¬¬Beginning of a new era of Hope
“I don’t like to be called a Bihari. I don’t like to be called not- a- Bihari as well. When someone says to me that you are an exception because of your unBiharian ways, since you don’t drink, never indulge in petty politics in the hostel in the name of caste, region and religion, don’t use abusive language after every other word, or ogle at girls while walking down the road and so on and so forth, I want to resist this reductionist fixing of identity with a set of characteristics strongly and debunk this myth of Biharian ways. Two years ago, these remarks sounded highly pleasant to my ears and I felt myself absolved of the burden of representation. I am painfully aware of the local accent that I have, and some semblance of rusticity that I have been trying to dispense with for quite some time now because this will not be acceptable to the affluent Delhi elites, who often remind me what it means when you are pinned down to a certain negative identity. From identity and representation I can recall one instance of literary representation from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake where, Mr Ashok Ganguli is afraid of the robbers lurking
in Bihar..."
This diary entry, which I made a couple of weeks ago, needs either to be deleted or rethought in the light of two important experiences that I underwent recently. The first one concerns my reading of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow in which a Turkish character named Blue shares his experience of spending some years in Germany as an exile with the poet called Ka. In Germany, wherever Blue happens to be walking, he feels a ubiquitous presence of a German, who always stood as an object of fascination for him. The interesting thing is that Blue does not think of that German but he imagines what he might be thinking of him, of his appearance, his clothes, his history, his nation. It makes him feel terrible and degraded, and then, he realises how his countrymen must be feeling. After undergoing this experience, he comes up with a prophetic proclamation: “Most of the time it’s not the Europeans who belittle us. What happens when we look at them is that we belittle ourselves.”
I was struck by the universal applicability of Blue’s statement, especially when measured in the light of the anxiety of disclosing or hiding one’s identity by Biharis, for example, in conversation like this: “Yes, I’m from Bihar. But I’ve done my schooling outside the state...” or “I’ve hardly spent any time in Bihar...”, and a sense of pride involved in it. Self- gaze makes one more vulnerable and perpetuates one’s sense of inferiority more than any form of discrimination at any level. We need to get rid of this self gaze and the tendency of reading other’s mind more than anything else in order to stop this self-belittling inclination. The same tension I could read on the face of a Delhi University PhD student from Baramula in Kashmir, who while disclosing his place of origin, was trying to observe the changing expression on my face.
The second experience I was referring to regards the biggest ever victory of Nitish Kumar government in the legislative assembly election in Bihar, where it is said that people do not cast their votes but vote for their caste. This outcome is historic not only for Bihar but also for India in the sense that people of Bihar have unanimously rejected the casteist politics of Lalu Prasad’s RJD and have shown that there is no substitute for development. It will inarguably restore the faith of the electorates in democracy and politics of development, and bring the wind of optimism. Today, one of India’s most socio-economically backward states feels proud in declaring that it is led by a man of integrity and honesty, who will steer Bihar against all the odds and sustain the process of economic and social development, which has already been initiated. Congratulations to Nitish Kumar and best of luck to Mr Ashok Ganguli for his next trip to Bihar!
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Reflections
It has been raining intermittently for the last ten hours, which has impelled me to stay cocooned inside my room, depriving me of any form of pleasure that I derive from jogging. Such monotonous evenings always give me a pretext to think of you, to write something to you, which I know I will never be able to do because I am afraid you will misinterpret facts as fiction and fiction as facts. Despite this I want to write something in order to preserve the precious memory of mine, especially the way I thought of you,dreamt of you, tried to understand you and ended in failure, as this particular piece of writing is a work of personal history, not of incidents but of memory.
For the first time when I saw you I felt you were like an angel, inaccessible, utterly different from others but ultimately I realised that you were also a part of the crowd, cold, distant - women have formed a union. Please don’t think I’m a misogynist or a male chauvinist. I think it was Robert de Niro who said something similar in the film Taxi Driver, and I know that de Niro has millions of female fans all over the world. What I like most about this movie is his self-confidence and wit that he exhibits in the conversations he strikes with the woman he likes, who works as a campaigner in the presidential elections, apart from his extremely alienated existence that precedes and follows his frustrated love life. There is nothing except this sense of persistent failure that we have in common.
