A post from yesterday

17th October 2015

The ear-splitting music started playing from today. I just about got the fluttering of the Fall experience yesterday – of the stirrings of the unmistakable strains of the promise of joy and unfettered lazy laughter coming from maybe parallel universes with the blue sky and the sun creating ripples through the tree leaves and throwing bands through my window. A part of me dressed in the common woman's Victorian garb and with a tight, prim and ugly bonnet on her head carefully pointed out to all the times that I’ve been wrong about that strange surreal fluttering of hope and even showed me one of my terribly and horribly embarrassing e-mails as proof of my madness and wanted me to see yet other ones and carefully pointed out to the many times that I’ve been wrong and all the things I’ve done because I’m delusional. I protested and tried saying that I wasn’t going about sending e-mails or imagining anything now but that bonneted grim part of me pointed out that that was not the point. It was the feeling I felt that should not be given attention to or be allowed to bathe one. I had grumffed and asked how it was better being a grim old woman who dared not grin in fear of displeasing the gods. Another part tried telling me gingerly that it was okay while other parts were arguing amongst themselves. The grim bonneted part of me won out and I shooed away the fluttering feelings and typed along on the screen about scientists and wrote in my notebook about teachers and teaching with old happy dreams and a few memories running here and there, playing around and scampering and scuffling about and laughing like little gleeful ghosts. Fimh seemed to be rather quiet on the whole while smiling a bit in an absent- minded and sometimes a serene way. In spite of all the different opinions inside, I was later musing in a rather meditative way on the whole, I think – about the past and the present and the future. The work-week in this part of the world has come to a halt from early on in the week, which is nothing to cheer about – not from my end. Maybe next year I can cheer about it – who knows. I knew that the music – and I don’t care what music it is – would be playing at a horrible volume and insistently but I’d half-hoped that it wouldn’t start before Monday. I knew I was pushing my luck. I put up with the noise for about three hours though. An old man from the neighbourhood and I had gone at exactly the same time to lodge our formal complaints today. He was very pleasant in how he put forth his concern – I was not. Apparently there are people in the neighbourhood who want to hear the music and through the day and they have been complaining that the music is not loud enough. But I think the complaints made a difference. They started playing the songs in the evening as well but it wasn’t at that horribly head-piercing high volume.

