The Mind of a Black Widow

She had a painful tendency of profusely hurting anyone she loved dear enough. It was first her parents, who died when she was pretty young. And then, lovers taken in and lovers let go, and lovers strangled. The cycle followed a regular pattern, love (for the Widow was always at extremes!) and then more love, and finally the jugular. However, since she loved she felt the dagger of empathy tear herself as well. But it was like a ink blot on a lovely poem, a poem you can never read again.

Life went on for the Widow, marred by bouts of contemplative restlessness. She tried very hard to find the answer. She realised that she was not happy, maybe she can never be happy like other creatures of heaven and earth who loved and find their joy in that. She tried to busy herself in work, became pragmatic about life and living and also developed a rationality in finding her pleasures.

Then one day she got the answer she was looking for. She gathered, the answer lied in loving herself. If she loved herself more than any other, she would at least be rid of her guilt. She loved herself, not in the way of pampering herself, but in the beautiful way only lovers can, removing the dualities of mind and body, heart and soul. She just loved.

One night, deep and sound, she woke up to find that she was mutating herself, gnawing out one of her tentacles. But since, all dualities were gone, she could do nothing but observe, which she perceived as an act of love. All of a sudden, it flashed upon her, this is how her lovers must have felt, but she was too deep in her own spell to react. However, strange are the ways of love, for with uproot of one tentacles, (like a Lernean hydra) two grew in its place. And thus it followed, for every tentacles she tore apart. With this knowledge she entered a dark cave, and how she ended up no one knows. All one knows, is that this was her beginning of finding herself.

…and the cheery on top

Newspapers comprise a significant part of the mornings of a jobless man. When I had rummaged through the front pages, and had reached the sports page to read about our Olympic miracle, I felt a sense of relief more than pride. So, at last! I had personal reasons also apart from the collective nationalistic one. My aunt is part of the Olympic contingent this time, and behold we have fared far better than ever!

But then, that’s not what I am writing about. I am writing about a news clipping I chanced upon, just five minutes back, and have filled my heart with infantile happiness and wonder. I looked up the net to share the article with you. An excerpt:

An 11-year-old boy who set out for China from his Kasba home on a Hercules bicycle with Rs 1,300 in his pocket was sent home from Dum Dum airport on Wednesday.

CISF men became suspicious on seeing Sayantan (name changed) loiter around the international terminal on a bandh day. Under persistent questioning, the boy revealed that he had cycled six hours down EM Bypass and VIP Road to catch a flight to China so that he could meet Jackie Chan and watch the Beijing Olympics.

I mean when I grew up, I never cared much about Olympic sports. I didn’t even know shooting had so many different categories (and eventually where the gold would come from), nor did I ever imagine wrestling could be an Olympic sport. I was an ignorant ass, but then I was not the only one (Lenon-esque!). Thousands paid exorbitant sums to get a seat in Eden Garden those days to get a glimpse of a Manoj Prabhakar or Salil Ankola. While million idiots like me gaped on an India Pakistan cricket match on television munching Uncle Chips and Pepsi Cola, there were a few exceptions.

Exceptions that were too busy trying to get a job in the army fighting their mittens off, or some suburban misfit who ping-pong-ed plastic balls across a shoddy plywood table to make a job in the railways, or someone who kicked and volleyed a dump of paper rolled to a ball in alpine heights of East Himalayas. Once in a while there was a guy who went for net practice when the hallowed match was on, for he loved playing the game more than watching it.

Sports, or so I have believed, is the mark of a man’s character. How hard he plays, how much he risks losing, and how magnanimous he is victory or graceful in defeat: these according to me can be imbibed through sports. Sports, mark it, not entertainment.

Even till a few years back, there was a sense of mockery and self-ridicule, which claimed that India could never win an Olympic gold, India can never win any International football contest (Sunday editorials were spent ruminating on politics in sports, post-modern songs were written dryly at the failure, pundits remarked that we are basically a cerebral race). However, in a span of a week, both these cynicisms were thrown out of the window. The phoenix like rise of sports, or as I see it, has not come by being witty, but by spending hours in training and fighting really hard to achieve one’s dream.