I can recall all our conversations - where a sense of compulsiveness to speak more in order to hide my nervousness and to counter the overwhelming effect you had over me - pervaded my reason, and with hindsight I realised that because of this act of mine these talks became like two parallel lines, never meeting. I became like that inefficient professor who, having nothing substantial to offer to his students, comes to the class with five or six books, speaks ceaselessly, throws some jargons, talks about theory superficially, and brings an element of theatricality into his voice. There was one more person, in fact, one of my teachers, who used to exercise such overarching influence on me. I remember thinking how he used to enquire about the exams and results and how I used to reply about my health and weather. Oh, it was not pederastia, dear! I’m straight. But, totally unconnected, like parallel lines...
To move from the pleasure principle to the reality principle, I planned to wreak revenge on you, and I decided I would never, ever think of you, would not talk about you – no, not even to myself. But things turned out to be different: I often dreamt of our classroom, where all the familiar faces were present except yours. I tried calling you but couldn’t reach you; thus in all of my dreams you became an absent presence, and a persistent fear of losing you forever (though I really never had you in the first place) transformed these dreams into nightmares. In one such dream I saw that we were married but even after five or six days of marriage I was unable to see you. I had understood Freud’s concepts of neurosis, displacement and condensation instantly (as if the dreams were the moments of epiphany), which would have taken ages, had I read all the dry volumes of psychoanalytic criticism.
Having understood that you had become an inextricable part of my unconscious I started looking for you in the library, market place, restaurants, book shops and all other places where human beings could register their presence. And, when I found you absent from all these places, for a while I felt like a character from Anjum Hasan’s novel Lunatic in My Head, and accused the whole city, including you of conspiring against me, thwarting my plans of seeing you. On one such afternoon, I came to my room and slept for almost two hours, and when I woke up I was down with fever, crushed under the weight of loneliness. Suddenly I was overpowered by a desire to talk to you, and I called you without deciding the topic of the conversation, which made my condition utterly ridiculous, as I ended up asking you to do something I could have done myself or many of my close friends, who are techno-savvy, could have easily done within seconds.
To add one more insignia to this list of emotional crap, I can recall a line from the Italian film Malena: True love is always unrequited. Though this line is uttered by a thirteen-year old boy in the movie, love being an irrational discourse, pushes one’s thoughts and reason to their limits, and blurs the boundary between the young and the old. In a true sense love is a classical example of sublime, as it cannot be represented in words. I’m, then, trying to represent something which is unrepresentable. You see why am I a failure?
For the first time when I saw you I felt you were like an angel, inaccessible, utterly different from others but ultimately I realised that you were also a part of the crowd, cold, distant - women have formed a union. Please don’t think I’m a misogynist or a male chauvinist. I think it was Robert de Niro who said something similar in the film Taxi Driver, and I know that de Niro has millions of female fans all over the world. What I like most about this movie is his self-confidence and wit that he exhibits in the conversations he strikes with the woman he likes, who works as a campaigner in the presidential elections, apart from his extremely alienated existence that precedes and follows his frustrated love life. There is nothing except this sense of persistent failure that we have in common.
I can recall all our conversations - where a sense of compulsiveness to speak more in order to hide my nervousness and to counter the overwhelming effect you had over me - pervaded my reason, and with hindsight I realised that because of this act of mine these talks became like two parallel lines, never meeting. I became like that inefficient professor who, having nothing substantial to offer to his students, comes to the class with five or six books, speaks ceaselessly, throws some jargons, talks about theory superficially, and brings an element of theatricality into his voice. There was one more person, in fact, one of my teachers, who used to exercise such overarching influence on me. I remember thinking how he used to enquire about the exams and results and how I used to reply about my health and weather. Oh, it was not pederastia, dear! I’m straight. But, totally unconnected, like parallel lines...
