The Vetalam.

The Vetalam is also called the Baital in the north, but as I am south Indian, and eat thayir saadam and (don't) chant the Sandhyavandhanam, I quite prefer Vetalam. I was tucked in the roots of a rain tree when I knew he/she/it was there. I went cold. All things are full of Vetalam now. Drawing my breath in to warm my stale white face, I begged mercy. But would it be merciful of him to stay, or go? It was night.
'Wipe the vomit off. Wake up or throw up, you'll have to answer me.' I thanked him for invading just my ear, he would have been the last thing I saw if he had shown himself. 'Yes, what are the rules?'
'A story I'll tell, you'll end it. A story I'll tell, and you'll define it. A story I'll tell, and you'll escape me or die.' If you fail at any question, your brain will become sludge.
Picking my ugly, brain ridden face up to the coiled boughs, I answered them.
'Two prisoners, locked for the two crimes, one lesser, one greater, face the executioner. They haven't signed their artwork, a murder, preceded by a kidnapping, but the police have caught them. They need a confession without proof. They go about it with the prisoner's dilemma.'
'Tell one to testify against the other, tell the other to testify against the one.'
'Yes. But they keep their honour, but do not gain their freedom. How'. I closed my eyes, and wished everyone well, and heard the frogs and cicadas. When I opened them, the moon was blanketed in a rainbow, the tropical corona. It's fresh coldness froze the sludge for a moment. I knew.
'They both accept the lesser crime, exonerating the other. They cancel each other out, but keep their honour, and lose their freedom. The opposite of the Dilemma.'
'Good.' The world was mine!
'Next' and it was lost.
'A temple on a hill, to which devotees flocked with humility and greed, is invaded by a ghost. It kills everyone, except for babies and animals. Even the priest's incantations and the devotees' entreaties make it only stronger. What was the ghost's power?'
'I........cannot know...its a ghost! A reason for a scream?'
'A trick for an imp' I cradled myself in the raintree's boughs, sprayed with water and leaves. As good a spot to die as any other. I felt my nerves tingle with death.But the legend of the Vetalam struck me. Vikramaditya could not speak, for then the Vetalam would flee.........
'The ghost gets its flesh and life from men's voices, and what better place than a temple for that!'
'I will grant it. I wanted men's lies.' 'Oh....the story's fresh now, that makes it memorable.'
My third, because I wish to eat your mind.
'A boy was suddenly assaulted by the Vetalam who asked him two riddles, that he managed to answer. The third task was to ask a riddle the Vetalam could not answer. What did the boy ask?'
Well, I thought, the boy would just ask the Vetalam for mercy? But he already had. Then what? A riddle that a riddle itself could not answer. What could it be? I knew it, and rubbed my hair against the trunk, in exhaustion.
'Vetalam, I am lying now. True or False?'
With that, the Vetalam left me. He has rid me of all hope, and all words, like blood back into a wound. I wish him back, though he is half Muse and half Skull.

A review of Dil Se, dil se.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which
we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely
disdains to annihilate us.

Every angel is terrifying.

from the 1st Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke.

I am a reckless reader, and the sudden poignance of certain lines, I credit to an innate taste. When I read of the angel pressing Rilke to his heart, I closed my eyes, because, I already knew without knowing that every angel was terrifying. Few days ago I felt an urge to see Dil Se. It was a favourite of mine while an early teen, the sort of age when a bookish fatso decides on a pious devotion towards anything with a 'serious topic'. I felt like falling in love with Meghna again. I have fallen in love with the film, and sincerely confess my prior indifference to it.

Lets just skip the parts where we praise the cinematography, and other cinematic values. Its all there, for sure, but this is the type of film that doesn't beat you on the head with its own virtuosity. The camera doesn't give us vertigo with disorienting angles, the editing does not turn every scene into a cliffhanger, the music is not cold and orchestral. The film doesn't try to be a classic. Every value is well and good, but not cunning.

Dimwits will not even begin to like this film, and half wits just might see that Amar 'represents' India, the centre of India, and Meghna 'symbolises' Mother's sorrowful, ephemeral fringe, or even, horizon. A truly sensitive viewer, or a brilliantly ignorant one, might just see that the film is very genuine, with no character ever degenerating into a symbol, and no symbol ever bloating into a character. There are some other themes, tropes, and stuff, like the lover's search, woman as beauty and sorrow, stuff. Don't bother about it, if you can appreciate the film only that way, then do.

