When do we start being us?
It goes without saying that this blog is heavily tilted towards dogs. If you are fond of canines, you are in the right spot. No pun intended. Not that I’ve got anything against cats — I grew up with cats; at one point, there were close to 10 in our little tin house — but dogs are ridiculously affectionate. Again, Ranga is not the proper unit for love here. His indifference makes him adorable (to me) and his self-reliance can become a life lesson (for us). Anyway, the point of this paragraph was to bring to your notice that the streets you abandon at night are taken care of by street dogs. They are the guardians whether you live in a big city or a brokedown village. In effect, they protect the streets when the sky is inky and do what is required to mark territories. However, when the sun comes up, they are back to protecting themselves. And guess from whom? Us, who else?
There was a gorgeous doberman in the neighbourhood. She was feisty, strong and extremely loyal to her landlady. Having spent about 13 years in the same location, she knew everyone and everything around the corner. Nothing escaped her droopy eyes and curious snout. Yet, she was a nuisance to some. Her incessant nocturnal barking bothered immediate neighbours who held grudges against the landlady. After all, society isn’t very kind to a woman who doesn’t have a man. Two souls, two different species, one house. Anyway, as fate would have it, the poor dog passed away after struggling with renal issues. No more barks at night. Within two weeks of her demise, there was a burglary in the nearby house.
The difference between truth and lie is often a litmus test of privilege. The social divide dictates who’s going to believe what. The rich have a choice here whereas the poor don’t. The way we see things, it might appear that people are fighting for “more” but when you peel the layers, you’ll notice that the war is on for something else: to determine who gets to monopolize the “truth”. You see, our wants and needs are going to change with time but truth has a very bad habit of not changing. And this is something the rich understand much better than the poor. So, they put in all their powers to patent the truth. They will harness whatever is required, be it religion or ideology or dogma, to up their game in this endless pursuit of crappiness.
If the first word that comes to your mind is “tribal” when you see a person with painted face and in indigenous garment, then you ought to brush up our past. Going by essence, we are all tribal, not because our ancestors were tribal but because tribalism is what drives us everyday. We may not dance around the fire — well, we do, but that’s alright for an argument — but our instincts are pretty tribal when it comes to connecting with each other. A tribe of cricket lovers. A tribe of Liverpool FC fans. A tribe of Apple users who think Jobs was the best thing to have happened in the 20th century. A tribe of corporate careerists. A tribe of this. A tribe of that. A tribe of everything else in between. Without a tribe, ‘we’ don’t have anything to call ‘us’. And this is thanks to our desire to be a part of something bigger than us which precedes us by millennia of tribalism.
My readers, especially on Instagram, keep asking me why did I move to Mangalore. They have been reading about my desire to move since 2018 but they never thought I’ll actually take steps in the north-south direction. Irrespective of the circumstances, the simple answer should be, “I always wanted to move to a smaller city” but that’s not the whole answer. In all fairness, we could have chosen Chikmaglur or Coonoor or Coorg or even Cochin — I don’t know why C-letter cities showed up in my head — but we went ahead with Mangalore. The truth is, my wife’s familiarity with this coastal delight of a city played a huge role. We wanted to shift but we didn’t want to be completely clueless. As of now, we’ve spent over a week here and everyday is filled with surprises. Nothing prepares you for tier-2 when you are already used to tier-1. But then, that’s the beauty of not-so-impulsive-and-yet-very-impulsive decisions. Once we get seasoned with this city, we might try our luck with one of the C-cities in the future.
There used to be a young man who was tied to his solitude tighter than that ring on Saturn. Trapped inside his tiny room, he stared out of the window at the two coconut trees creating an illusion of fighting giraffes. Sometimes, the clouds would play with him by sculpting random images: of a woman weeping, a lion roaring, a mermaid, etc. Every once in a while, some birds will grab his attention as they pass by chuckling at his self-imposed exile. To top it all, the sunset made him cry because the following darkness meant his window is as good closed as open. And there is nothing nice about being in the company of a melting candle made of semen.
