A weird genius is still a genius
Have you watched Network (1976) yet? If yes, you might relate to this paragraph. If no, you must watch (I doubly insist) for that monologue at the end. Peter Finch delivered it and then a few months later, passed away, becoming the first actor — and so far, the only one — to win the Oscar for Best Actor posthumously. In the spirit of zero spoilers, let me just tell you that after watching the film, you won’t forget him or his performance. The message was crystal clear: we are being treated as lab rats by those who rule us. 50 years ago, there were television sets to keep us hypnotized. Now, we have our smartphones to do that to us. Irony dies a bit after knowing how ignorant we are in the so-called Information Age, mainly because the technology wants us to save time but not enough to spend it on non-technological stuff. And with the unchecked spread of the Internet, we can only guess when are we going to be mad enough to break this chain.
I rant.
You rant.
They rant too.
Everybody rants.
Ranting is what unites us.
We rant thanks to our privilege.
Those suffering for real don’t know how –
To make the most of their voice and words.
Nobody can teach them to fight for their rights.
Only a matter of time before they stand up straight.
They are under the sun, in the snow and across the pond.
Waiting for the abandoned paradigm to shift toward their tribe.
While we continue to stay aloof from what’s going on beneath us.
Not our fault either because we must focus on our natural strengths –
And rant and rant and rant and rant till the end of the forsaken timeline.
What is the language you think in? You must be speaking several languages but what is the language your mind speaks to your body? To make the question simpler, when you close your eyes and meditate, what do you hear? As your thoughts move from one branch to another, where do they pause to bring you back to yourself? And just before they do so, which lingual territory do you find yourself stranded in? When you are writing, things are pretty different: your finger movement sync up with your thoughts: you think, you feel and you write. Wonder what does Jhumpa Lahiri think of when she’s writing in Italian. Anyway, according to me, our thoughts are more of a feeling and are quite illingual — if at all there is such a word — as they speak to you in a language that doesn’t pertain to set standards of syntax or grammar or phonetics. When was the last time you were thinking and you had to correct yourself for wrong spelling or pronunciation or usage? It’s a wordless flow at best and that’s why I think people are being absurd when they claim to think in a particular language.
Old age brings with it an unwarranted amount of grace and very few manage to carry it well. Most people give into crankiness of lost youth and zest. Some learn with time the necessity of maintaining beauty in the face of wrinkles. I realized this aspect of humanity while being seated next to the popular food historian Salma Yusuf at an event on Monday. Draped in a saree, she was charming, witty and insightful. Being a Persian scholar, she knew what she was talking about when she shared some interesting tidbits about Mughal era — the medieval practices and indulgences. The thing I appreciated the most about her was her candour and her ease with letting me step into her world. Most of the time, from what I noticed during my journalism days, writers and the experts lose patience too quickly and end up being solitary vanguards of their chosen disciplines. Salmaji was different. Her warmth radiated at our table, with the way her sari-clad elderly peers hugged her, I could only witness why. And I genuinely hope I get to meet her again.
It’s that time of the year when you’ll read listicles of ups and downs of the world. 25 news reports that made your day. 50 instances that will reinstate your faith in humanity. 10 bad news that will change the course of history. Yada. Yada. But very rarely do we get to read about the decline of mother tongues in the world. With the loud expansion of global village and the undeniable impetus of monoculture, we are experiencing more and more mother tongues losing the battle to their dominant counterparts. Young parents not feeling the need to instill the seed of love for heritage and culture in their wards is only a symptom of a much bigger problem. Perhaps we’d bothered to save our mother tongues more if it was called father tongue in the first place.