This movie is special because Manisha Koirala. She doesn't speak much, so I won't either, just watch her and, if you have a girl friend, don't go out with her on the same day. You will be doing an injustice to at least one of them. Koirala loudest voice is when she has a seizure.

Shah Rukh Khan finally got to elevate his entire acting range in a character fit for his virtues, virtues that Meghna expresses her envy for in the film - vitality, energy, an almost epileptic joy. In Darr, he played a psychotic lover, in Yes Boss he plays a yuppie yes man, in Raju ban gaya gentleman he plays a straightforward everyman, and in Dil Se all of this soars into one excellent performance. He is quietest when she is envying him.

Meghna is a terrorist, Amar is an AIR man. He falls for her, and trailing her madly in the northern regions misty and snowy, falls in love too. He returns dejected, dolourous and agrees to a marriage to the new face Preity Zinta, fresh from her Liril ad, cute and Mallu. Meghna and her group comes to Delhi, certain vicissitudes in their planning causes her to ask Amar for help with a job in the AIR, further complications, all very well written, bring about a denouement between Laila and Majnu, and then there is a bit of rhetoric about the army and terrorism. They blow up and die, she is a suicide bomber.The greater embrace of the Angel. Except for that bit of rhetoric, everything in this film is very fine, very fine indeed.

The songs are better than songs, surely, they are poems within the 'search for love' in the film. First is the light flirtation in Chaiyya Chaiya; exhilarated Dil Se; aroused Satrangi Re,(there is no release, of course, one doesn't make love to Angels, and in any case, it would have been censored) and then Preity's Chaiyya Chaiyya, Jiya Jale. In fact, if Jiya Jale hadn't been so Mallu-sexy, we would have actually realised in one sitting itself that Preity is heart broken at the end.

A good book to read for a feel like Dil Se is Pamuk's The New Life. Or you could go and read the first Duino Elegy. There aren't many books or filims out there with such a dream as their theme.

The first and final frontier (USP essay written by Sandeep)

THE FIRST AND FINAL FRONTIER

Did man evolve essentially as a tool maker, or as a seer tormented by visions? I paraphrase Joseph Campbell (Masks of God – Primitive Mythology) to indicate something that has always fascinated me- machines (or any automata) and their effects on our lives.

Campbell’s insight implies almost every argument and thought that is contingent on any discussion about automata and man. Should we see ourselves as building contrivances that supposedly make life easier for us, or do we see ourselves as people receiving constant hints about a different world?

Machines as such permeate our life now. They are everywhere and are accused of reducing what is left of the seer that Campbell sees us as. The irony is that machines themselves are the finest evolved product of our dreams and visions, I need only mention the curious and mystic Nikola Tesla, visionary (in all senses of the dictionary definition – both mystic and a brilliant innovator and inventor). Tesla is said to have got the structure of the Alternating Current generator in a momentary vision.

Technology is often considered a Faustian exchange that man makes with reality, ultimately leading to some sort of apocalypse. Greater dependence on automata is seen as sapping his moral fibre, or I need only reiterate, destroying any remnant of spiritual or mystic sensitivity. Most processes nowadays are automated anyways, a manufacturing company’s prime achievement is to automate all its processes. This is supposed to leave plenty of time for man to explore his complexities, but this promise is seen as illusory, with the very automated processes requiring massive intellectual effort to control and manipulate. However, can we discard the idea that this very expense of the intellect is sharpening our mind and making it more receptive to understanding more profound concepts?

Such an abstract play of ideas does manifest itself in our greatest invention so far, the internet. It is a ‘thoughtscape’, a ‘mindspace’ , the product of a machine that mirrors, or can mirror the workings of our individual and collective minds. We can no longer think of Campbell’s tools as mechanical contrivances achieving physical goals, but as powerful, almost inspired creations that lead us to greater confusions and fascinations. It is easy to characterise the internet as a collective stream of consciousness, that we nurture, and which nurtures in return. It is an almost eerie sort of symbiosis, between one’s creation and oneself.