I was reading this article titled 'Do Female Lives Matter' from The American Scholar yesterday. I must say that I had never heard or read about William James’ sister. It was nice to read about the James sister but especially about Beryl Markham – I harbour a fondness and admiration for women aviators from another generation. I’ll remain sceptical about the allegation that William James did not want history to remember his sister. The article as a whole and especially the title made me instinctively want to argue with the writer. Maybe I’ve gotten even more sensitive with age and experience. God knows, I do not disagree with the premise of needing to make an exceptional individual and life visible and audible to a wider audience and bringing that life within the frame of history. But I don’t see why ‘female lives’ in the grand scheme of things should matter regardless of what sort of females we are talking about and what such females have done or achieved. And surely Jane Austen cannot be compared to Dickens in describing ‘trials and triumphs of the human existence’?! As for individuals being noticed or remembered for what they do: Emily Dickinson wasn’t really known outside her tiny circle until she was dead but then Van Gogh wasn’t particularly rich or famous when he was living. J.K Rowling, as a writer, enjoys far more public attention than Kiran Nagarkar ever will. But will someone try to say that the saga of Maharaj Kumar and Meera is less fascinating than the Harry Potter saga? Which work and which lives will be noticed and in which age and for what reasons do not remain a gender issue. But that particular article got me thinking about our present times. It certainly made me wonder about karma again and other very worldly matters and also from an objective bird’s perspective, which I cannot adopt very often or for too long. There is the matter of the common people and the average people and the billions across the world who are still poor and who still scrounge to make a living and who will never, most likely, make it into the pages of history unless it is through some quirk and quark of fate. But what about the billions or at least the millions and more than millions from the educated middle-class? Will the world, if it continues to make its annual swing around the sun, many centuries later comment on how middle-class girls and women lived for the most part during this age? Intent on extracting and getting whatever they are able to from the rare decent man and also from the roadside Romeos and various men in between while also feeling affronted and offended for not being understood? I’ve lost count of the number of females from different professions who have claimed that ‘all men are selfish’, ‘all men are pigs’, ‘men don’t understand…’, ‘my boyfriend/husband doesn’t understand me…’. I hope history honestly remembers that the greatest achievement of the great majority of women from the educated, middle-class in this particular generation was either to display their feminine wiles and charms in full glory while never needing to prove that they had earnt respect, regard and love or else it was to tell the world all that was wrong about men or else it was both even as they quoted, elsewhere, from Tagore and Shakespeare and some romantic hard-headed poet. There are the regular feminists and there are plenty of women in this category who claim that they are not feminists, which helps their cause no doubt. I have never understood why anybody should deserve respect, admiration and love for just belonging to a social category or why women from the grand middle class should expect the same. I don’t understand why women should almost always cook up the many ways as to how they are being ‘victimized’ at the hands of men or whine about not getting enough respect or why men have it ‘easier’. Otherwise women will see themselves as being close-to-perfect while it is always the men who ‘have problems’ and need to improve themselves. In the grand category of females as a species – these days, I remind myself that I have more than ‘a choice of nightmares’. One group of women will call me stupid and obsessed for the views I have. I remember telling lots of women that ‘all men are certainly not pigs’ and they have tsk-tsked me or called me some names. Another group will call me stupid as well for different reasons. Maybe I am the one who is making a terrible blunder. There have been Lucys and Mirandas and there have been the Helens and Delilahs (Cleopatra was an unusually remarkable woman not to be mixed with the aforementioned types) and anybody who has read Morton’s memorable passage in his A Search for England on how he helps a woman by the roadside and why he does so and about Jatin from Debjaan and how he returns to the world because he cannot bear to see Ashalata in pain will know what I’m talking about. Maybe it’s that many girls and women, for the most part, do not need to do much apart from looking pretty or beautiful and charm men and weep every now and then or smile mysteriously because they are so emotionally awakened as they 'come and go...talking of Michelangelo' or somebody else. Maybe I have just become a grum old woman who insists on trying and trying to do something which matters and makes a genuine difference because I cannot be any different.  I’m sure there are plenty of pretty women and lovely girls half my age who’ll tell me that I’m grumpy only because I’ve never been able to bewitch any real man. They could even ask me whether I think that writers or poets would, upon a glance, write about them or me and they’ll probably point out to Tagore’s poem Gupto Prem and titter while telling me that that is the poem, which is meant for me. They could add for good measure that the only reason I try so hard in doing something is because I can never charm a real man with my being – which they can do in an instant. Much of what such a group might say about me wouldn’t be far from the truth. Even if it is all true I don’t mind making a terrible blunder, if indeed it is a blunder. I’d rather be someone who is valuable for something other than youth, beauty and some ephemeral charms which make romantic, imaginative writers spin stories and poems. That speaks more of the imagination and creativity of the writer rather than any real attribute or quality possessed by the woman in question. And unless human beings are still living in some Neanderthal age or something similar I am sure there is something beyond the markers of youth, looks and charms that takes a human being further along the path of being a human being who loves, cares, has a mind and does things to bring about a positive difference to someone. Am I being delusional? Well, this will be yet another delusion I’ll live with. The grim bonneted part of me can mutter all she wants to about this and throw evil glances in my direction - I'll stick with my beliefs.

