Eternity, Bathroom, Smoke and Spiders

"Men always represent eternity as an incomprehensible idea, as a something immense- immense! But why should this necessarily be the case? Imagine, on the contrary, a small room- a bathroom, if you will- blackened by smoke, with spiders in every corner."

   -Arcadius Ivanovitch in Crime and Punishment.

Being Caliban

'Why do you read Western theory and literature?" he asked disapprovingly, looking at the books on my bookshelf. I was shocked: this was the first time I had come across such reverse Orientalism; albeit a politically-correct one.

We were having a rather irritating debate on 'continuity' and 'rupture' two days after that.

This young French anthropologist was trying to say the more things change, the more things remain the same. Yes, I said, but it depends on the position in time, space, and culture that you belong to, or assume. To an epithelial and alien anthropologist watching earth over an alien telescope for ten thousand years, it's the continuation of a species over numerous insignificant events. To Foucault, the Islamic 'Revolution' of 1978 in Iran was a rupture.

We differed sharply on the question of 'choice'.

He said: The middle classes largely control what is called 'culture'. They are to blame for consciously choosing on every point on shopping malls, consumerism, cars, and everything that goes with the logic of the market: they consciously choose that everyday, every moment, when they share small bits of power against the relatively powerless.

I said: The middle classes, at least here, are now primarily shaped by social conditions that make them devoid of 'history' in the older sense. Apart from those rooted to older ways of tradition (those disappearing ones who still preserve the classical educationist's vision of, say, listening to Mozart and speaking the Queen's English measure meticulously on a Nesfield grammar book), most ape and synthesize according to local customs and cultural moorings (for aping is also an act of synthesis) the products spawned by what Adorno and Horkheimer had simplistically tried to pin as the "culture industry".

The question of blame be better left to those higher-up in the fields of concentrated power —those running, funding and controlling the globalised networked shows of power and domination. An individual belonging to the middle classes can only be criticised when he is aware of the range of possibilities that constitute his 'choice'. I don't blame a person for buying a branded jeans from a supermarket; I criticize him for not knowing that jeans is the fruit of sweatshop slave trade. And I, specifically blame him when, for example, he pretends to ignore that the person sitting next to him has fallen sick and needs taken to a hospital. That is, he can be explicitly blamed only when he's aware of the choice he is to make as an individual, and then choose the ethically wrong one... I was going on to speak of Max Stirner's view on the topic, but then I stopped talking all of a sudden.

I found out that I was rather rude when debating with him, and I wondered why was it so. I'm usually not that rude, and I've been a patient debater in other situations, more disconcerting and hostile. What was it that had unsettled me? And then I remembered his question.

'Why do you read Western theory and literature?" he had asked.

The question was sickening. And I couldn't answer him without being angry; angry at him for being a white man with a not-so-innocuous question. A long time back in the university, a professor had told us: 'There's a Caliban somewhere deep inside you. You'll always find him when time comes."

You can't answer the question without being Caliban. Prospero's spirits hear you and yet you need must curse!

I pay out my line

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand, you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible of course.

I pay out my line, I say out my line, this black thread I'm spinning across the page."

- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, 2000.

Youth

A young couple pose for a photo in front of
Jinshui Bridge in Tian'anmen Square, Beijing, on March 23, 2009.


Student protestors struggle with soldiers from the Chinese Army,
the PLA, at Tian'anmen Square, on June 3, 1989.

Both the pictures share two common features: youth and Tian'anmen Square.
No points for guessing the difference.

Incidentally, this month marked the 20th anniversary of the Tian'anmen Square Protests.
Mourn. Celebrate. Remember.

(Pix Credits: The first is from The China Daily, a showcase of photographs by 100 photographers, part of the 'Chinese Revolution's 60 years celebration that is coming soon. The second is from the Asian history section of About.com which records the butchering of student protesters by the PLA. )

'Any Where Out of This World!'

"This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by a desire to change beds. One would prefer to suffer by the stove. Another believes he would recover if he sat by the window."

- Baudelaire, 'Any Where Out of This World!'

"Remember When"- Sharing is Caring

In this world of webs, deceptions, and sickening credit-carded entertainments, and where strangers walk the nights of the ether in their wakeful solitude, it's rather strange that the act of sharing survives. It's made up of one of the oldest and noble human sentiments that made us humans, and it's still the only act that makes you feel alive, at least on the net.

Sharing. An act of courage and extreme gentleness that survives the hostility of governments, and other rabid censors of free expression.

Imagine a world without the silent uploader, her pirate eyes alight with the warmth of the incandescent cathode ray screen, spending sleepless nights to share a movie, an album, a book she knows you're sure to appreciate.