Cyberspace is so nascent that it is quixotic to attempt an analysis in this short note. However I can allude to several auteurs who have attempted to cast an outline on its myriad subtleties – the whole subgenre of cyberpunk fiction is indicative: like William Gibson’s Neuromancer (the foundational cyberpunk text), Isaac Asimov’s monumental Robot series, and the Matrix Trilogy appear to exhaust the theoretical and imaginative possibilities of technology, but this is clearly illusory. As of now, there are researches into biomimesis (the imitation, in materials engineering and other fields, of the features of living organisms). Also, one of the declared purposes of creating an artificial intelligence, is to study our own.

In the end, I merely allude to the aeroplane as an inspiring example of how automata satisfies a long lived, almost childish dream of ours: to fly. Such inventions always give us the fleeting impression that technology, is after all, a great thing. Only time can tell and man can decide, where he will soar or plunge to.

Katrathu Thamizh

With great regret, I submit that I don't know Tamil well enough to even review this movie with enough depth. I watched an interview given by Ram and the poor man doesn't speak English well, admitting it with irony. That sort of makes us even.
Its surely the best movie I have seen in many days, and it is particularly touching that I saw it on the day after I completed reading a brief biography of Guru Dutt, who could well be a cinematic alter ego to Prabhakar. I was also reminded of Pyaasa in the film, or at least, how the film radically fled from Pyaasa's poetry and melancholia to murder and ferocity.
Not that I wish to take anything away from the director's own vision, but there was something nagging at my mind all along, do I see this film as a realistic portrait of conditions, or as a semi mythical portrayal of a rebel, a Realistic film or a Romantic film? If its the latter, I have no problem watching it and enjoying a Quixotic ride allowing myself to cry "Ate!" and letting hell off its leash. But if its the former, I am pretty scared shitless.
Even as I write this blog I wonder at all my decisions so far, and my latest (yes. I have decided to go the Katrathu Tamizh way, fucking around in humanities.) It seems somewhat absurd. Here I am, moderately talented in English, with a thousand blogs to compete with me and with a thousand more with inferior thoughts but a more engaging (meaning vulgar) style, for the attentions of passing idiots. I mean, is this what I am going to offer agencies as a persuasion to hire me? Ah well, I have a nice way out...
But back to the film, though its difficult reviewing it, I couldn't study it too much, I was too busy drinking it in. Lets see. Cinematography superb, unforgettable, it has a sort of focus that is at once phantasmagoric and real. I remember this scene in the film where there he traipses down from the top floor of his dump of an apartment, the scrawls on the wall almost throb under the sole light. The thing to wonder is that even such photography has a powerful, mesmerising effect (curious how real life can be so tantalising).
Acting is....overwhelming. Again, the realism in it is fantastic. Some of the best examples are the superb performance by his tamil master, who speaks in a rolling patois of Malayalam and Tamil, Karunaas' crisp and believable comedy when kidnapped and ordered to record Prabhakar's (Jeeva) confession, and Jeeva himself, living the role with every sort of nuance and shade. It is too flat to say that he lives the role, he does more, he forces the role onto us, he represents a community, he lends flesh to an abstraction.
Katrathu Thamizh is a harrowing, Kafkaesque film. A post graduate in Tamizh goes on a rampage after a failed (or foiled) suicide attempt. Eventually, he returns back to his naivete, but is forced to commit suicide with his wife.
I am still reeeling under the effects of the film, so I will write a more detached review few days later....

Power and its tokens

Inevitable as authoritarianism is, re-invoking tedious truisms about its nature is not. My teens were spent in discussing politics from a couch and a coffee. We are rarely at the scene of revolution, and never its centre. We know back and forth, the theory and practice of almost every political credo (or at least, Wikipedia does.) So we shouldn’t think about it. But, yet, its vicarious effects are there every day of our lives, hard enough to miss, harder still to leave unprocessed. We place our chair between pro and con, of course, but still, the temptation to rethink them is upon us. So how do we deal with politics? I am tired of arguments and debates….

Before even man could write (and, perhaps, speak intelligibly) he chose a leader and carved a totem pole. Leadership is older than even flowing thought, that is, language. Perhaps this is why none of our efforts are enough to get a grip on it. But this doesn’t mean we stay numb and dumb (though we do).

