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.