Songs I didn't tell you about
Keep Me In Your Heart -
Warren Zevon (
Link)
Moon River -
Audrey Hepburn (
Link)
Song To The Siren -
This Mortal Coil (
Link)
At My Window -
Townes Van Zandt (
Link)
Ek ilzaam hai kuch khwab ke baseron pe;ek tarikh aisi bhi, jab naqsh-e-shaam laayi puraane rang.Daayron ka sehra kabhi utaare, kabhi odhe chale hain;aarzoo faqat itni, der hi sahi, mumkin hai phir seher hogi.
Orange – Brown
“
orange, how he is so strange, wanders in woods n meadows, dsnt long for sun or shadow…”
“One of my favourite words is ‘eunoia’, it means ‘beautiful thinking’. Aristotle said it forms the basis for a man’s self-conscious love of others. Did you know that it’s the shortest word with all the vowels?”
“No, I didn’t.” – Brown replied.
“Do you like it?”
“Yes, it’s interesting.”
Orange had always had a latent streak of survivalism; his Eucharist had nothing to do with breaking the bread or wine, but turning a few pale pages of his Walden. He was working toward something for quite sometime – a thatch, to be made entirely of long, dry leaves. No tarpaulin – nothing artificial. The tilt toward being the wanderer had been a steady one; it wasn’t a swift, quirky enlightenment that jutted out of the subconscious, but a rather painfully slow movement made more interesting by its distinctly anti-diegetic pattern. He didn’t want to be a non-conformist because it offered a breeding ground for bodhisattvas, but because the modern world’s parlance had him searching for his own words. The new road was taken more in tentativeness than the lightness of being. Like Gadamer, he nurtured a deep interest in the mysteries of human understanding, but unlike him he did not have any hermeneutical bigger-picture in mind; the concerns being self-reflective and immediate than allegorical. It was to satisfy such primitive needs as tolerance, self-preservation and tranquility that he had found a refuge in the wilderness. He did not possess any illusions about sudden polemic interventions that might suffice as a breather. The charm was in the remains of stasis.
The thin sheaves of Brown’s notebook were indicative of the slices of her world; words written in blazing hurry and yet each one wearing a prehensile look around itself. A cursory glance presented a picture with wild, bright brushstrokes, and it was only when the canvas was stretched that the complete form appeared. Brown’s world was a study in contrast; there was a genuine affection – at times, suffocating – for the human vaudeville; there was no hint of tiresomeness or self-deprecation in her acceptance of the ordinary, the crowd or the regular, small houses on the roadside, smoking chimneys, trains and caps and chocolate milk; yet there remained a constant longing for liberty, a latent lingering elixir that urged for a flawed and uninhibited march through everything that was rooted and old, everything that reveled in self-decay. Brown often imagined a literal run through sand and silt – vulnerable to wind and rain, yet intrinsically incapable of joining the mud. Brown had sketched out a personal template of life with innumerable questions and a few validations – life that was frantic and solitary, precociously cheery and forlorn, unchained and spontaneous – a life fascinating in its otherworldliness and epic in its details.
Mastroianni said that too much idleness is a sign of mediocrity, and so was always busy with phone calls; Brown – the world was her phone and it kept calling in. From a distance, the overlap between the affection for the humanity and the unwavering desire of surrendering to everything nature was willing to offer – the mighty white mountains, old trees with no names, grey goblets of rain, fall and spring – seemed jotted thick with specks of alarming contradiction, yet if one were to observe closely, it became apparent that there was no design, no jigsaw pieces – it was one simple and fluid deterministic precursor to her way of life – alien to the disorientations of the modern world, and yet always accommodating. The thrownness of human existence didn’t perturb Brown, as much as she appreciated the contingency of the events under which freedom exists, it caused no inclination to run near or distant from it, it could never repress or banish her personal views about idealism – be it sceptical or pantheistic. Under such apparently simple outlook, the deterministic de rigueur of identity was developed, built by constantly applying oneself in the tasks – an exercise that ultimately excavates purpose like it did for Sisyphus. The pursuit not aimed for personal glory or justification for being different but to confront the ever-present dissonance of mortality. If there were to be noticed a positive assessment of anomie in human character, Brown’s near-clinical and yet astonishingly natural way of dealing with the paradox of bustle and quiet, of solitude and inclusiveness, of glass buildings and wild trees offered a profound evidence of the alternative.
“I don't know where it's likely to go better.I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,And climb black branches up a snow-white trunkToward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,But dipped its top and set me down again.” – Robert Frost
bonjour tristesse
Around 5 a.m., the day holds promise; it truly does. A couple of years back, I said this to an old friend. We had been talking all night – he doing most of the talking, and I, the listening – the night ended and we decided to take a walk around the restful houses. I was asked if we should go to that old, grey-with-dust
Kali mandir, ‘yes, why the hell not.’ Early mornings, the only two creatures actively looking at the world are birds and dogs. Dogs are the better observers of the two, there is a weary sense of quasi-ridicule stamped on their faces, the unkind drool merely a precursor to the gob of spit in the face of humanity; though I suspect if they have read their Henry Miller. Early mornings are a welcome relief for them too – minimum interaction with their best friends. Birds are different though, they are deliberately amusing; I wonder how effective such a plan could be – amusing others just enough to cover one’s disgust. But birds do it all the time – they keep chirping, can’t stop it.