Let us cast a glance at its prime perpetrators: politicians, aka rabble rousers, demagogues, chieftains…and the many epithets (many flatteries) they bestow on the ‘rabble’ gives them their freshness. Everything is new from the mouth of the Politician. There is a certain ignominy when the demagogue prostrates himself for the crowd, now vulgarly elevated….and then…suddenly, he is back on top. For a good modern example, The Last King of Scotland would suffice.

There is more to it. The apathetic, dispersed mass is captivated, hence captive, but how does the politician reinforce his ‘authoritah’? Scintillating examples from history: Asoka, seizing the reins of Magadha, bids the treasury to stamp coins with his profile. R.C Majumdar, historian, records this many centuries later. So ‘well stamped’ is Asoka’s power, that its glow does not abate for centuries. There are bulkier symbols that Asoka scattered, like Stupas and the uniqe Asoka pillars, but money is almost like a rash, his authority isnt reinforced, it breeds. It is an idea still utilised, if one sees into one’s wallet.

There are subtler examples in modern literature. ‘Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius’ , a short story by Borges, condenses the rise to power of a group of geniuses, who envision a whole new world called Uqbar, and slowly make it intrude onto the real world. In another story by Kafka, ‘The Great Wall of China’ authority is maintained by not only the building of symbols, but where the act of building itself is a symbol (the great wall is never completed, it is just a ruse to keep the mass scattered and disunited)

Not that literature forgets the flip-side. Authority is comatose. Kafka’s ‘Neptune’ has the great sea god so inundated with affairs of state that he is unable to take a swim. Italo Calvino’s ‘A king listens’ reduces the monarch to a motionless puppet moved by nothing in particular, trusting only his hearing (or his overhearing, as the tale progresses). A more moribund token is found in Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Brodie’s Report’- where a degenerate African tribe chooses its chieftain by certain stigmata on a child’s body, and promptly cuts away his limbs and puts out his eyes, so that he may concentrate on his duties, rather than the attractions of the world. Tedious connections to reality are readily available: Hitler’s insane behaviour as the World War progresses against his favour; a paranoiac Idi Amin regressing into wanton atrocity.

The ‘mob’ now churns out a new leader, or becomes the many headed leader. He challenges the sterile authority. In some fortunate examples, this is the first ruler himself, avoiding wearisome substitutions, like Asoka and other ‘enlightened’ ones. In most others, it does involve a dark interregnum bled by Civil war and violation from external aggressors. The mob behaves paradoxically at this point. In several cases there is a paradigm shift in world view: Gandhi’s non violence, Asoka’s missionary Buddhism, etc. There is a crescendo in the atrocities and the resistance.

Finally, the coin is changed, reissued. In modern times there is generally a disembodied ideal, like a thinker or a symbol (Benjamin Franklin on the dollar, the Asoka pillar in the Indian Rupee). This is an aphorism of democracy. However, democracy is hardly freedom….the totem pole still endures, there is just a many-headed monster on the top, destabilising it. A graceful Sufi epic casts its final scene in such a light- Mantiq Al Tayr (The parliament of the birds) by Farid ud-Din Attar. The poem, mainly spiritual in content and persuasion, sings of the search for The Simurgh, god of the Birds, by the race of birds. They seek enlightenment and authority through the Simurgh. As their pilgrimage continues, several birds drop out, citing various excuses, all symbolic, and (as it is a poem) sweet. Eventually, a mere thirty birds are left.

Reaching the height of Mountain Qaf, they wait while the Simurgh’s chamberlain promises a vision of the Great Simurgh. After several minutes, when no Simurgh is forthcoming, by looking at their reflection in the lake, they realise that they are the Simurgh(Simurgh also means Thirty Birds in Persian).

It is really quite absurd to try and narrate our way through any political era, there are too many details. Might it not be better to glide through them on symbols?

