
10. Orcrist

Questions IV

1. Who takes up the Stewardship of Gondor after Denethor?
2. Name Theoden’s father.
3. Aragorn is also known in the Westron tongue as ‘Dunedain’. What does it mean?
4. Connect the following: Amon Amarth and Sammath Naur.
5. Who is the Numenorean king who first set foot upon Valinor, causing Numenor to be drawn into the oceans?
6. Name the mountains where the Army of the Dead reside.
7. Whom do Elladan and Elrohir rescue from a band of Orcs – a feat mentioned specifically in Rivendell by Arwen when asked about her family?
8. What is the Elvish name of Rivendell?
9. Name Legolas’ father.
10. Name Aragorn’s grandfather.

Answers IV

1. Faramir
2. Thengel
3. Man of the West
4. ‘Amon Amarth’ means ‘mountain of fate’, which is a reference to Mount Doom. ‘Sammath Naur’ means ‘cracks of doom’, a chasm located deep beneath Mount Doom.
5. Ar Pharazon
6. Dunharrow
7. Their mother.
8. Imladris
9. Thranduil
10. Arador

* * *

Well, that’s about it. I’ll put up more soon.

Cheers!

My General Wonderment On The Human Mind

Caution: What’s written below doesn’t follow any specific order; I’ve just put down whatever came into my head.

***

On Minds

First things first. The human mind is the one single element that sets the sea of humanity apart from the rest of the living beings that inhabit this earth. The way it perceives the objects external to itself is a confined perception in itself, and cannot be wholly understood by other minds. It does not have a physical manifestation and is, instead, limited to a persistently functioning conception of the brain. There is no way to recreate it synthetically, and there is no way to destroy it. Even if one were to cause damage to it, either the self or another being, it would still continue to exist. The one factor that makes the mind to be so unquantifiable is its definition on the one hand, and its existence on the other. There does not exist a definition per se, but if you were to combine this with the conscious knowledge that a mind does exist, then I would arrive at this conclusion: the mind seems to exist in consciousness only when the mind itself is employed to think that it does. Without the mind, there is no mind to believe that a mind indeed exists; if there is a mind, then only the mind can foster the reliance in itself upon the self that contains it.

The mind is analogical to only itself, as all other conceptions stem from it. All our sciences and understandings are understood in their meaning and accomplishment through the way the mind understands them to be. The need to quantify things as they were, to count and to understand quantity as it varied through time (which, in its turn, is used to quantify progress and the rate of change of progress) can be interpreted as a fundamental constitution of the reasons that point to why we exist as we do. Without the mind, personal interpretation is lost and the differences between each one of us drowns in the fact that all of us now remain messengers between our thought and the stimuli that effect it. Therefore, in its limited quantifiability, the mind has the secrets hidden to reveal its source of unlimited perceptibility. Another mind, if it does exist (solipsism), cannot wholly understand mine, and vice versa, as I said earlier.

In this gap of understanding stands many a complexity. If I am not able to prove that another mind does exist, then my mind could perceive myself to be the one ‘complete being’, whence could stem the emotions of ego and pride. I would come to trust myself with me, imbuing a self-respect that also stands sowed in the need to triumph and, thereby, conclusively prove superiority. Further, this gap of understanding also makes invisible the bridge that could breach it: there is no way to go into the mind once you realise yourself as being out of it.

***

On Cognition

What is cognition? It is the process of ‘thought’, or of thinking, or the processes involved in coming to a conclusion about something, or the perception and understanding of the world. Cognition can be represented in the physical realm by the science of mathematics, where numbers are used to identify, define and reconstruct progress or progressivism (magnitude); vectors are used to orient the self with respect to a frame of reference (direction). However, in the intangible realms of thought and cognition itself, cognition plays an important role in that apart from coming to define the pseudo-rules that the mind seems to follow in perceiving and understanding things, it also concerns itself with the interpretation of symbols and their apparent interchangeability. The study of these symbols, or semiotics, has to do with the construction of meaning and its understanding.

I have discussed about the importance of the mind and its biological standing, but one important point I missed was that the mind acts as a pseudo-interface between the abstracted knowledge of the brain and the understanding of the self, of the external stimuli/responses. Once an event has been stowed away forever as a memory, then the process of understanding is complete because the event has broken down into a cause-effect system, identified, defined, thereby making the self to be able to recollect it later as a response to identical stimuli. This is as a result of the prowess of the mind to interpret the messages being sent or received.

Coming back, the first thing I’d like to talk about is that the importance of languages in communication. Now, communication is a very important aspect of the living in two ways: 1. when messages defined by an external source are understood by the self, and 2. when messages defined by the mind and the self are understood by an external receiver.