To move from the pleasure principle to the reality principle, I planned to wreak revenge on you, and I decided I would never, ever think of you, would not talk about you – no, not even to myself. But things turned out to be different: I often dreamt of our classroom, where all the familiar faces were present except yours. I tried calling you but couldn’t reach you; thus in all of my dreams you became an absent presence, and a persistent fear of losing you forever (though I really never had you in the first place) transformed these dreams into nightmares. In one such dream I saw that we were married but even after five or six days of marriage I was unable to see you. I had understood Freud’s concepts of neurosis, displacement and condensation instantly (as if the dreams were the moments of epiphany), which would have taken ages, had I read all the dry volumes of psychoanalytic criticism.
Having understood that you had become an inextricable part of my unconscious I started looking for you in the library, market place, restaurants, book shops and all other places where human beings could register their presence. And, when I found you absent from all these places, for a while I felt like a character from Anjum Hasan’s novel Lunatic in My Head, and accused the whole city, including you of conspiring against me, thwarting my plans of seeing you. On one such afternoon, I came to my room and slept for almost two hours, and when I woke up I was down with fever, crushed under the weight of loneliness. Suddenly I was overpowered by a desire to talk to you, and I called you without deciding the topic of the conversation, which made my condition utterly ridiculous, as I ended up asking you to do something I could have done myself or many of my close friends, who are techno-savvy, could have easily done within seconds.
To add one more insignia to this list of emotional crap, I can recall a line from the Italian film Malena: True love is always unrequited. Though this line is uttered by a thirteen-year old boy in the movie, love being an irrational discourse, pushes one’s thoughts and reason to their limits, and blurs the boundary between the young and the old. In a true sense love is a classical example of sublime, as it cannot be represented in words. I’m, then, trying to represent something which is unrepresentable. You see why am I a failure?
Monday, February 15, 2010
Apples
I get a call from an unknown number. Who the hell can it be to disturb my sleep.
‘Hi! This is Jaheen here. Your red apples rejuvenated me…’
For the past few months, I have felt an incurable hole at the centre of my heart, like Saleem Sinai had in Midnight’s Children, which has become an eternal part of my existence. After the failure of the cardiologists in providing me with a momentary relief, I want to attribute the cause of this hole to the lack of having some friends—female friends, not male ones. Some of you might find it ridiculous, if not a pathological manifestation of love, as most of my male friends find it (because for them this is a form of cognitive masturbation), and it is this lack of empathy on their part that alienates me from them on many occasions and drives me to find some friends of the opposite sex.
Many times I feel like David Lurie from Disgrace — do I need to castrate myself to resolve this conflict? But how to castrate my mind that is the progenitor of all these aspirations? I often contemplate this, lest the dehumanising mechanisms of science should invent some device to operate on and castrate my cognitive apparatus and all its frustrated aspirations, abortive desires and erotic impulses.
Immersed in these philosophical and biological thoughts, I couldn’t realise when my train arrived at Wayanad station. Malayali was always Greek to me therefore I had to struggle for half an hour before our local co-ordinator Thomas talked to the autowallah and directed him to drop me at the Apostolic Centre, a fort-like place, surrounded by hills from all the sides, six kilometers away from the bustling city of Wayanad.
The mere imagination of spending an entire month with twenty odd beautiful women, apart from the remaining men, 24/7, of course except the sleeping hours, filled me with unfathomable pleasure. I fell in love with the promiscuous, lush vegetation of the place and, more importantly, with all the twenty women. What! Twenty women! Yes, love is promiscuous.
I often fall in love twice a day with the same person.
One fine morning, when I was having my breakfast with Hannah Sweeney, the first person to arrive in the apostolic centre for the Theory-Praxis course we were enrolled in, trying to make her understand my half-baked understanding of Indian culture, Jaheen appeared, drenched, in a red t-shirt and blue jeans, May being the peak time of monsoon in Kerala. I was lost in the midst of her sensuous lips, red attire, dishevelled hair, the rain and thunder, my heart heaved and I stammered even while saying Hi.