Therefore, when I saw this article, I felt genuinely happy. The kid didn’t try to board a train to Bombay to become a Bollywood icon, as has always been the case, but he cycled six hours to the airport to make it to Beijing to pay homage to his heroes.

At the stroke of the midnight hour

“As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don’t know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves – and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity – are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we’ll be just, well, cosmopolitans.”

- Jorges Loius Borges (this sentiment allegedly robbed the man his Nobel)

When I quote this, I am reflecting on a personal sentiment. I am not asking anyone to stop believing whatever, if at all, they believe in. What I am asking is to stop and think with me.

When we think of a country and its prosperity, what do we see in our minds eye? A wide green field and happy farmers singing songs of good harvest, maybe functioning industries with tall chimneys, and happy workers earning their hard day’s bread with honest labour. At the macro level, we look at a civil society where justice and liberty is upheld and equality of opportunity pervades. Indeed, a layman like me would consider this a happy state. A more academically inclined person may look into GDPs, and indices of societal satisfaction. Bottom line being nowhere, when we salute our countries, do we think in terms of wars we have waged and won, or outsiders we have killed.

This is precisely my point of conjecture. The very idea of a piece of land bordered by barbed wires and uniformed men in guns, is an archaic one. I mean grabbing a piece of land, and marking it as our own, is as ancient as evolution of man from apes, or even back. Yet as I write this, men are dying and proudly so, and killing in the same vein of pride and honour. When I look back at the history of the country, one man had cracked the puzzle of this, a certain Mohondas Karamchand Gadhi, whom the nation idolised and celebrates crossroads with his statue of stone. Yet his lesson has been quickly forgotten and given a chapter in history books, as has been heroes before, be it Akbar or Ashoka. The barbed wires hold on and guns fire.

A few months back, I had a chat with my erstwhile roommates, who were from the southern states of India. In our discussion we came upon this, had history contrived in a manner that we were in different countries (a big “if” here, please note), we would still have continued to be happy and life would have gone on. But today, since we are in the same country, we take pains to tolerate each other, share our bread and shelter, and try really hard to learn each other’s language and, all in all, try to coexist. And the rewards I would say disproportionately outweighed the efforts. Cant this happen to countries altogether, when it can happen to states? Why the barbed wires and why the guns? I am might sound too naïve, but I am thinking really hard and yet like a kid am still clueless.

Maybe the ground realities are vastly different from what my perceptions are. Maybe I am being stupid when I find demonstrating India’s military might with aircrafts (fusilladed with scandals) and tankers and parades of men in uniform, facile. Why don’t we salute the millions of engineers, the blue collared workers, the truck drivers, sportsmen, teachers and rocket scientists, who have indeed engineered a civilisation that is worth a marvelling at. Maybe we do, but not with the pomp and show, but with the quite resignation of being happy.

Let me clarify, in case I hurt sentiments, I respect the way a soldier earns his living, however, no more or no less, than I respect the way a farmer tills his land, a engineer codes, or a poet writes. Every man has a right to his living. That is where my patriotism lies. In earning one’s bread with dignity, in not having to fight for one’s right but being born with it, a freedom in general, which allows me to think and be vocal in whatsoever respect, and without fear.

A salute!

Not a Love Song

There is a major problem with memories. They are painful, yet useless, and timeless. The only thing one can do with them is mutilate them, with knives and fork, and if the need be, with ribbons and bows.

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands,
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

I have tried to be brave. Be happy, be unthinking, be empty. But one cant be mortal and do away with memories. I don’t know what it takes, I don’t know if it is possible. If I can ever be brave and happy at the same time. Yet I know quite a few things, a few stones that could be been left unturned or better still, left untouched. But being brave and stupid at the same time is so easy.

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: -

The failings of a common man are invisible, or rather not so, I think sometime. It is only too obvious to overlook, and too painful to forget once you know. And yet one is too weak. Weak and brave at the same time. How? Rather why?

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous -
Almost, at times, the Fool.

Yet, like a pattern it keeps repeating itself. And one keeps stumbling at the same step. Is it conscious, is it purposeful, is it perfunctory? Why have it if you cant keep it? And why pine for it if you know you will lose it!