A set depiction

For example, a common pattern of the actuation of events is the coming together of large groups of people. This can happen only when a common idea is endorsed by all of them at the same time and place. In order to create such a majority of difference in opinion between this group of people and the rest, who don’t conform to the ramifications of the idea, communication is required wherein the idea is conveyed with a specific interest in mind.

***

On Communication

Communication, by definition, involves many aspects of the media, like audio, video, body language, and many more. The audio medium makes use of intonations in the spoken word to complement the feeling to be conveyed, and so also does the video medium, which also uses body language and gestures to add a little something more to what is being said. However, the written medium is quite powerful on its own because of the fact that those same feelings and associations are conveyed only through the text, leaving the mind to interpret everything. There is no use of intonations other than the adjectives themselves, and there is no use of body language whatsoever. Still, the print media plays a very important role in that the permanency of the text is undeniable, and therefore allows for recreating and recollecting it easily.

Let us take up the English language for example and analyse the way the sentences are constructed, and thereby understand the way the meanings in them are construed. The words here can be classified as nominals (nouns, noun phrases), verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions. Noun phrases and pronouns have the function of pointing to some object in the real, or a possible, world, and pronouns can behave as substitutions to noun phrases (but not nouns). Noun phrases also have the ability to act as both subjects and objects, and as complements within clauses.

Nouns are generally defined as words describing persons, places, things, or ideas. They are usually a word with a single root, also sometimes simultaneously a stem that can be inflected. For example, the word girl: its stem is also girl, and can be suffixed with -s to give the inflectional word-form girls. However, this only pertains to a simple noun. More complex noun forms can have derivative prefixes or suffixes like dis-, anti-, -ment, etc.

(To be continued…)

"I wished he would hit me"

“I wished he would hit me. He never did. If he had, then it would have been a matter of fists, and I could have forgiven him later on. I wouldn’t refuse to take a shot at him. I mean, I had seen him in different light for some twenty years, and to see him changed liked this was very new and surprising. It is not something I had ever expected from him, and he had proved me wrong. But he never hit me. Just gave me cold looks which I couldn’t forget for days. They rent my mind in two. I couldn’t sleep well in the nights, knowing there was a monster in human form roaming around outside my bedroom. To be someone whom you have looked upon as an idol all your life and then to consciously shatter those impressions as if they were something so trivial. The mind is but sand floating on the surface of water. It will look beautiful if you want it to, but a small disturbance will change its appearance for ever: there is no bringing it back, and even if you do, there will always be a difference.“

This is something I wrote  long time back in a letter or a post card (or perhaps an e-mail) to someone I can’r remember now. I just like the way it’s written.

Demystifying Cool

Being cool has come a long way. I can’t really place my finger on when, but I’d like to knight the psychedelic ’70s with the origin. No one really knows what it means, and the word, rather the term, assumes a meaning only in context and again, only when it is part of the utterance of a worthy speaker. If a bespectacled village idiot says it, the inherent dignity that it seems to bear vanishes in a flash, and you don’t have anyone speaking of it in a 50-mile radius for a week. But, say, if Basshunter uses it in one of his songs, it undergoes rapid evolution into a catchphrase which you will find being spoken about in the whole country. I guess it’s one of those things that happen on YouTube: a video is posted, the number of views skyrockets, and it becomes what is called an ‘internet phenomenon’ and the centre of cyber-tourism. Anyway, the young men and women crowding in parties – supplemented, of course, with bulging wallets and bosoms – are cool, but those sitting home by the utopic fireplace and smoking a pipe aren’t. Driving a car that makes a lot of noise and farts even more smoke is cool, while driving a truck (which does the same things) isn’t. Wearing a shirt that has a design resembling a mutated eagle with matching denim pants is cool, but wearing  casual shirt and pants while the heat shoots past sweltering isn’t. However, once a formerly cool guy is spotted by a wannabe, the trends catch on with ‘being cool’. Cotton clothing? Cool! Trucks? Cool! Fireplace and pipe? Cool! 

And that’s why I think the need to be cool should exist. If you don’t understand, here’s why: as long as people fear individuality, as long as people accentuate their external loci of identity, they go farther away from being who they really are. Only by touching the flames of a fire can you know, in the future, why you shouldn’t do it. Only when the time comes that ‘not being themselves’ is no longer a feasible solution will they understand the importance of being oneself. Being cool is being individual. Being cool is being unafraid. Being cool is believing in oneself. The cool guy on the street is who he is because he doesn’t, for a single moment, care about what others think of him; you admire that quality in him, but through a mask that filters out the cause of that. You see only the effect, and you don the garb of the effect. Thereon, what ever you do will be fake because your actions don’t stem from an inborn cause. It’s just like trying to make the external shell of a car run – you didn’t bother about the engine. All you can do now is frame it in a cubicle and make it a show-piece. People will ogle at it, but when the real car runs by, your time will run out. 