The Epiphany of Panini

In a story that I have been unable to locate in the Net, Panini, the Sanksrit grammarian, starts as a worthless student. Lazy, laid back and lounging around, the frustrated criticisms of his Guru have no effect. One day he resolves to leave the Ashrama, and declares his intention to his Guru. His master is aggrieved, but Panini has decided on idiocy. He sets out, packing his nominal belongings into a saffron bundle.
As he walks further away from the home of his abortive learning, memories of the place resonate in his mind. Soon he is loathing himself, and regrets the finality of his mental sloth. He pauses at a well, to rest and refresh his dried throat and cringing mind. Suddenly, he experiences an epiphany, and if the legend is to be believed, a fateful one. The scene at the well assails him. He sees the iron axle of the well-rope scored by the hemp, he sees the damp disks that wooden buckets have left on the stone. This is all he needs to turn back. If iron and stone are scarred by hemp and wood, then why not.....
Panini is now Appolline in his devotion to texts. Without relent or ruth, he eventually hews Sankrit to order and logic in his epochal Ashtadhyayi. Let us also observe, partisans that we are.... that he graced the Achaemenid Empire, which would help 300 Spartans achieve immortality by repulsing their 'barbarian' advance into Greece. And wrote his treatise almost contemporaneously with the Gates of Fire.
I insert an anecdote that cannot belong here. I have been playing the violin with a certain manic passion for a year or so, now. My style allowing few of the fingers but the left index, I had secreted thick, dead skin at its sensitive tip. I also play, with ritual fervence, Endharo Mahanubhavulu, St. Thyagaraja's richest and most complex Pancharatna Kriti. The Kriti repeats and reinforces a signature Sree Ragam phrase (involving Kaishiki Nishadam, or minor ti in the Western Solfa). I have unravelled the steel twine of the third string thanks to my repeated rendition of the phrase. I can no longer use the violin without replacing it.
The irony is that I am an amateur and a very ordinary player even among amateurs. Which only serves, perhaps, to reinforce that metaphors and idioms are as Platonic as the ideal they set us off to try and achieve.

Prisoner's Dilemma

Take it from me, they were uncomfortable, but they felt none of it. The bright lamps, stools, lathis and the rest which I do not care to name, had been taken away; they were left the floor, which looked bare from the hole, but was grimed by many insects and rodents. Sikander leaned against the cot, unable to sleep for the seventh night. The police had arranged his acuity for the other six. Now there was not much to think about, really. He had made his choice: it kept him company in his insomnia, and he smiled at it sometimes. There was Srinivas again. He felt the hole in the door slide open, raw, resonant and felt the policemen’s eyes on him. A prisoner’s instinct told him Srinivas would enter. Some yellow light at the ceiling poured some putrid light at the floor.

There isn’t much left to say. Sikander glanced at the man. ‘Except for me, of course’. You do realize he betrayed you?

‘I realize.’ There was a small pause; the rats resumed their squabbles.

Is there a reason why you kidnapped the industrialist? Not quite. Money, yes, but no reason. Sikander looked away, and Srinivas thought he understood.

‘Now I see…. He had to die….’ Sikander said. Srinivas pelted him with a glance. You were involved in the sting. Weren’t you? A smile, almost kind, mostly sardonic, eased the captive’s degraded face. Of course. He didn’t mind telling him that now. He had been stewing in this cell for nearly a week, he could not know about the salting the minister was getting from the media.

Sikander had not confessed to anything even now. The hour of humanity after a week of torture…but no, didn’t work this time; his gymnosophist indifference to the nail clippers was a thing to scowl wide-eyed about. Srinivas learned about the Ghati thief-tribe later, artisans of a yoga immunizing you to torture. They would have to go through with the prisoner’s dilemma. He walked out silently, though the door rasped.

Sharan was, of all things, asleep. It was not courage, of course, like in Dumas’ Monte Cristo, it was exhaustion. Srinivas looked with resigned pity at the eyes being rubbed clumsily – and then at the walls. Caves had been painted in this fashion, once, for perhaps similar reasons. Before his eyes swiveled back to the unlikely artist, he etched several in his mind – a perfect likeness of Sikander, a bowing Sharan, a hangman, aesthetically crude, above.

‘His idea- draw your worries out. Think he meant it this way?’ the sonorant English was naively insulting; damn, kid didn’t belong here. Ah well. He went through the routine again. Sikander betrayed you. Testify that Sikander was murderer and kidnapper. You go free, he hangs. He had just altered the names with Sikander. The symmetry! The captive refused to believe in the betrayal. Srinivas clinched it: the safe house’s address, Sharan’s safe house, given to the police by Sikander. How could Sharan dare doubt it? To doubt Srinivas was to trust Sikander, to trust Srinivas was to doubt (and betray Sikander). You have the night to decide. He didn’t think further: and a life time to contemplate it.