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Once I had spent an idle afternoon with a dear friend on how we tamper our memories to suit us. Maybe that is how it should be. Maybe that is how it is. And I have known and ignored all along.

Toys

These days when I look through old cupboards and cobwebbed attics, I sometimes find old toys of mine, or say an old drawing or sometimes a book, which I had hidden there for some obscure reason. I find plastic binocular, those black ones with a plastic ribbon, dangling from hooks behind unused almirahs. Sometimes, a toy gun, yellow and black striped, remarkably unused and still making the irritating noise, that can only come from such a gun. The other day I found an entire army set, with an entire battalion in various posture of combat, one akimbo, one frozen in an animated run with a rifle and bayonet, one prostrate on its elbows, one in exasperated genuflection and so on; and a olive green jeep to go with it. Sometimes they are useful too, like the contraband Swiss knife, which I so badly needed for its corkscrew. Often, typically stupid, like caps of water bottles and wooden sticks of various dimensions. Seldom embarrassing, like the set of trump cards I flicked from a really old shopkeeper, who is now dead and the shop has been shut down. However, always carrying a jigsaw puzzle of memory.

I had assembled all this on my bed, when my Mom came and said, “Oh! So these are the ones that you hadn’t broken to pieces. You must have loved them a lot!”

Or maybe, I never cared for them a bit.

Wall.E – A Review

To think of it, I just saw the best romantic movie of the year. And it’s in animation. Andrew Stanton’s (yes, the same, the director of Finding Nemo) Wall.E is, in my opinion, from Pixar’s top shelf and took a quite some time coming. Especially after the last few. That the creative team went into a shell and did their bit of introspection shows in Wall.E. Minimum pontificating, which otherwise, given the setting, could have made a moral science text book out of the movie; and minimum dialogue, which weaves magic on screen.

The plot is predictable yet touching; the pace steady and uncompromising; and the characters, the lynchpin of the movie, well, they are just awesome. Take Wall.E, a waste collecting robot, who has been stranded on Earth with few friendly arthropods, while the rest of entire human race has migrated to space only to come back when the pollution ridden planet is fit for life. Wall.E’s day starts with recharging his(no, he is not an it!) batteries under the sun, and then taking his lunch box goes to work, compacting metal wastes into boxes and making obelisks of them. There he collects odds and ends, teddy bears, a spork, a Rubik’s cube, toaster, and if he is lucky a green sapling. He goes back home at the end of the day, listens to his favourite video of Hello Dolly. Lonely Wall.E almost with hazy eyes watches longingly at a couple holding hands. Finally he cradles himself to sleep like a baby. By this time, if you are watching the movie, you are bound to fall in love with Wall.E.

Then comes Eva, a white next-next-generation robot, with blue eyes and shiny curves, who blows up everything that moves with her gun. Until she (again, not it) meets Wall.E. Wall.E by then has fallen head over heels for Eva, who floats around scrutinising the planet for her classified mission (which is looking for plant life). Wall.E takes her to his apartment of sorts, and like a kid shows her his most enviable collection of knickknacks. Eva then spots the green plant, and taking it, goes into a hibernation mode!

Eva is taken back to the spaceship where humans stay, and Wall.E follows. Here the movie becomes quite predictable, especially if one has been watching Kubric and reading Huxley. Brave New World, seven hundred years into the future, with overweight Americans sipping colas on a spacecraft isn’t much of a surprise. After lots of flying around, rogue robots, an Auto pilot (with voice-over from MacIn Talk), lots of little symbols and a few itsy-bitsy homage, disdain for Big Corporations, a lovable captain, they come back to Earth and live happily ever after. The End.

Not much of a story, eh? But, by now, you are not watching it for the story in the first place. You are there for Wall.E, who quite like Nemo has made a beeline for your hearts! Every movement of Wall.E is impulsive, idiosyncratic and suggests a though process which stems from the being itself, this I feel is a singularly great achievement in animation. And the idea of having robots convey strong emotional message without words, itself demands a bow! Another spectacularly entertaining movie from Pixar.