I have also been reminded through the din about some other things that I have been fairly stoic about across the last more than two years. I feel terribly sorry and sad that India is in the state it is – more than I normally admit. Yes, true – the US has terrible problems of its own and it’s all the more befuddling in a way because there are so many socio-economic and basic material aspects that the Americans have addressed by now – absolute cleanliness in surroundings (at least in smaller towns if not entirely in the cities), lots and lots of greenery being preserved and conserved and ‘actively promoted’ – which is probably an off-shoot of the insistent teachings, writings, exhortations and actions of Thoreau, Muir, Pinchot and Emerson from the turn of the 20^th century – an efficiency in everyday services, including administrative, banking, municipal functions and various everyday services including but not limited to gas, electricity, plumbing, fire and emergency services and so on, and making a good and earnest attempt at making unpleasant services well-paying and also entirely mechanized, as far as possible – such as, everyday trash-removal. It’s something most middle-class Indians would much rather ignore or at least not talk about because it is impolite. In the place I stay now, for example, the man (please take note – all ye feminists and females who are not feminists) who clears out the trash everyday goes about with a hand-held cart and picks up whatever offensive stuff is there near the gates of every apartment complex. And if smart Indians still want to believe that India is progressing by leaps and bounds because we have smart phones and can buy stuff on-line or that the biggest problem in the country today is the violation of homosexual or transgendered rights – well…maybe I’m a dinosaur in the wrong world. I’m reminded too of the incredible US libraries, the art galleries, the nature parks and the animal welfare organizations. Of course it makes me wonder all the more why the Americans have become so incredibly mindless through the decades in spite of such fabulous resources and earnest attempts to take care of certain aspects of their society. And there are terrible pockets of poverty – not just in the ghettoes of big cities – in spite of the overall wealth. Among the highly developed nations of the world – the US had a very high and abnormal rate of poverty even five years ago. I do not know about the current statistics. And from a social-psychological angle, I do not think that Americans have become a superior race in terms of the mind. It sometimes just makes me want to pick a quarrel with Marx again for his saying that if societies took care of the basic economic base – the super-structure, meaning culture and the social-psychological would all take care of themselves. In India, we seem to have not found any model of development or progress for ourselves and we fail even on objective indicators. And it’s not as though we don’t put some laws into practice with great gusto. We have become very proper about adhering to the no-smoking law on platforms and near airports – but about spitting and throwing trash and keeping our surroundings filthy and smelly and sporting indecent public habits and about flouting traffic rules, we do not care. As for personal hygiene – I remember while reading Suvro da’s chapter on 'Personality Development' from his To My Daughter even the very first time quite some time ago, I’d cringed at the thought of actually telling educated people that they mustn’t pick their noses in public (or in private, actually). I’ve now stopped counting the number of people I have seen picking their noses at formal workshops or conferences. When I look around in my country, I would if I hadn’t been trained well, feel utterly hopeless and dejected. I can only too clearly remember how the state of worldly affairs had made me feel back in my college days. Most of the times, and every day when I travel, I keep a blind eye and a deaf ear or at least pretend to the same to get whatever bit of my own work done. I’ll do what I can do and I have made certain circumscribed boundaries or these boundaries have been clearly made for me. I was re-visiting Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions recently and one bit especially brought the glimmer. It’s a line where Einstein quite unapologetically states that the herd is unimaginative and useless and that it is the individual who is important as a sentient and creative being.

It is also strange, I was thinking, of how one remembers certain dates even if it might seem silly or childish to others. I remember this date from 13 years ago and how I got a letter and I remember long bits from the letter and yet I remember of nothing from the same date for years in between until four years ago again. No, actually one year, seven years ago, on this date – I’d gone and had a martini at a French restaurant in the small town I stayed. Not a James Bond martini but it was a nice lemon martini. One year I had gone to the river in the evening and with some coffee and a doughnut and was perched on a tree branch that curved over the river edge; the river had been in retreat and I had sat there on the branch dangling my legs. One year I had a semi-mystical, adventurous, incredibly perfect, very proper and utterly blissful sleep dream in shots, even though it was rather too short. That dream however, unlike a couple or a few of my sleep dreams and waking dreams didn’t materialize in reality. Now I can’t help but almost smile softly. I sometimes wonder whether such perfect dreams come from parallel universes. I don’t know. But I like to think that they maybe unfold somewhere, sometime.

Mahalaya

October, in my mind, always feels like the first gentle, snug or haunting shroud of a winter. It has nothing to do with the physical reality but I actually get the sudden and delicious cold shiver, every now and then. October spells the leaves changing colour – into golden yellows, maroon, burgundies and flaming oranges. It spells also of a sudden quiver of almost expecting an unexpected perfect moment of communion. It spells of meetings and reunions and companionship through the forests of life. If that doesn't quite come about in physical reality – October spells of being reminded of some that happened out-there in the physical world and not just in one’s own head. Moments of close-to-bliss, so Fimh whispers. November is different. November is grey, icy, still and brooding and with a lot of sleet, cold rain, snow and dark winds, which sometimes blow in just the mind, and it’s almost as if there is ‘first the chill…’ and then the hibernation if not the stupor. But I mustn’t get started on the months and seasons. That would be a different post. Although Sunday morning has passed by – this song, rather restive, below, has been playing on my computer, off and on, from the time I got up and started working on a side-project....