I better explain the prisoner’s dilemma. Two captives, a crime, and little evidence. Tell one to testify against the other. Tell B to testify against A. A meagerly alert mind can foresee the decision of the other’s – why not testify when the other is sure to? Srinivas was wielding this at the duo, whetting it on the betrayal jibe. Sikander must believe that Sharan was the informer about the hideout, Sharan that Sikander was. The subterfuge would melt if they managed to communicate.

‘Mine is aware of good cop, bad cop. But good gangshter, bad gangshter, no. In this fuck up there is some mirror –stuff going on.’ Srinivas listened to the tapori, (the lingo of tapris, thelas, and most of Bombay, also known as Hindi’s Bane, ask any Delhiite fresh from a trip to the city) maybe this outlaw really did think in Bombay’s patois, but he doubted it. Sikander had a good ground life, he appeared in TV and such. What do you mean? ‘Tell me one thing. Hoga nahi tere se, but phir bhi. Why, in this place should I rot for a week, after junior had his little talk? Brings me here, then keeps me here, why? Why not finish the job? Make the deal first itself?’ The assured languor was not defied, Srinivas had no answer , he still banked on his fork: either him, or Sharan, whom to trust, Sikander?

But something else interested him. If you were in the sting, then it was you who got the journos to the minister, you got them to pop the kidnapping proposal, you helped in embarrassing the minister, and hopefully, his resignation. Then how did you commit the damn thing later? He had not done it, but if he had, it would have been his charge. Brave fellow, this Sikander. When younger, Srinivas had toughened himself to death- throes and- threats by looking at films and the like. One day his mentor made the car tires squeal and they had patronised a mess comprising a child, a dog and a lungied fiend with a razor. After the blood and other fluids had been spilt and wiped up, he had laughed till his forehead hurt. He laughed like that now. A horror movie parody, funny and revolting. ‘Tell me, was Kothari bhai strangled or skewered? Was there blood on the fingers or the balls?’ – ‘methods’ of infamous shooters a layman would be unable to catalogue. Srinivas was almost sure of Sikander’s innocence , but this could be ambiguous. He could have overseen the job, making him the ‘mastermind’, as the Times kept saying. You chose balls and pokers. Sikander coughed out his amusement. Oh,and if this is your argument, then there is no doubt about the kidnapping, it’s you all the way, I mean, your signatures are all there, Sikander. Srinivas was satisfied, Sikander declined to react. Srinivas got up and stumbled on his weaker foot. A long arm helped him up without unsettling the rest of the body it belonged to. The kidnapping. Who? The way Sikander looked up, he said: ‘Oh seriously, too much drama!’ He withdraw his arm, but his toothy, twinkling smile made up for that.

Sharan had swallowed up the drawings. He had been hangman, he had been Srinivas, he had been Sikander facing betrayal, laconic, unsurprised, and he did not quite know how to prevent the situation, being, in the end, only himself. Srinivas entered and found the good drawings smudged, and Sharan’s hand chalky and red. Pity, what did you do that for? At least some distraction. All right, all right, no need to get worked up now,and please, bhai, wipe that chalk off your eyes. Anyway, its time for the testimonial. What have you said? Mind telling me?

Sharan wiped his eyes and his nose. Srinivas squeezed his lips shut, that lunatic chuckle was tickling his mouth again. But Sharan looked like such a kid, with his chalky nose and white! Oh God! Why him? Why did he have to torture their minds? The others had it so easy, just whacking them till they bled and groaned! He had to think it. I know, its very formulaic, the plump conscientious manipulative middle aged policeman, I know Mohan Lal in Company, but seriously, this story really happened, you know, and humans are like films (not the other way round.), being humans and getting creeped out by that.

‘I committed the kidnapping of Mr. Kothari, and Sikander was not involved in anyway. I imitated his style and methods without his knowledge to implicate him. I have not murdered the industrialist. If by any chance, Sikander Khan is incarcerated, he should be released at once.’

Oh…………fuck it. All righty, then. This was the limit and he finally decided to let that damn chuckle out. He went up to the adolescent and wiped the nose and the hands. I’ll be back. We’ll worry about you later. Now for Sikander.
‘No! just free him! You know you have no right! What reason can you submit? I am taking the blame, and he must go free. Listen. You do realize I am not damaging myself here. All I am doing is NOT implicating him. I am not hanging. You can see that. You can see that he’ll walk away, and so he doesn’t have to implicate me. You know that the only thing keeping him is your threat that I will testify against him. Now I am not. Why should he testify against me now? What evidence do you have to keep him here? NOTHING!’