Imagine a world without the patient seeders on the portals who seed and seed for years, risking their systems to known armadas and unknown hostilities, and planting new trees of hope in every island of a recalcitrant computer connecting to this nether regions.

Or imagine a world without trees.

Yes, trees and photosynthetic life forms and images that survive and blossom inspite of a million leeches who've never bothered to put a decent "thank you" comment on a post. They nod in silence, share light and oxygen, lifting their branches and leaves up into the ultramarine sky and breathe life everywhere, and right now, as you're reading this, they weave life in all its varieties.

Listen carefully. Let me whisper it once more in your ears. "Sharing is caring."
And gentle reader, remember it well.

What follows is a Not-Copyright Comics on the "piracy" issue by Dylan Horrocks, a wonderful artist from New Zealand:
(Click on the image for a better view)

"Ojor"- Another Uneventful Bangla Blog

I've started blogging in Bangla. The name of the blog is 'Ojor'; in Bangla it refers to something close to agelessness.

It'll contain some uneventful expressions and feelings I've trouble writing in English, and without that peculiar sense of immediacy that goes into the making of this one.

Click the image below for the link:

Miraculous and sacred stoopidity

Growl! I received that mail for the umpteenth time! Earlier I had it from MBAs, corporate executives, NGO scions, smart-ass journalists, and from postgraduate people whose CVs exhibit a dose of 'liberal humanistic education' comprising Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Marx, Foucault, and also all that post-colonial shit.

After a never-ending list of people it is forwarded to, you get to see a picture of a grim-faced deity (I guess of Tamil origin) and a message drafted and highlighted in red and blue by someone who hadn't learnt elementary grammar in primary school.

Class 1 Officer of Indian government received this picture and called it 'junk mail', 8 days later his husband died. A man received this picture and immediately sent out copies...his surprise was winning the 10 crore rupees & promotion in job

T. Ratan received this picture, gave it to his secretary to make copies but they forgot to distribute: she lost her job and he lost his family.

This picture is miraculous and sacred, don't forget to forward this within 1 days to at least 20 people. Do Not Forget to forward and you will receive a huge surprise!!

My usual response had been:

I happen to be an atheist, and I don't believe in luck.
Please refrain in sending me these kinds of stoopid messages in the future, or you might make your goddess really angry. Thanks :)

Or sometimes I had come out sarcastic:

I had lost my brand new Nataraj pencil last week. A Persian god and a Scandanavian god appeared in my dream, and asked me to send it to you and ten other stoopid people who believe that they'll have a box of crayons soon by forwarding this mail.

Don't ignore this mail, or the wrath of 10, 000 Tibetan and Malaysian gods will fall on you. Amen.

But these deeply religious and mortally afraid people have refused to relent. I wish I could send something materially hard (like a bamboo with nails sticking out of it) to the original sender of this mail, without hurting his religious sentiment, so that the person could shove it up his ass, and stay put in religious serenity. Things like that are not possible in a secular state of things, I know. But the wish grows stronger by the day.

Nowhere to go

And in another land and time, a Marmdadoff tells a schismatic student who might not be Raskolnikoff:
"Can you understand, sir, what it means to have nowhere to go to? You don't? Don't realise that yet?"

Writing is a con

Any child can see that the map is not the ground. You cannot make a “reliable” map. A map, like a scientific theory, or consciousness itself, is no more than a dream of control. The conscious mind operates at forty or fifty bits a second, and disorder is infinitely deep. Better admit that. Better lie back and enjoy it—especially since, without the processes implied by it, no one could write (or read) books anyway. Writing is a con.

- M. John Harrison (what it might be to live in viriconium, 2001)

Quotes from "Upside down"

"Today, there are certain things one can't say in the face of public opinion:
* capitalism wears the stage name "market economy"
* imperialism is called "globalization"
* the victims of imperialism are called "developing countries," much as a dwarf might be called a "child"
* opportunism is called "pragmatism"
* treason is called "realism"
* poor people are called "low-income people"
* the expulsion of poor children from the school system is measured by the " dropout rate"
* the right of bosses to lay off workers with neither severance nor explanation is called "a flexible labor market"
* official rhetoric acknowledges women's rights among those of "minorities," as if the masculine half of humanity were the majority
* instead of military dictatorship, people say "process"
* torture is called "illegal compulsion" or "physical and psychological pressure"
* when thieves belong to a good family they're "kleptomaniacs"
* the looting of the public treasury by corrupt politicians answers to the name of "illicit enrichment"
* " accidents" are what they call crimes committed by cars
* for the blind, they say "the unseeing"
* a black man is "a man of color"
* where it says "long and difficult illness," it means cancer or AIDS
* "sudden illness" means heart attack
* people annihilated in military operations aren't dead: those killed in battle are "casualties," and civilians who get it are "collateral damage"
* in 1995, when France set off nuclear tests in the South Pacific, the French ambassador to New Zealand declared, "I don't like that word 'bomb.' They aren't bombs. They're exploding artifacts"
* "Getting Along" is what they call some of the death squads that operate under military protection in Colombia
* "Dignity" was what the Chilean dictatorship called one of its concentration camps, while "Liberty" was the largest jail of the Uruguayan dictatorship
* "Peace and Justice" is the name of the paramilitary group that in 1997 shot forty-five peasants, nearly all of them women and children, in the back as they prayed in the town church in Acteal, Chiapas, Mexico."