I don’t hesitate to write about serious topics like mental health but the more I read about them, the less I am convinced about my hold. Random bloggers like me can pick up popular subjects like sports, nature, society without any repercussion. On the other end, depression, anxiety, stress, etc. carry a baggage of scrutiny for obvious reasons. When a person says he is depressed or anxious or stressed, we are talking about a silent vector. Depression doesn’t make noise and neither does anxiety or its many cousins. They quietly enter the scene and never leave without a significant damage to behold. Under such circumstances, who the hell am I to tell a troubled person what to do? In fact, the most I can do is listen attentively and try to grasp where is he coming from. I can pray they don’t go to their premature climax anytime soon. For quite a lot of disturbed individuals, suicide seems like an easy way out when it obviously isn’t. Although art has romanticized the notion of ending your life on your terms repeatedly, reality is starkly different from the paintings and the haikus and the movies of our world. For a person suffering quietly, suicide might be the most profound event in their life, but on zooming out a bit, one can see clearly that the act is a part of the problem, not solution.
If you really care, try to help. Feeling bad about something doesn’t make you a good person. It only makes you a person who enjoys feeling bad about something. If your child is hungry, you don’t feel bad about it. You feed her immediately, right? But when you see pictures of hungry kids, you feel bad. Why? Is it because you can’t help in whatever little ways you can (volunteership, maybe) as quickly as possible? The truth is we are fatigued by the overflow of bad news and we are fast losing our ability to empathize. We look for nooks of doubts in the most harmless of person due to our captious settings. To help others, we ought to rise above ourselves first, then learn to care, and then learn to help. On the mirror inside an empty bowl, you can see a child either smiling or crying: she smiles because she ate from that bowl or she cries because the bowl is empty. Most of the time, we get to decide the difference.
There is a lot of hue and cry about a controversial bill being introduced in the parliament. The government claims it’s an attempt to curb the influx of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. For some reason, it’s perfectly alright to have illegal immigrants from Nepal. To top it all, a nationwide registry is under construction to ensure none of the Muslims in the country are from our neighbouring countries. Palpably so, it’s a complex issue, given we live in a complex world, and we’ll take a long time to get to the root of the issue, let alone, the solution. But then, we also live in an impatient world. As a result, followers of different ideologies are busy circulating extreme possibilities from this bill. The Right feels that India will finally be free of the burden of ’71 War whereas the Left assumes that Indian Muslims will pay a heavy price for this amendment. Whatever the consequences, it’s cute to assume that India is so damn law-abiding that any plan (good or bad) can be executed with utmost efficacy.
On the subject of illegal immigrants, what’s more intriguing is the utter lack of nuance. As is the case nowadays. Everybody, especially on social media — which has become the strong backbone of our lazy media — jumps to conclusions. After all, it’s much easier to spread premature glee or foster fearmongering than actually sit down to read and parse through details. At the end of the day, we are a nation of 1.37 billion. It’s a massive population and we are quite literally exploding with people. However, unfortunately, nobody has the guts to admit this human epidemic; even the prime minister keeps mentioning the incorrect figure (1.25 billion) in his speeches. Won’t take long to estimate how much resources we have and how much can we effectively expend. Yet, in the chaos perpetuated by the nationalists, religionists and the regionists, the basic tenets of economics are being ignored. Today, you smirk when your domestic help feigns to be from West Bengal while her Bangla accent gives her away. Tomorrow, we may have graver questions to dabble with.
Give me a memorable movie and take everything else away from me. It’s one thing to watch a good film and quite another to watch something that you keep thinking of for the next one week. Have enjoyed every single work by Noah Baumbach, I must admit Marriage Story (2019) is definitely his most intense feature so far. It deconstructs spousal relationship so damn neatly that for a change, you don’t pity the child at all. In most divorce-related movies, you think too much about children stuck in the middle — for a parent, divorce happens once but for a child, the divorce happens twice; his mother divorced his father and his father divorced his mother — but in this film, the focus is on the two protagonists. And what a stunning performances they delivered! Scarlett Johansson has never been truer to the camera. To complement her, Adam Driver is equally striking. Also, his character shares so many similarities with me. All the things that she says about him in the film is true about me too. Which made me ignore the fact that Driver is indeed a weird actor, somebody so strange that they end up shining brightly.