‘So, are you from Bengal?’ She took my Bihari accent to be that of a Bengali.
‘No, I’m from Delhi.’
A couple of post-lunch and post-dinner perambulations exposed my vulnerability to her honey-melting voice that was at its prime when she sang some Assamese songs and her way of saying ‘yes’ and ‘yeah’ in her semi-American accent plunged me into an abyss of oblivion. Some shared frustrations about the existing educational system and our conviction regarding the gulf between the theory and the praxis brought us closer.
If someone tries to wake me up early in the morning, say, five o’clock, the first thought that comes to my mind is to smash his head and spend the rest of my life sleeping peacefully in a prison. So, when somebody knocked thrice on my door early in the morning, I flew into a rage and was about to say “fuck off”! But as soon as I heard ‘Hi! This is yoga time’ in a lyrical voice that was worth a billion dollars, my heart did a complete somersault and the abusive f word got transformed into ‘f-fantastic to see you so early!’ Within ten minutes I was downstairs and I exhibited such skills in yoga that our yoga teacher must have felt insecure about his job, let alone the fact that for the next ten days I suffered from cramps. ‘God has punished you because of your evil designs’ said one of my co-participants.
Who says love makes you a poet? I say love makes you an acrobat.
The journey from the yoga camp to the St. Joseph hospital was a difficult one, especially when I had to act as a surrogate father, not lover, in order to console her by taking two drops of her tears on my finger tips and flicking them away, while she lay in bed, listless. ‘You know, for the first time when I went to Delhi I had acute jaundice. Doctors had forbidden me to travel but I did it. Pneumonia is not incurable; I have brought some apples, have one you will feel better.’ Next day she flew to Guwahati via Delhi.
We had fifteen more days to go. The lush vegetation of the place with which I had fallen in love, love at first sight, suddenly appeared to me a part of the concentration camp, holocaust already having been done, burning my mind inch by inch and leaving some cinders to cherish her memory. The camp started showing its true colours. The telepathic communication that was established between me and other participants made them fall ill one after another, I being the second victim, puking eight times within one hour before I was admitted to the same hospital. After her sudden departure, I dreamt of her for seven consecutive nights—dreams which became nightmares, tinged with longing.
“Animesh, since then every time my phone rings, or I step out of my room, some distant hope of encountering her makes me excited but very soon this veneer of excitement begins to crack.” Once her songs and her honey-tongue melted me, later on her tears froze me, now her eternal absence eats at my insides like a termite.
The coffee Animesh was to have remained untouched, as he seemed on the verge of crying, after listening to my story. As soon as I saw he was getting emotional all my suppressed emotions burst out and took the form of uncontrollable tears. Before he left he tried to console me in various ways. As soon as he left I was struck by how I could be moved to cry at the lie I had concocted for myself in order to narrate him a tale and how gullible, finally, he turned out to be. To tell you the truth I never went to Wayanad, never met anybody called Jaheen, nor did I ever fall in love.
‘Hi! This is Jaheen here. Your red apples rejuvenated me…’
For the past few months, I have felt an incurable hole at the centre of my heart, like Saleem Sinai had in Midnight’s Children, which has become an eternal part of my existence. After the failure of the cardiologists in providing me with a momentary relief, I want to attribute the cause of this hole to the lack of having some friends—female friends, not male ones. Some of you might find it ridiculous, if not a pathological manifestation of love, as most of my male friends find it (because for them this is a form of cognitive masturbation), and it is this lack of empathy on their part that alienates me from them on many occasions and drives me to find some friends of the opposite sex.
Many times I feel like David Lurie from Disgrace — do I need to castrate myself to resolve this conflict? But how to castrate my mind that is the progenitor of all these aspirations? I often contemplate this, lest the dehumanising mechanisms of science should invent some device to operate on and castrate my cognitive apparatus and all its frustrated aspirations, abortive desires and erotic impulses.
