For a small-town boy with no exposure to western philosophy, he opened the doors to this new animal called existentialism. My later love for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and all the various philosophies had their beginning with that one book – The Outsider. And thus began a path of discovery and self-discovery.

My continuing love for the occult, the esoteric arts and magik, began all those years ago, when as a impressionable young man, I discovered Aleister Crowley, Blavatsky, Gurdjieff and Jung, all and more which were contained in that one book – The Occult. Thus began a lasting fascination and exploration of all these arcane subjects.

Pseudohistory, alternate history and lost civilisation, whole new world, or rather completely lost worlds were laid open by that one book – From Atlantis to the Sphinx. All the tomes and books I have read and own today on the subject are a direct result of the spark provided by that one book. And all written by that one man, the ‘Angry Young Men’ – Colin Wilson.

I couldn’t even begin to list out the other books of his which provided further direction to my reading habits and to subjects I could delve into deeper. From sex crimes and criminal histories to de Sade and sci-fi, horror and alternate realities. Yes, I have read much better books on each of these topics, but for a newbie these provided interesting enough to know further. And for that, Colin Wilson, thank you. And…
…to the only writer who has a shelf all his own in my library, R.I.P.

Thank you (also) for the music

Is it purely for the music or is it because of how intrinsically entwined it is with my childhood that I feel so a special connection with the man? I think it is because of the latter closely followed by the former.

Growing up, it was easy to dismiss ‘western music’ as this inexplicable noise and gibberish that as someone with absolutely no knowledge of English or exposure to the outside world I could afford to do. But somewhere between Mukesh and MS there was Michael, this one person who came to epitomize western music for us all – Michael Jackson – be it in gulbarga or karwar or udupi and other such places I spent my childhood in. Exposed to nothing more than Doordarshan and later The World This Week. It is a testimony then to MJ’s influence and worldwide accessibility. For the longest time, he was the only western music I ever knew, as I am sure he was for many of my generation. Those days if anyone said he listened a lot to western music, you could be rest assured he meant that he had one Michael Jackson tape. And that is why his death is that much more saddening. A part of our collective childhood died today, reminding us again of those days gone by when we would listen to Michael Jackson on thrice-recorded audio cassettes. In fact the first english music album I ever owned, a gift from my older cousin, was a copy of MJ’s Dangerous.

He was good. He made us love the unfamiliar. And how. But….Who was he? What was he? We knew nothing but his name. And all songs (the few rather that we knew) were known more by their description of what happened in that particular song than by its name. The attempts to hum the tune to tell the other guy what song you were referring to were as much as the songs themselves. Lyrics were irrelevant, as we didn’t know or speak english. Track names, what’s that? All that mattered was that we were listening to “foreign music”. And having a ball of a time crowded around an old tape recorder, each trying to outdo another in his “understanding” of this weird and unfamiliar yet strangely alluring music. With their fast pace, their dancy tunes, their strange instrumentation and above all, that great voice.

I remember those futile but insanely funny attempts when a few of us school boys tried moonwalking and dancing after seeing MJ do it like only he can. With lots of loose flailing limbs and crotch grabbing in a manner only awkward adolescents can. There was no cable then, no youtube, no DVDs, but a rental Video Cassette (at 10 rupees per day) that we all pooled in with a rupee or two in to see what it was all about. I remember that video cassette also had “that song where the Michael walks on the footpath and the tiles become bright bright as he walks over them”. I clearly remember that day after we watched the video mostly because of all the bruised knuckles and painful fingers we inflicted on ourselves during PT class in a bad, misguided and pale (no-knife) imitation of the Bad video. Total fun. Lots of Iodex was used in many a classmate’s household that night.

In effect that I think is what this is about – it wasn’t just Michael Jackson who died today, but a small, if very significant part of me as well. A part of a childhood lived in a bygone era, unrecognizable today. So selfishly I mourn today as much for that part of me as much as for Michael Jackson. All the artifacts, the little cultural reference points, the shared experiences slowly eroded by death, and fading with the march of time leaving behind the detritus of nostalgia and echoes of the past.