This is already going to be my third pujo after coming back. I remember one evening, very clearly, from the first Durga Pujo after returning. Last year, I don’t remember anything from the Pujo days. I spent a few days down south on a work-trip and workshops and spent a few days looking after two cats in Mohanpur, near Kachrapara where Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay had spent a fair bit of his time. But I don’t remember what I did or didn’t do. Right until the 12^th year of my school-years (I feel embarrassed to think about this now), I would wait in tremulous anticipation for the Pujos when I could dress up and go and spend whole days and evenings at the pujo pandal. Yugh – is all I can say now. I did go out for a couple of days during a couple of my college years too and after that I became a crotchety recluse and nobody – but nobody could drag me out of the house during those days. No amount of shaming or name-calling about how ‘unsocial’ and how ‘abnormal’ I was could make me budge. I merely chortled or maintained a shroud of silence. I don’t think this is entirely a function of age – this growing feeling of distaste and disgust and revulsion. It’s almost as if I quietly and slowly understood that I expected something else during celebrations – and that the reality of what I experienced never gelled with some images in my mind. I don’t mind people enjoying themselves and having fun – but I do start wondering over why and how people – and masses and masses of people can enjoy themselves and have fun by creating a lot of unholy ruckus, mess, irritation, and by gorging and spending and going about woo-hooing. People can of course tell me that I have the freedom to be away from it (I am already cringing thinking about the decibel levels during those days) but why should I be such a ‘Scrooge’ when it comes to Durga Pujo and complain about other people and how they use their freedom to be? Freedom to be – ah yes.

‘Freedom to be’, brings to mind long parts of the book chapter ‘Freedom and responsibility’ and thoughts and questions about the same. Yet another chapter/essay/mixed strain of thought I sometimes wish I had come across in my early college years. I am also reminded of many a class argument and discussion from 20 years ago as a college student with my professor and then from less than a decade ago when my students discussed, debated and argued with me. And then just this Friday, in the middle of a formal and semi-fruitful conversation with a woman scientist and administrator who – when I mentioned Suvro da and Fromm in the same breath and said that a particular problem these days is that people are concerned only about the ‘freedom from’ and yet they have no real idea about the ‘freedom to be or do’ unless it is (and I know I am not the only person to think this way) to engage in utterly directionless, mindless, heartless, soulless activities or ephemeral fancies – smiled and said that I had in turn reminded her of a woman poet whom she had read in college and who had said at the beginning of her feminist activism and writings that women needed freedom to express themselves as human beings; many years later the same poet had wondered aloud sadly that women had gotten the freedom but what indeed had women done with the same. That reminded me of Virginia Woolf and her ‘A Room of one's own’...

I have been talking with scientists over the last long months for a side work-project about scientists and values, transcribing and looking at the interview excerpts and when I’m not obsessing over my hobby horse project about the self-development workshops. Who knows – maybe one day soon when our Institute is truly flourishing – we might indeed be able to do meaningful research studies on freedom, parenting and children and their strangely stunted development in some crucial ways these days. I'd be happy when we can host the grand lecture series. Anyhow. During the course of this last year, some of the matters that I’ve been relentlessly thinking about or which, to tell you the truth, keep invading my mind, even when I try to push them away saying ‘I don’t have time to think’ – have chased me down and now demand to be written about. Maybe it’s in connection to my current work, finding more work or my own self-development or some mix of this and something else. God knows, I’ll always see it as a blessing that I have been given a chance to build up something good while engaging in paid work that is built on all that one has really learnt through one’s own education and search for meaning and where one must ruthlessly look at oneself, better oneself, be mindful and keep the faith. I know I am abnormal in plenty of ways but this part and the following have nothing to do with my being abnormal – I am sure about this.