Secularism in India is a lot like religion in the world: too much is talked about but too little practised. For decades, we were made to believe that we were secular when the ground realities spoke differently. Just because people appear irreligious in public doesn’t mean they are secular in private. The past few years have exposed this farce very efficiently. Turns out people are ‘secular’ as long as their interests are fulfilled. And in such a scenario, the atheists/agnostics tend to blow their secular trumpets because they don’t have skin on the line here. If anything, the recent upheavals in French secularism — an event made possible by the Third Republic in 1870, long before the rest of the political world could even spell the word — should wake us up from our slumber of pretence and actually work towards creating a world where the distinction between public and private is diminished.
I spent several years in Gurgaon but not once did I notice a woman clad in burqa there. This despite the fact that there were several “Bangladeshi” women working in our colony itself. That was then. As of now, I am quite surprised by the number of burqa-clad women in Mangalore, despite being someone who grew up in a Muslim-dominated slum in Bombay. According to my wife, who belongs to this city, it’s a recent phenomenon and has a lot to do with identity politics drawn on religious grounds. On the other end of the spectrum, there is an evident increase in Hindu assertion as well: missus doesn’t remember witnessing so many festival-related cultural programs (read: pili-vesha) during her younger days. It’s worth wondering where or when exactly does one start being somebody they want to be and stop being somebody that they don’t want to be.
Speaking of clothes deciding who the so-called other person is, I am always amazed by the suppressed stories of those who don’t care about fitting in. They are doing just fine being themselves. The diktats of the modern world where ABC is supposed to behave and talk like ABC don’t seem to interest them. In all probability, these individuals uphold the secular fabric of our country. Unlike those who talk too much about it but do too little. A very good example is a conversation between a little boy and his young mother who happens to be in a maroon burqa. Standing on the footpath of a market, refusing to walk, the boy is demanding firecrackers. She replies, “Diwali is 10 days away.” Just like any mother, of any faith in this country, would do.
Although the previous paragraph sounds like in favour of firecrackers, I am totally against it. Not saying this because I have an old dog who runs and hides under the bed every time a local kid bursts a loud one. Saying this because I can’t stand noise. Of any sort. My ears are sensitive and my mind, addled. As I am typing this, the fan is running at number 5 (it runs only at number 5) and is making an annoying hovering sound. I can’t stand it. Maybe that’s why I am seated. Similarly, the honking trucks from the nearby main road bother me and so do the religious prayers in our neighbourhood. Not to forget the screeching sound of construction going on behind our building; it sounds like millions of humans grinding their teeth with Anu Malik as their music director. Fucking hate it. But can’t do much about it. At least some state governments are doing something about firecrackers.
History is a strange animal but it grows stranger when you choose to not know it. For example, last week, during our weekend quiz, somebody asked with utmost sincerity whether there are written records to acclaim Chola dynasty’s naval prowess. The answer is a straight yes but the fact that a naive question like this emerged from an elite group of quizzers makes you doubt the strangeness of history itself. There are ceaseless debates about how too much importance is given to the Mughal era which barely lasted three generations whereas much more influential empires are overlooked. This position is problematic for two reasons: if I ask you how many Mughal emperors were there in total (the answer is 19), you wouldn’t know for sure; and at the same time, if I asked you to name three kings from the Hoysala or the Pandya dynasties, you would probably struggle. This dichotomy of (lack of) knowledge has something to do with the ‘establishism’ of historians. From their perch, they dedicate extra pages to few characters of their choice and revolve their stories around them, neglecting the sideliners. Which is why you might have assumed there were about half a dozen Mughal emperors in the first place. Or that the naval glories of south Indian empires could be more myth than facts.
Since we are loitering in the garden of facts, did you know there was only one Mughal emperor who married only once? Everybody else had more than one wife. His name was Rafi ud-Darajat and he died at the age of 19. Maybe life didn’t let him enjoy the perks of polygyny. Regardless, he was the 10th emperor to ascend the throne, briefly though, and was already on the cusp of irrelevance. As far as monogamy is concerned, the most mighty notation could have belonged to Dara Shikoh. He was the rightful heir to Shah Jahan but Aurangazeb got him beheaded and took over power with a public spectacle of apostasy. Dara passed away at the age of 44, a few months after his only wife, Nadira, died prematurely to dysentery.
