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.