‘My dear boy, what made you think I was going to take any of your confessions seriously? So you did figure it out. You’re right. We have no evidence to keep him here, haan haan haan. We needed your testimony to implicate him in the kidnapping and the murder, and we needed his to implicate you for the crimes. So now, you are being hero no.1. you say, aha! I will just admit to the kidnapping, and make it so like only I did it. Then I’ll risk the courtroom trial for the murder as prime defendant. As, of course, we didn’t commit the murder, no witnesses would turn up. So it boils down to the confession here, not to any sweaty boring session in Court Naka.’

‘Yes. Work in Bollywood, they also love stating the obvious. Now please, Sikander’s release is promised?’

‘Nope. Forgive me for being a bastard, but I have to go and read his testimony. Yes, yes, yes, its illegal, a man falsely locked up should not even be asked a confession, yes. Now don’t just crumble like that! He might have said something that won’t make your song a lie, you know.Good chance that he is keeping his mouth as shut as he has been till now. Keep up the hope, boy, keep up the hope.’

But that didn’t happen, here is a copy of Sikander’s confession, also published in newspapers.

‘I committed the kidnapping of Mr. Kothari, as the methods clearly show. However, Sharan Kumar was not involved in any way. If he is in jail, anywhere, he should be set free unless there are other crimes (and other warrants) on him. I will stand trial for the murder if I am so charged, and I demand a public defendant as my right.’ The symmetry! The well worn symmetry! Also, a quote from the man: ‘good cop bad cop, have heard of, good gangshter bad ganghster, no. both are good only.’

So now, Srinivas tells me that Sikander faces trial, and Sharan is arranging for his defence, from hiding. He chuckles stupidly when I ask him for Sharan’s confession, and Anything could have happened back in that dirty safe house. (Of course you expected an Mp3 player in my pants pockets, but not this time.) Srinivas fondles a fragile papier mache doll in his fingers; his daugher has flounced in and places herself on him and the doll in his hands. Some of the writing is still legible, but I don’t want to spoil a little girl’s budding genius at handicrafts.

Koan

See-
more of
nothing,
than anything, though matter is
upon us!
0.all ~ 0.0......0... ~ 0
mug, or understand, but don't forget!
grey, lazy sky deludes us for the moon's sake
0 does not seduce by contrast.
blessing: may you fall soon into it.

A fragment from Bale v.3.57

A history of Bale has been sufficiently evaded until now, when I, a lone man sitting in front of the comp, should attempt a hasty generalisation. Several hasty looks at the Archive and a good deal of wandering, confused and fearful, has allowed me to write this precis, equally a part of Bale. Again, I reiterate, that Bale is everything, and hence nothing in particular. As an early Scientist said, Bale was a photon, which contains nothing but itself, but then is everything, including itself. Not a single man spends a day without it, it is the matter of several lives. How does a game started by bloggers become so pervasive?

It started predictably enough, a clever variation on the Chinese whisper and the Story game. A blogger, frustrated with fiction and non fiction, and haunted by words in his mind, proposed to write some nonsense and let others continue it. A few decades ago, a writer remarked: Google Random + blog and you will get almost as many results as the number of blogs. The blogger's proposition was nothing new, it held no promise. A few others continued it, until one man used it to sublimate his sexuality. There are blogs with nothing but the names of actors and the names of orgasm. The others were disgusted, and hence enlightened: they still believed the word and the seed to be contrary. A sudden sense of fellow feeling must have then been engendered, still unexpressed in Bale, but by it. The entry was quietly deleted, none complained but masturbator. There were several edits, and incoherencies were patched up. But then again, nothing could possibly smooth the varied rudeness of a few amateurs. Nothing could anticipate the ending, or the beginning of an idea born of chance. This was irrelevant to the Pioneers, and everything to Bale's future. The idea grew, and Grew.