[Upside Down, a primer for the looking glass world, Eduardo Galeano (2000: 40)]

Utopia, toothache, and Orwell's diaries

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

- George Orwell ['Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun,' Dec, 1943]

I have recently come across a wonderful online project that blogs live entries from Orwell's diaries, seventy years removed in time.

The act of putting up Orwell's personal notes in a real time cyberspace blog creates a strange of contemporaneity, and simultaneously, makes us feel less solitary in an acutely amnesiac world. You see nesting storks, goats on a mountain climb, carcasses of dead donkeys, herons, ibises, and also meet interesting ordinary plain people in Morocco whom the world has forgotten, while the news of the fall of Barcelona comes in.

A few centuries back, this man would have been one of the most famous prophets, and probably crucified, burnt at the stakes, his limbs torn apart, etc. The greatest and wickedest discovery of the previous century, though, was that the integrity of a person can reduced to cinders if you're capable of desenstivising minds to make all words inane and unrecognisable. We lack the training and the circumstances to feel and caress words and feelings, and we've been trained to unlearn our social memories by our gods and masters. But journeying with Orwell is more than a pleasure. It's delight in the sense that words only can convey.

If anyone is interested, here's the link to the Orwell Project.

There is a crack in everything

The anthem concludes:

Ring the bells that still can ring 
Forget your perfect offering 
There is a crack, a crack in everything 
That's how the light gets in. 
That's how the light gets in. 
That's how the light gets in. 

- Cohen ('Anthem,' The Future, 1992)

Slumdog, caramba, and an old ad jingle

In the search for superlatives, the limits of sense and decency have long been passed. Did you ever think a person living in the Mumbai slums could be so lovingly called a 'slumdog' in the yankee fashion in print and the boom, and everyone would celebrate the triumph of this repulsive rags-to-riches story with obcene hurrahs, and people not even being slightly uncomfortable with the word?

"Woof! Woof! This is all so boring!"

Sigh, the Indian advertisement industry too has ceased to manufacture simple wish-fulfillment messages: of a TV that made your neighbours green with envy, a red soap that could be used alternately as a brick and a magic token for winning football matches, a scooter that 'united' India, or simply those 'amazing whiteness'-inspiring detergent powders of Lalitaji and (oh ho!) Deepikaji that lost their appeal once the publick took to mall-visiting sprees, and chucked all their old clothes out somewhere.

But these are remembrances of things past, and no one can be forced to read Proust anymore.

I was inside a ramshackle Kolkata bus last week when I spotted a rather strange advertisement outside the schlock South City mall:

"You shall be judged by the colour of your skin; your second skin."

In a sense, the product which happens to be some fashionable clothing has become irrelevant: the advertiser with the exaggerated imagination of an ant inside a Myrmecophaga tridactyla's snout is trying work directly on self-congratulatory images and dreams using coloured words. Images and dreams inspiring "colour confidence", and revealing the rest of the world in its true (bad) colours, words that remind you once more of the complex past and confused present that your country suffers inspite of all that fashion the advertisers offer you, dear Neo, this time you get to choose a skin instead of a pill!

"Woof! Colourman, colourman, which colour do you choose?"

¡Ay, Caramba! I have a suggestion, though, and I think I've mentioned it somewhere above in the oblique. But in case you're bored, let's forget that and let me sing for you a old ad jingle of times when you never thought of the big, bad world. And in case you've been wondering, Myrmecophaga tridactyla is the scientific name of a morose 6-ft long snouty creature found in Central and South America that lives on ants.

Chorus:

“Washing powder Nirma, washing powder Nirma
Dudh si safeedi, Nirma se aaye
Rangeen kapda bhi khil khil jaye
Sabki pasand Nirmaaaa. Washing powder Nirma. Nirma.
Woof. Woof.”

[Credits: See this blog by Vinayak Razdan if you're really nostalgic about the Indian advertising world of the eighties. The image of Lalitaji is borrowed from At the Edge.]

The inferno of living

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

-Calvino [Invisible Cities, 1972]