Superstitious enough for what?
There was an English chapter (maybe in 5th or 6th class) during my school days which described in detail the scientific studies Dr. Jagdish Chandra Bose conducted. He basically proved that plants have feelings too and are not very different from the so-called sentient beings. Come to think of it, a lot of good chapters were lost on my generation, because none of my childhood friends, even the higher ranked ones, remember any of these exquisite lessons. For them, they are a blur. To me, they are waves of heat or ice depending on what I felt back then when I read those chapters for the first time. Be it a story about a blind man carrying a lamp, or a babul tree weathering the changing seasons, or Gadge Maharaj’s message about cleanliness, or how birds build their nests and go to extreme lengths to ensure the eggs are hatched, or a tragic poem about Summerlake, or how a Japanese girl named Toto Chan finally found a school that would cater to her special needs, or a tale of wisdom about about a Kashmiri fellow who teaches his urban friend that simplicity is the answer to our troubles, or an excellent chapter by Arnold Toynbee titled Intellectual Rubbish, or an unforgettable lesson on why Einstein was more of a sage and less of a scientist, and finally in the 10th grade, a wonderful story by Ruskin Bond called The Cherry Tree.
Anyway, I digress here. Also, what I wouldn’t do to get my hands on all the languages (English/Hindi/Marathi) textbooks we had through the years!
The point of this paragraph was to emphasize the feelings shared but rarely visibly exhibited by plants. For instance, my wife and I recently brought home a marigold plant from the local nursery. Within a few days, it started showing signs of decline. According to my friend’s theory, and I wholeheartedly agree with it, maybe the poor thing is missing its friends from the nursery. Imagine living your whole life in one place with fellow marigold plants only to be separated abruptly. As a solution to this cruel problem, it’s advisable to buy a bunch of plants instead of only one, so as to ensure they don’t feel lonely.
Human weaknesses excite me. After all, isn’t our entire existence built on the foundation of hiding our deepest flaws? Wouldn’t the society crumble if we started saying what’s on our mind or acted as per our true will? We behave in a prescribed manner to smoothen the process of getting by, whether it’s a queue at the railway station or inside the office cafeteria. Our societal obligations hold pretty strongly on us and personal hygiene is a non-negotiable factor. However, it gets awkward to initiate a conversation with somebody suffering from BO — actually, others suffer — or worse. Although you are doing an enormous favour by letting a person with bad breath know that he has BB, you somehow feel guilty. Perhaps we feel this way because we are fragile beings. A hippo doesn’t go around telling other hippos that they stink. He will engage them in a fight and then try to bite off their balls so that he doesn’t have to deal with them anymore. Humans can’t do that. We have to deal with each other but at the same time, we don’t want to cross the line (malign?). But then, bad breath, like truth, can’t stay hidden forever.
As mentioned earlier on this blog, we are fast moving towards a binary world. You either detest or champion it; you either hate somebody or stan them. There is no middle ground anymore. Understanding others can be an uphill task when emotions run rife and equanimity has left the room. These behavioural trends — aided by the masked upheaval of social media — can explain why we’ve started hating everything. The generations that preceded us didn’t use the H-word as fluently as we do, for a good reason. When we don’t receive the care we need, we turn to the indifference we deserve.
If greatness is the worst thing that can happen to a great person, then Joaquin Phoenix is safe. Here is an actor who doesn’t seem to care much for fame. His filmography might be an instruction manual on how devoted an artist is supposed to be to their medium. And it’s not just losing weight to fit a role; it’s about stepping beyond the obvious and blowing life into the lifeless. For instance, when he dances down the stairs in Joker (2019) with that perfect music playing in the background, for a brief moment, he lifts you with his undefined madness. And therein lies the symptoms of his greatness.
Before you read this para, you need to know (if you don’t already) that marijuana was legal in India until 1985. It was only because of USA’s pressure — owing to Ronald Reagen’s War on Drugs — that India went ahead and banned cannabis. For civilizational record, Indians have been consuming weed even before it became cool to pass the joint. So technically speaking, the ban couldn’t translate into the intended impact. Also, it’s not really a surprise to learn that Mumbai and Delhi are two of the biggest consumers of marijuana in the world. The current generation has taken to it faster than duck takes to water. However, the problem here is the utter silence with regards to those who genuinely have addiction issues. You might be an occasional smoker but there are young folks who can’t go a day without rolling. Spending the weekend in hot box could be as much a sign of bliss as it is of grief. Drinking problem? Maybe. Smoking up problem? Nope. Unless we open up enough, we won’t address this problem head on.
Different people have different belief systems. Such differences lead to comfortable superstitions. Your greatest superstition could be the presence of god. Mine could be the absolute hope that this world needs to end asap. To each their own: Nadal has his stored in water bottles; Sachin had his superstition with leg guards; Dickens never slept without a compass. All of us prey on our fears and create a belief system out of it — best suited for our survival. Imagine living in a world where your fears have no place. When I tell others that I am scared of lizards, more than many empathize because we share a common nemesis. Imagine being afraid of dragons. Which is why superstitions are beneficial because they can bring out the sanguine in us. For instance, Akshar has a unique superstition that whenever he spots a Maruti 800, he genuinely believes that it’s going to be a great day.
Unless you live inside a bat-infested cave, you must have noticed by now that I am going through a makeover on my Instagram profile. I’ve started sharing my old tweets from my early days on Twitter as IG posts. Going by the initial feedback, people seem OK with this development. Some are surprised that I didn’t think of this move earlier. Maybe it’s their way of saying that my one-word caption strategy has been boring them for over four years. Either way, I am going to continue with a healthy mix of more old (relevant) tweets and less random (irrelevant) pictures. Who knows, I might become a full-time influenza soon?
What is the ultimate price of development? This has to be the most important question of the 21st century because almost all countries accept the D-word unequivocally. Everybody wants a piece of it. Turkey remains wet for Europe as it perceives the West as a magnet for development. China has sold its post-Mao story on the back of development and pulling its citizens out of poverty. African countries, from Angola to Rwanda, can’t wait to shed the yoke of colonial past by developing themselves from grass up. Venezuela is an economic cesspool today but development was a favourite word of Chavez as well as Maduro. Brexit wept for the development of the “neglected ones” and so did Trump for the “deplorables”. Closer home, India is rewriting history on the down payment of vikas (a more nuanced Sanskrit word for development). The answer to the question posed at the beginning of this paragraph is tricky. Development is a continuous process and cumulative data don’t give us the exact picture. Yet, granted our loss of concern for the environment, we can presume the answer to be situation somewhere in the loss of a land called mind.
