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.

Fifteen minus four

Never! Never in my lifetime had I been to the first class that started at 10.20 in the morning. I simply hated it. Most of my classmates probably thought it had something to do with my complex communistic principles, a conscious act of defiance against the bourgeois university system, essentially typified in the 10.20 class, which denied students the right to sleep till noon.

But today, post 9.30, I sweated profusely and pedalled furiously as I moved in through drizzling rain and roaring city traffic to reach the university. There were kids supposedly waiting for my—whazzit called? ah, yes!— sermon. Yesterday had been my first class with a bunch of postgraduate kids, fifteen in number, and I had been assigned by R...di (the course coordinator) to take classes on Eric Arthur Blair for the rest of this week.

I reached the verandah and smoked one and a half cigarettes (I had to throw off one for ADG had stepped in from nowhere, speaking absent-mindedly on his phone). Five minutes past, I saved up the stubbed-out one in my pocket for emergency futuristic consumption, and picked up the attendance register from the HoD's office. By then only two kids had appeared and at 10.35, I was still patiently waiting. Damn, I had to explain so many things by 11.10. Another two turned up at 10.40. Two plus two made four, and I started off. It's so strange to be on the other side of the desk—this is a metaphor, for I deliberately chose a small room with a big table and lots of chairs around it— with people fidgeting and gaping at you, and you fumbling for words.

As I was, er, exploring the, er, complexities, er, of the genre formations of 'utopia' and 'dystopia', and the post-Enlightenment, er, reaction, er, to the notion, er, of technocratic, er, progress— a cellphone rang. A kid stood up with an apologetic smile and said: "Dada, please, can I attend to it?" Lost in the corridors of no-place (ui+topos, to be precise), I was blank for a moment. "Switch it off, you're crossing your limits," I said in a cold voice, well remembered from other spaces and times. Limits? Ha, ha, listen who's talking of limits. But voila, it still worked— I had perfect attention for the rest of the class which ended, let's say in considerate terms, rather miserably but slightly better than yesterday.

Kids, big brother (dada) is watching you, but believe me, his vigil is mostly symbolic. There are ghosts, shapes and mental structures that you've inherited from the past, and as long as you seriously believe in them, you cannot dream of alternate worlds, or even have serious negative visions.