All I can say is I’m glad I lived when I did. And given a choice to redo things, I would still choose to have Michael Jackson as my first tentative step into the world of foreign, western music.

You, me and our friends brought up in that time – we are all those blocks that lit up when Michael Jackson stepped into the days of our lives. Back when.

Rest in peace Michael Jackson and do the moves again on the great dance floor in the sky.

Le roi est mort. Vive le roi.

Half a Manifesto. Full Satisfaction.

Late to the party you may be, but it’s never too late to read Half A Manifesto by the one-and-only Jaron Lanier. He gets it.

And yes, make sure you read the Reality Club comments on the .5 Manifesto and Lanier’s responses to them (links to these are in the page linked above). From people like Bruce Sterling and Lee Smolin to the Dysons.

One of the people who responded to the .5 Manifesto as you will see is a guy called Daniel Dennet. If the name sounds familiar, it is because he is one the lapdogs of none other than Darwin’s Rottweiler, the delusional Dawkins himself. Bleh!

The adaptionists. Sigh. No one's denying it happens, adaption that is, but to call everything an adaption and to say that natural selection is the only agent (even if you call it a filter) of evolution isn't a good or tenable standpoint. And also because the adaptionist programme leads to the invention of not just theories but a whole new (pseudo) science called Sociobiology or Evolutionary Psychology if you prefer. Because Sociobiology is such a bad word. And so is the 'science'. A bunch of just-so stories that make for good cocktail conversation and nothing more. But you can push it and be counted as amongst the world's leading intellectuals you happen to dress well, have a scholarly clique of lapdogs and are good at PR & media management and know how to write literately. You got to give it to these guys. Take a bow Richard Dawkins!

Now would be a good time to re-read Gould and Lewontin's 1979 paper critiquing the adaptationists.

Spring Thunder

This man makes me want to learn Malayalam just so i can read him in the original. Agreed, he himself has translated most of his work into English, but knowing as i do the ‘lost in translation’ business that has happened with some of the books in Kannada that i have read in English also, it would be fair to assume that the same has happened with OV Vijayan’s books. As OV (do i dare call them this?) himself said, “...translation is an act of shifting eggs from one nest to another. In the process the yolk and white are separated, and what you have left with is broken shells.” And this from a man who translated his own work into some fabulous English. Who better then?

The reason for this post? After The Hanging and Other Stories by OV Vijayan. Finished it over the course of a packed weekend. From the surreal to the heartbreaking, from allegories to little seeds of thoughts, it was more than just a good read. A good read ensures you enjoy the good while you are reading it. Not after the last page has been turned. A classic like this sticks with you, much after you have finished reading it. It happened with me with Khasakkinte Itihasam, then with Dharmapuranam, and now with After the Hanging...the search is on now for Gurusagaram. If any of you reading this blog regularly (five at the last count) happen to chance upon it, let me know ASAP!

OV Vijayan. This man now firmly occupies the #2 spot in my personal list of ‘Best Indian Writers in English’. If only by virtue of having translated his books himself, and even with that he is leagues ahead of those just out to prove that their vocabulary is as good, if not better than the whites themselves (or that they have a good dictionary/thesaurus). Most are just writing about things we all know and are part of us – making the banal and the commonplace – seem exotic for the white man’s consumption, and the confused rootless generation of today. Not so Vijayan. He wrote, yes, about things here and now and of what could be....but ever in a way so as to give us from here a new perspective, a new way of looking and of thought. Not just through his novels and stories. As an acerbic and unforgiving cartoonist, OV also occupies the #2 spot in my ‘Best Indian Cartoonists’ list.

PS: The #1 spot in the list of ‘Best Indian Writers in English’ was, is and will always be RK Narayan with his ‘Common Man’ brother the #1Indian cartoonist.

PPS: A quick flash back to this, a previous post concerning OV

Bharat ki aakhri Chai ki Dukaan

Make your way to Badrinath. Walk three kilometres to the last inhabited Indian village, Mana. If there are no panchayat elections happening on the day, you might just be lucky enough to hop on a local bus or jeep. I wasn’t.