‘Being cool’ is not a stereotypification of any sort. Like I said before, it has to be the nucleus of a worthy utterance from a worthy utterer. It can be understood only when the contextual meaning is understood. It’s not something you would use as you would ‘Fuck!’. That’s a word that everyone knows and understands, but ‘cool’ demystified is… fluorescent? Yes, that’s the word! 

Musings On Queer Innocence

Innocence in today’s mornings lies inexplicably squelched between the need to know and the tendency to ignore. These kind of people seem a welcome change to meet. All the others that you walk past everyday either know too much – condescending ********! – or absolutely nothing at all. The innocent kind are special in that regard: they only know what they think they need to know, and more often than not, it works out to be just enough. These are the people who know only to live, an they do it stupendously well. Too much knowlege is a burden and I think you’d know that. But some, like me, can’t help but keep asking “Why?!” to each and everything that happens around me. Even if I know it’s going to be a useless piece of information with a good chance that I might never need to recollect it again, some sort of a raging storm in my head settles only when its contents are snuggling cosily into my brain. There’s too much to think of at times, especially when I’ve been asked by someone to find the solution for a weird problem: my head spins out of control as though it’s horny or something. But the innocent, these are the people who have not chosen to ignore but have done it inadvertantly. There life’s journey seems straight an lined by tall trees on either side. In Tamil, there’s a famous proverb that can be translated as “you can know how a backache feels only if you experience it for yourself”. 

And that’s why I dont really know if I want such a life for myself – impossible though now it is. Queer innocence. It imparts a fullness in character unmatched by any other quality in a person. “I know what I need to know, and I’m happy with it”! I know it has to do with the upbringing of the child, but I really can’t place a finger on it. I can never come to make myself to step into their shoes. I know so much that I’ve gone beyond being happy with myself: ‘being myself’ is only a fantasy because I don’t really know who I am. You get into such a state when you take to too much of philosophical nonsense while there’s no need to at all. But I can’t help myself. Hmmm… I guess that’s who I am. Helpless and squandering every useful object I find strewn in my path. You probably don’t know what I’m trying to say here. Imagine this: there is a running race between a group of blind men, and the winner is the first person to run past a pole in the distance. The shot is fired, and they pickup speed. But, being blind, they don’t know when they’ve run past the pole, and so, keep running. That’s who I am: I am one of the blind men in the running race. Someone else watching me knows where I really stand, someone who’s watching from close to the pole. If someone I really trust were to tell me that I could stop running, I would then. But not otherwise. I think I’ve figured what I want to do with my life, but I’m not sure because I am not really working towards it as I should have been. Or maybe I have. I don’t know.

Ahh, when I meet God on Judgment Day, and if I get the chance to have a word with him, I would ask him why he made me like this. And I would ask him if I could get a second chance. He would probably say no, to which I plan to reply with a bribe. If he’s a nice enough guy, he should accept it. If not, well, there doesn’t seem to be anything that I can do about that, does it? But if I do get the second chance, I’m going to want to be born deaf. People have too much to talk about these days. It all probably began as I was overhearing a conversation between two people discussing something really important. And then, every time after that, if I think two people are exchanging as much as even small talk, I wanted to be a part of it. Yes, that should be how it all began! If only I’d never heard that important conversation happen, the world would be a much different place – but I don’t know if so for the good or for the worse. 

Queer innocence.

Revering LOTR

Whenever I run out of movies to watch, I draw the curtains closed in my room, set up the speakers, recline on the bed, prop my laptop onto my lap, and commence a delicious ‘LOTR’ marathon. That is one movie that never fails to amaze. Although a marathon stretches into 10 hours (director’s cut version), it never feels as though the movie stretches a bit too much at any point of time. As much as people say the relationship between Sam and Frodo looks gay, true ‘LOTR’ fans find that easy to go past because the know the movie is so much more than just the plots. The picturisation, the locales, the photography, the screenplay – fabulous. I’ve not seen any other work of fiction match this work in two aspects:

• The storyline that seems to involve all emotive and active aspects of the living. Tolkien’s saga moves elegantly past Lovecraft’s bizarre brainchildren as well as Poe’s narrative. Although the book is a monstrous 1000-pages thick, reading it never seems a bore (unless you’re a die-hard Harry Potter fanatic).
• The blandiloquence with which the characters and kingdoms in the book have been brought to life. Recently, Dan Brown’s ‘The DaVinci Code’ was painted on the silver screen by Ridley Scott with poor results and unsavoury responses from the watching crowd. ‘LOTR’ screen writers Peter Jackson, Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh knew what to cut out of the script an what not to. That said, I’d like to see how ‘Shantaram’ shapes up.