Some stuff goes back to my college years. I remember picking out Scott Peck’s book ‘The Road Less Travelled’ on one sudden impulse when I was flipping through it at the book-store – Chuckerverty and Chatterjee – where I spent an inordinate amount of time in my college days. I bought it, read a few parts of the book but then stuffed it away.  I remember reading about ‘delaying gratification’. I remember the example as clearly as though I read the book some minutes ago – not two decades ago. He raised the question of whether I, the reader, liked eating the frosted icing or the cake for iced cakes. I had chuckled and said ‘the icing’, and I answered before he had gotten to raise the next question, ‘I save the icing for the end’. Peck’s question was whether one first eats the icing or the cake, depending upon what s/he liked best. I was so chuffed to have fallen in the category of folks who can delay gratification in order to attend to the less appealing parts of a task – any task – I had chortled in glee and put the book away to read for later. I did read it later. The ‘why’ has a story of its own (and I got to read about serendipity and more).  Back then I had been too hasty in being pleased with myself. I am old enough to admit to this. I did practise delaying gratification in eating iced cakes and I did wait for 11 years before opening my mouth to talk with my old friend, but these instances apart, I do not think that I have ever had the tenacity to keep doing boring, mindless stuff or even useful stuff or stuff that I do not like as much if it does not interest me enough or lacks immediate meaning or if I do not have some idea as to why I am doing what I am doing. I know this for I have tried and very hard but every time I have tried I have failed in such an enterprise. I failed to keep at my undergraduate studies and sat out of examinations for two years in a row when I couldn’t see the purpose and there was interesting, other-worldly stuff that I'd started experimenting with. The only reason I actually sat for my examinations is another story but I know it goes back to an utterly unexpected encounter. I failed when I tried to work on a Ph.D. project on scientists when it didn’t interest me enough. I did try but I couldn’t do it. And these are just two examples. I have been able to tackle some stuff at certain points in my life by saying that it is the means to a greater end – and there I have managed to get certain things done because there was something interesting that I knew I could do in the future… When I am interested, I know I am deeply interested and work like the dickens or do my best (even if my best isn’t always good enough). This is not a figment of my fanciful imagination. Even people who hardly knew me told me the same when I was a Graduate student.

The above is not a meaningless delving into what I am or am not as a human being. If I fall at one end of a scale about delaying gratification and happen to fail in plenty of ways as a normal human being – it seems to me that much of the so-called educated world today is geared towards ‘instant gratification’. I want something now – so why shouldn’t I get it? I am reminded of a song which goes back to my college days, which sang about instant nirvana and enlightenment. I have lost from my memory the title of the song and the exact lyrics. I certainly shall not pretend that the matter of long-term and short-term gratification is so basic and easy that all human beings should innately know how to deal with it. There are obviously different kinds of desires and needs – that goes back to Abraham Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ even though there are and have been people who can transcend a few of the basic needs and search out for the higher needs – but I have not been able to figure out exactly all the factors that make for such differences. This was something we had dabbled with in one of our first introductory sociology classes, when I was a college student: that human beings alone, among all the animal species, are capable of a super-organic level of existence. And then there is the line from Suvro da’s chapter ‘On Time’ -  ‘…act as though today will be your last, and sometimes as though you are going to live forever’, which makes perfect sense now and then but I don’t always know for sure whether it makes sense at the precise time it is supposed to or whether I just imagine it to be so. But still – in spite of my doubts about what I don’t always know for sure – it does seem unsettling to me that most human beings these days seem to seek instant results, thrills, pleasures, respect, romance and meaning in life. It doesn’t seem to matter whether I have done enough or worked hard enough or whether I deserve what I want or whether someone else is being badly inconvenienced or whether I even know what I really want or am seeking for. At least there is some humility in U2’s angst-ridden liner, ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’ but it seems to me that most people don’t even have that basic humility because it takes too long to think about what they are really looking for. It doesn’t even seem to make sense to most people that things will not always work out the way they expect them to or want them to. This goes for youngsters working on scientific experiments where they want instant results to females – young and a little older – who will arrive late at airports and then expect to be whisked away through security like they are very important somebodies (while donkeys like me will get there at the stipulated two-hours-before-time and plod patiently, and now and then not-so-patiently through the long queue), to people who want a formal service but somehow think that they don’t have to pay for it to folks who do not think twice before breaking a rule or being rude but are all flustered when someone else does so to especially girls and women who desire and even get romance and love right at the time when they want it but are only interested in getting a lot of stuff from lots of quarters – tangible and intangible, even if they never admit to it even in their own heads – without ever even needing to ask themselves whether they know the basic difference between the mindless and the meaningful and whether they can and want to stick with the meaningful. And when things do not work out the way they want – then they are victims or martyrs, for it is always somebody else’s or something else’s fault. 