Beyond this village there is nothing but snow-capped mountains. No habitation, just no-man’s land and then the china border. Walk through the village, up towards Vyas Gufa (the cave where Vyasa is supposed to have dictated the Mahabharata to Ganesha). And there, at the edge of Mana you will see one of the most memorable places I visited – and one of the more interesting people I met – during my month-and-a-half sojourn.

Meet Chandra Singh Barhwal. Proud owner of India’s Last Tea Shop, and a brewer of one mean cup of chai.

the sleep of reason produces monsters…..or, au contraire!

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Thus begins William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence. Wonderful. But from this beginning Blake goes on to 120-odd lines that speak of good and evil, innocence and experience, corruption and clarity. All at once and then some. Contrasting one with the other. Talking of things to the contrary. Ah! William Blake.

A friend of mine liked the first four lines so much she went and read out the rest of the poem (“…after the elation that the first four lines gave me…” in her words). From elation she went to saying, “[I] didn’t expect the poem to leave me feeling disturbed….made me shift in my seat…”. But that was the genius of Blake. To show experience in the light of innocence and look at innocence through the eyes of experience.

For Blake, Innocence and Experience were two states that had to be each given its own due and acknowledged. Putting things forth as they were however disturbing they were. Innocence is not a vacuum, it exists in the world of experience. In Experience there is the vestige and hope of innocence. But while others would tell us one part of the story, hold out only hope, Blake would tell it as it is hoping his readers would go through his larger body of work to get to what he wanted to get at.

So in Blake’s worlds, and in his words, for every Clod which sang….
“Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives it ease,
And builds a heaven in hell's despair.”

…there was a Pebble that sang back,
“Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a hell in heaven's despite.”

In fact the sub-title to Blake’s most-beloved work is “Showing the Two Contrary States of The Human Soul”. But this relationship of Innocence and Experience, this inter-play of these contrary states, is not one of direct, static contrasts, but with ever-shifting perspectives and thoughts and tensions. But what about the Soul? If these be the Contrary States, what about the Soul itself?

The difficulty in trying to get the whole import (if one can ever get to it, or to the best of one’s ability) of Songs of Innocence and Experience is that the States are so intertwined that it is difficult to see the Hope in experience and the fear in Innocence. Later on in his illustrious career, Blake would be more clear….showing the separation of the States from the Individual. The Individual being real and eternal, with the illusory States being temporary conditions through which the Individual would pass. The Body and the States just a ‘clothing for the soul divine’ (see below). That’s what it says in the immortal Gita. With broad strokes, reminds one of the eternal philosophy of Advaita, from which we know that once you that ‘Thou art That’ and cast away the subjective reality of Maya, and uncloak yourself from avidya and agjana, will you realise that ‘Thou art Bhraman’. It’s a long way to go, seemingly impossible. But there’s still the hope. The knowledge. But coming back to Blake, why wait to read the later works, when this same message is there in ‘Auguries of Innocence.’

"Man was made for joy & woe,
And when this we rightly know
Thro' the world we safely go.
Joy & woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the Soul divine…"

But why not then make it apparent from the beginning? There’s a reason. It’s called progression. In Blake’s own words (selectively selected from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

“…As a new heaven is begun…the Eternal Hell revives……
…..
…..Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”

Without Contraries, there is no progression. And another interesting point to note is that Blake refers to ‘a new heaven’ while hell is eternal. Hmmm….is it because Joy is rare and ephemeral, but misery and sorrow is ever present. Is it because Joy and Happiness come in small portions but Misery and Sorrow do not? Like Shakespeare wrote, “When sorrow comes, they come not single spies, but in battalions.”. Or is it because each Joy is Joy, but not every sorrow the same? Leo Tolstoy I think got it right when he started Anna Karenina with this of-quoted line, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Well. Too much thought. One can think and think and write and write. Sigh.
Well, one can but barely scratch the surface, knowing that the answer and the explanation may never be within reach. But one can try. And spew it out from his onto his blog, for no particular reason except that one cannot help but think. Keep thinking. Sharks need to keep moving. If they stop, they sink. Similarly I guess if I need to stay afloat, I must keep moving, thinking. Even if it be to no end, to serve no purpose, and for no one but myself. But thinking has its own evils.