When the movies began to be released on an annual basis some six years back onwards, my father touted them to be a big flop; he called them “childish and probably worth a snore when in the theatre”. I don’t think he has still reconciled to the fact that it is impossible to snore in the theatre while watching ‘LOTR’ and I, for one, have been having a hard time convincing myself that he only refuses to agree because of him being unexpectedly wrong!

(Oh yes, that reminds me, ‘The Hobbit’ is slated for release in September of this year. For those who are not familiar with it, ‘The Hobbit’ is the precursor to ‘LOTR’.)

Watching the movie has me yearning to be in it, to live and breathe and fight in it. It draws out a gallant and chivalrous gentleman’s character from within me. Even though I know the dialogues in the movie line-by-line, when I watch the movie again, I wait with my lips shut and waiting for the goosebumps. They come. Always. That movie has to be revered in filmdom as much as the book is considered to be a cornerstone in redifining the fantasy sub-genre in works of fiction.

The Right Side Of The Line

I grew up in incredible India, or so the tag line of the advertisement (that advertises the nation) says. It’s a nation of more than a billion people, which makes it the world’s largest democracy. But all that doesn’t seem to inspire anyone in India to adhere to a path of honesty and austerity. It’s not whether there exists the necessity of a need to, but it is because it is impossible to. Following after the British structure of government, the quantity of paperwork involved with anything is massive and predictably inefficient. But more than anything else, it is the way we take to it that marks the spot: we take to them as necessary evil. I don’t think anyone in India has ever really understood the importance of each piece of paper they sign, each bill of value they pass around – whether over the table or under it. We just do because of two simple reasons: we don’t know what it does because we don’t have the time to, and we do it anyway because someone else who can make things happen wants it done. Adherence to a politicial cause, in other words, is limited to the upper echelons of power. When you decide to get into politics, you have to be politically motivated. You don’t have to be patriotic – you only have to emboss the impression on other people that you can’t be knocked down, and if you are, then you can get back up in no time. You need to lick ass, you need to touch feet, you need to be the one all the others need to bribe to get things done. As much as you say it’s a roadblock to national prosperity, corruption is inevitable. 

And in such a country as this, if one is truly inspired to espouse a political cause so much as to stand up and speak for it, then one is jeered at, shouted at and spat until one decides to see it for what it is, or seldom for what others have made it to be. For example, in a nation of approximately 1.5 billion people (that’s around 20% of the world’s population), 240 million live on less that Rs. 20 a day – that’s a sign of abject poverty. If you were to stand up for them, you have to embrace a political cause, and here’s why: all causes have been embraced by the number of people on a money-minting campaign in the Indian political scenario, and if you pick a side of the wall, you’re on the political side. Even the top of the wall. Or under it. So anyway, standing up for them or banishing them: you’re rooting for someone. Forget being politically correct, you can’t be non-aligned anymore. Although no one seems to care for this thought, I do because it constrains development. I can’t seem to be able to do anything without donning political connections as a perpetual garb. Furthermore, the need to pass around as much money leads to the obvious localisation of resources, but that’s an economic residue, and I don’t want to spend time on that now. Political belief, as it used to be in the 1940s and ’50s when Mahatma Gandhi called out to the good of the nation to join political parties, has collapsed in the face of blatant distrust with and outright rejection of the state of affairs. And this has also cascaded into a siphon effect, resulting in something resembling a sewage pipeline network. Those who truly seek to do something are shoved to the sidelines. The only thing that can save us now is an abrupt and wholly miraculous change of heart within those on the thrones.

They have to begin to listen rather than speak all the time. They forget that we permit them to be there only so our voice is heard in the Hall of Power, not theirs. You promise land, you promise water, you promise homes. But what is it that we truly ask for? Have you promised to listen?

With the issue of every cause being commoditised as a tool to draw crowds and manufacture emotions, free speech is a luxury that has to be paid for – and it doesn’t come cheap. The only fact that has our nation clinging on to the frail strand of democratic nobility is that we all vote to elect our leaders (on Electronic Voting Machines). I’m sorry to say this Dr. Kalam, but Vision 2020 will only serve to be a bait. We will plod towards it with enough measures of luck and strategy, but Vision 2200 is more realistic. It’s not that I’m being pessimistic – I’m only being, again, realistic. I have my hopes too that India become a nation to be looked up at by others, but prefixing the word ‘incredible’ in an advertisement is only alliteration styled after the ideas of others.