If one puts aside the abstraction of it, Pascal has a lot to offer through his wager; one must continue to have belief – it could be just the absent reality, or aided by a bit of resourceful imagination – it is impossible that the rational is only a depository of truth; the imperceptible elements of the rational need to pass through the refuse of error and doubt, only then can the rational demand the grand apotheosis which it so hungrily demands. There is a near-elegiac realization when one evaluates the rational and the urgent deification it calls for. To disavow the frailty of the mind, the finer spaces of heart, the engulfing silence would be a treacherous assault on human condition – something that the infinite fragments of the rational can never redeem. Perhaps there is no poisonous harm in relying on reason when one analyzes the conservative remedies for the human condition – but I do not see any perceptible unraveling – in all probability, there is none; which is why the prevalent massive eminence on belief must not be frowned at. There is everything to gain.
Hugo says something about belief.
So a beast comes and goes,Roars, screams, bites.A tree is there,its branches bristling,A paving stone collapsesIn the road that carts crushand winter ruins.Under those thicknesses of matterand of night, tree, beast, stone,weight that nothing raises,In that terrible depth,A soul dreams.What does it do?que la raison ne connait pas.
Bombay
Kanta Devi wiping out her tears in Chinnore. The Britisher with a reverberating ‘No!’. The Times Now correspondent with the cracked voice. The POV shot of the rabbi's wife in Nariman House. The IT professionals in the Hyderabad cafeteria. pigeons. Versace. The
Jai Hinds for MARCOS. Major Unnikrishnan's mother. ‘
We’ve lost the live pictures.’ The American quoting Yeats' 'tread softly because you tread on my dreams'.
"
My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?"
-
F.D.
tout est grâce.
I don’t think optimism is passé. People who have a reason to look for the brighter side, however invalid it might appear to others, are less prone to stupidity than someone riled by private inconveniences borne out of nothing but a misplaced anger for their universe. When I say optimism, it is markedly different than the boyish naiveté one used to indulge lying mad in youth. Such a feeling is the result of a behaviour looking for the purpose within the mind and not in the elements outside of it; and linking the nature of that purpose to the external: a gust of howling wind, little bulbs of rain, the gaze of a child. The paradox here can not be missed by anyone with a working mind –if the objective is the disassociation of the mind from the external, then why is it that the purpose of such disassociation is only for enabling the individual for harmony with the world outside of it. It is only through a series of studied observations that the inner dialectic of this relationship can become apparent for a stranger.
There is no leitmotif for the truth; no baroque edifice appears on cue, so to help the stranger to recognize it. It is visible as much in the slightest signs as the most elaborate plans of showcasing the realms of humanity. The contiguity that evolves between the nature of such a truth and the identity of the slightest sign of action based on a pure thought has that unspeakable attribute to it – spirituality. The child watering the beat tree in Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice raises the issues of such contiguity. Through an action, seemingly so routine and devoid of any diabolically grand plan, the essentially bare nature of goodness becomes visible, and such a goodness has usability too –the morphed tangibility of such an action can not go unnoticed. Any infliction of such truth that comes with no baggage is welcome, even for the most cynical of strangers, acceptance of such truth often disguised in illicit humour. Humour is in fact the most obvious and inadequate weapon that the stranger possesses, for it does more to destabilize the internal coherence, even the most primordial argument used by the stranger: the futility of it all. It is quite extraordinary, the simplicity of this argument, ‘in the end, it does not matter.’ For not only it bares the proclivity of the desire born of nothingness, but also, in the most blunt fashion, places the blame to the opponent, in this case, the universe. It is hard enough to locate the seriousness of the claimant, after painful scrutiny for the omnipresent naiveté, one realizes the fallacy of favouring the absence of any action. In a ritualistic world, things would be simpler, and colourless. In a ritualistic world, philistines would be Greeks. In a ritualistic world, life would be meaningless. Because it is not so, and because ‘ritualistic’ is still a bad word, the absence of action hinged loosely to a strange moral indolence can only lead to the dark cavity which the stranger has preordained in a twisted nihilistic surge.
Why be tethered to the vile paroxysm then? Shan’t it be lovely to restore such memes of strangeness and binding them with good reason? For lack of sufficient proof, I doubt whether it will serve the purpose. Scepticism of any order is clearly the most treasured possession of the individual, and strangeness is borne of that very skepticism, the mandate for the disbelief contoured completely by the personal world. It is unfair to ask for a verdict from the jurisprudence constricted between the rational and the personal. It is unfair to expect limpid abstraction in the universe. It is never unfair to hope –never to the internal.