As I step into my 40th year, I sometimes wonder about the kind of childhood and growing up years that such creatures have had. Did they really get whatever they wanted whenever they wanted? Is that why they are so expectant of things always working instantly and the way they want them to and for people to fulfill their every want and need? Did they ever wonder what it might be like to be in somebody else’s shoes? Did they ever wonder what ‘meaning’ in life means? Or is it that they have been 'hurt', 'inconvenienced' and faced 'problems and troubles' of their own and have gotten comfortable in the notion that 'everybody does the same thing' and so we all need to be just as callous and unmindful of one another and just get along? I know I saw enough of such different types in my blood family and even among erstwhile friends and fleeting acquaintances. I don’t, quite honestly, give a damn, about the mindless herds. For the most part – the herds have in the past made me scream out in absolute despair and madness. From an objective bird’s perspective, I think it explains much of what is wrong with our world currently. It would have made some ounce of sense if the herds knew cannily and for sure what they really wanted and why. I doubt that this is the case (even though plenty of them seem to have got for themselves bits of 'worldly success'). But that goes back to a discussion on values and valuing and what an individual sees as being valuable. 

Now it hurts to see the rare human being who stands out-of-the-crowd getting burnt or scalded because people think that instant gratification is something of a divine birthright. I remember reading a book review and I shan’t say too much about the book review before reading the book but the book is by Barbara Fredrickson and it’s about how love is not entirely about commitment or about long-term feelings but about ‘micro-moments’ one can feel and everyday and multiple times a day, and for strangers and for just about anybody. The book uses ‘science’ to talk about love and how our bodies are geared to feeling the euphoric spasms of love in those micro-moments and how we can best use them to our advantage and for our ‘development’. Now I’m not being presumptuous here but yes, there is the feeling of ‘agape’ every now and then – not every single day of a lifetime – which has been talked of by individuals from different walks of life – but one gets over that and finds out what is really important and who really matters unless one simply remains flighty or uselessly mad or unless one is an avatar of an extraordinary being, like a Jesus or Krishna or other such human being. I often think wryly, these days, that too many of us, imagine that we are such avatars. I have come across only one such human being but that itself is a rarity on the planet. One might wonder what the connection of all this is to instant gratification and delaying gratification. My question is: how can ‘micro-moments’ of love be anything but instant gratification, no matter if the author apparently gives a doff of the hat to the 'non-lusting', 'spiritual' and the long-lasting? Whatever else one can dub those no-doubt intense instances – surely, surely, but surely – we are degrading and abusing and misusing the meaning of ‘love’ when we describe those instant but terribly temporary and flighty instances by the same name? 

This brings me to the matter of human motivations. The motivations for behavior – social and private behavior. Max Weber had something to say about that. This is something that has been bothering me consciously for months and maybe sub-consciously for years – people act and behave sometimes in similar ways or even in identical ways and sometimes say similar or even identical things – the reasons and the motivations might be, can be, and are, very different. That gets me to Ratnakar, who became Valmiki and through a very conscious and careful choice, so I would say...

In Hinduism, we often get to read that all human beings carry the essence of godliness in them. The essence of godliness in all living things is what is captured in 'tat tvam asi'. I have felt that keenly and vividly in wild and euphoric moments in the long dead past which I do not wish to revisit. But these days, I wonder along the lines of Tagore regarding more than lots of human beings and I hold myself to the same scale of judgment and across contexts: 'tumi ki tader khshoma koriyacho? Tumi ki beshecho bhalo?’ Surely there is a difference between the true human being who has loved and cared and brought meaning, laughter and joy, and the human being who has loved, and the human being who is yet to even really know, understand, feel and internalize pain, empathy, knowing and remembering? How can all human beings be the same or be seen or viewed as being equal or even similar? That is travesty. I can’t help but be reminded of letters from long past and of another book chapter...

So much for this post. It is Mahalaya, officially. So here's a song for the evening.