Immersed in these philosophical and biological thoughts, I couldn’t realise when my train arrived at Wayanad station. Malayali was always Greek to me therefore I had to struggle for half an hour before our local co-ordinator Thomas talked to the autowallah and directed him to drop me at the Apostolic Centre, a fort-like place, surrounded by hills from all the sides, six kilometers away from the bustling city of Wayanad.
The mere imagination of spending an entire month with twenty odd beautiful women, apart from the remaining men, 24/7, of course except the sleeping hours, filled me with unfathomable pleasure. I fell in love with the promiscuous, lush vegetation of the place and, more importantly, with all the twenty women. What! Twenty women! Yes, love is promiscuous.
I often fall in love twice a day with the same person.
One fine morning, when I was having my breakfast with Hannah Sweeney, the first person to arrive in the apostolic centre for the Theory-Praxis course we were enrolled in, trying to make her understand my half-baked understanding of Indian culture, Jaheen appeared, drenched, in a red t-shirt and blue jeans, May being the peak time of monsoon in Kerala. I was lost in the midst of her sensuous lips, red attire, dishevelled hair, the rain and thunder, my heart heaved and I stammered even while saying Hi.
‘So, are you from Bengal?’ She took my Bihari accent to be that of a Bengali.
‘No, I’m from Delhi.’
A couple of post-lunch and post-dinner perambulations exposed my vulnerability to her honey-melting voice that was at its prime when she sang some Assamese songs and her way of saying ‘yes’ and ‘yeah’ in her semi-American accent plunged me into an abyss of oblivion. Some shared frustrations about the existing educational system and our conviction regarding the gulf between the theory and the praxis brought us closer.
If someone tries to wake me up early in the morning, say, five o’clock, the first thought that comes to my mind is to smash his head and spend the rest of my life sleeping peacefully in a prison. So, when somebody knocked thrice on my door early in the morning, I flew into a rage and was about to say “fuck off”! But as soon as I heard ‘Hi! This is yoga time’ in a lyrical voice that was worth a billion dollars, my heart did a complete somersault and the abusive f word got transformed into ‘f-fantastic to see you so early!’ Within ten minutes I was downstairs and I exhibited such skills in yoga that our yoga teacher must have felt insecure about his job, let alone the fact that for the next ten days I suffered from cramps. ‘God has punished you because of your evil designs’ said one of my co-participants.
Who says love makes you a poet? I say love makes you an acrobat.
The journey from the yoga camp to the St. Joseph hospital was a difficult one, especially when I had to act as a surrogate father, not lover, in order to console her by taking two drops of her tears on my finger tips and flicking them away, while she lay in bed, listless. ‘You know, for the first time when I went to Delhi I had acute jaundice. Doctors had forbidden me to travel but I did it. Pneumonia is not incurable; I have brought some apples, have one you will feel better.’ Next day she flew to Guwahati via Delhi.
We had fifteen more days to go. The lush vegetation of the place with which I had fallen in love, love at first sight, suddenly appeared to me a part of the concentration camp, holocaust already having been done, burning my mind inch by inch and leaving some cinders to cherish her memory. The camp started showing its true colours. The telepathic communication that was established between me and other participants made them fall ill one after another, I being the second victim, puking eight times within one hour before I was admitted to the same hospital. After her sudden departure, I dreamt of her for seven consecutive nights—dreams which became nightmares, tinged with longing.
“Animesh, since then every time my phone rings, or I step out of my room, some distant hope of encountering her makes me excited but very soon this veneer of excitement begins to crack.” Once her songs and her honey-tongue melted me, later on her tears froze me, now her eternal absence eats at my insides like a termite.
The coffee Animesh was to have remained untouched, as he seemed on the verge of crying, after listening to my story. As soon as I saw he was getting emotional all my suppressed emotions burst out and took the form of uncontrollable tears. Before he left he tried to console me in various ways. As soon as he left I was struck by how I could be moved to cry at the lie I had concocted for myself in order to narrate him a tale and how gullible, finally, he turned out to be. To tell you the truth I never went to Wayanad, never met anybody called Jaheen, nor did I ever fall in love.
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