But some thoughts get to you. Some thoughts are like monsters. Restless. Eating into you, till you show them the light of day. Let them escape, and set them free from the caverns of your mind. You need to get them out somewhere. You need to grapple with thine demons. And thinking helps it not. Like that other great man in my pantheon realised, ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters…”. At face value, works just fine for me. And thus i guess I am left with some reason to put an end to this post with this image from Goya, called The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters...

“La fantasia abandonada de la razon, produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella, es madre de las artes y origen de sus marabillas.”

Bharat ka Ratan

Thanks Mr. Ratan Tata. For making us proud again. For showing us that there are still more people left in this country we can look up to. For showing us how promises are meant to be kept, for kept they should. You did it again. Congratulations. And thanks.

patriotism vs. Patriotism

This is Lakshmi Panda, a 77-year maid servant who’s been washing dishes and sweeping floors for the past many, many years who has the temerity to say that she now feels all that she did for the country was a waste. Hah! The sheer audacity of this woman. After all, who is she that she can make this statement?

She fought in the INA, yes, Netaji Bose’s Indian National Army in the Rani Lakshmi Bai Regiment under Capt. Lakshmi Sehgal. So what?

Does she not know that Bose and the INA never got us freedom from the British? It was Gandhi people, Gandhi and Gandhi alone that got us freedom! The INA was just riff-raff cobbled together by a disgruntled congressman who disagreed with the great Mahatma’s opinions and ideas. While Bose said, “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Gandhi said, “My enemy’s enemy is my enemy too!” Anybody with a bone of common sense can see who was right. Bose wanted to drive the British out of our country. Gandhi requested them to…please leave… And Gandhi won in the end. Sacrifice is the greatest ideal. And millions of our countrymen were sacrificed at the altar of Gandhi’s views, dying for the British, fighting for the Englishman and his cause. If that doesn’t make Gandhi great, what does?

Now, coming back to this maid servant, who thought she was fighting for freedom of her land. She hasn’t received her pension for the longest time. Making a living by working in others houses in the great Republic of India. She thinks she deserves a pension. But the Centre doesn’t. Their criteria is different. She isn’t a freedom fighter because she didn’t spend any time in jail. Now, that’s one hell of a definition. Clear. Concise. And no, prisons and hell-holes like the Cellular Jail might not count. There you go. That is why she doesn’t get any pension. Anyway, why ‘spend money’ on living freedom fighters who can anyway take care themselves? Think dignity of labour people!, even washing dirty dishes is a job! We’re better off not squandering our money way on these people with delusions of being patriotic when we can spend millions trying to get hold of the Great Mahatma’s handwritten manuscripts. After all, we got our independence because of Gandhi and Gandhi only. Ok. Ok. Nehru too. Yeah and some other random people. So given a choice between invaluable and priceless pieces of paper written on by the Great Man and people who gave their all to this great nation, who would you choose? Of course the manuscripts. You can laminate them and put them up for display at museums that tell us how Gandhi single-handedly won us our freedom. People, like Lakshmi Panda, will soon be dead anyway, and there’s no way you can put her on display.

After all, with the sixtieth anniversary of our Independence from the British coming up, acquisition of handwritten manuscripts make for better new stories, glamorous discussions, and opportunities to show more footage of The Great Gandhi than some old unglamorous shrivelled hag who thought she was being patriotic. And isn’t that the difference between patriotism and Patriotism? Media coverage and good PR?

Jai Hind!

my land, my peoples

A picture's worth a thousand words. These are worth billions to me. They tell me the story of how almost ten lakh people can crowd into a 3-kilometre stretch, driven there by nothing more than faith.
The sweltering heat. The suffocating humidity. Fainting is common. Stampedes more so. All to see the Siblings on their journey once. To see the gods who take sick leave. To see a king turn into a sweeper. To get a hand on the ropes that pull the chariots. Just once is enough. It's the dream of a lifetime for many people. Driven by nothing more than faith.

Once a part of them, you lose your Self in the flow. Carried away by the fervour that each one emanates. It's a time to celebrate. A time to worship. A time to wish. A time to pray. A time that i hope never passes.