A man posted a limerick, another, a love song. An Indian posted a home video of a birth, and again, the Pioneers were jangled. Bale was not to be the province of the senses, but this was unfair, the Indian countered that it was hardly a mish mash of senses. If Bale was about the inability to control thought, then so was it the inability to control life. The Indian, dimpled and humourous, contributed a review of his video. The video was preferred. Bale would boom soon, thanks to the crying baby amidst the remains of other's thoughts and the shadow of an orgasm.
The beginning has gone too long, but true to myself and true to Bale, I will not edit. I will indecently expose Bale’s influences. Borges, first and foremost, as the lightest and latest symbol of infinitude in the infinitesimal. Then it reminds me of Genji's tale. There was after all, a theory that Bale is a portmanteu of Borges and Genji's tale. There is another, that it started as Blogger's tales, then to Blale, and the world, yearning spacious sounds, turned it to Bale. Like all magnitudes, Bale would be named much later than it existed, and good, because a name is a limitation, as several Balists have declaimed. So beautiful, that none remember why it is really called Bale!

The baby's progress was posted, there were several who wished to tell his story and watch if the first Son would live up( or down) to it. The Pioneers, no longer much heard, objected mildly, they did not want a collected fiction to impinge on an individual's reality. However, there were cries of censorship suddenly, the Pioneers, bewildered and frustrated, let them do the hell they wanted with it. The fateful day, when the blog's password was released (hackers were curiously both protecting and attacking the password, hence facilitating the ceremony), would throw Bale along a thousand (and one) trajectories. A hacker 'confessed' his crime. A defender laughed his claim down. Characteristically ignoring flame wars, the Dreamers continued to nurse Bale. Other technophobes posted mini-Waldens, cyberpunks posted Cyberpunk. A pastiche of Dostoevsky followed, by Dosto (most commanding of all the early presences) and Wilde parodied the parody. The swirling double helix grew and grew and Grew, until Grobes summarised the summaries. The helix threatened to collapse at this point and no posts followed for a long time. A few rules ensued. There were to be no false summaries (the GOTO statement that Dijkstra argued against.). Grobes politely pleaded guilty, and set about implying the summary. Again the rules were thwarted without puncturing Bale's Health.

Grobes led, inevitably, to the first Math: RMnjm suggesting equations and series (but cannily, no sets). RMnjm was bested by Cantor culling out equations to the equations. There were absolutely no complaints this time, a sudden swell in postings, varied and sweaty. They had their greatest critics. The appearance of mathematical rigour to imagination and flesh! The masturbator reappeared, hale and whole, writing of his wife. Forgive this hazy symbolism.
Bale's most beautiful feature, of course, was its polyglot profanation of reality. But even a mess has to cohere, if it is to be appreciated (as in Modern Art). Unsunggenius performed the selfless task. It is remarked that he succumbed to heavy metal poisoning soon after. Bale became a public craze. Not even Unsunggenius could have imagined the reverence he would be dealt with soon after. Critics interpreted him, Newspapers reviewed him. Pioneers rejected him, Dreamers thanked him - in their minds. Some believe that UG did nothing but claim that he had carved Bale, it was enough.

But how was Bale to continue without the Maestro? The coherence, the wealth of circumstantial detail, the brave, soaring expectations of the past, who to provide, who to dream? Bale was discontinued, the several bloggers going on sprees and, scandalously, book tours. All entries were blocked, at least on the official website, and for once, the public was impolite to pastiches like Gale (all girl Bale.). Even the most amnesiac reader ignores a thrice removed creation.
Ingenue , or Sunggenius as he is sometimes satirised, solved the problem. Version 1.2 would follow; him at the helm. Ingenue , as progenitor, followed the mathematical rigour for a year's worth of posts. He would give up soon, anguished by an equally Promethean labour, of trying to weave the imagination of all and none at the same time, before and after it would be imagined and forgotten. Ingenue's brilliant failure was duly spat on and celebrated, Bale's simpler contraries a boring tremor to most by now.

Predictably enough, a few years after all and none had read and reread Bale, genius kissed it the second time: a legion Haikus followed, ostensibly written in the interim (or should I say interregnum?) Night had fallen in Bale, now there were stars. For several years haikus, and short poetry followed (poetry was hardly non existent in Bale, though none understood the nature of Bale and its particular demands on the Flight of Fancy). All could enter in it, patterns would follow, read at your will, constellations would appear, some would fade out. A few schizophrenics honoured Bale naively. They lived it, and Called it Religion. The writer of Haikus is anonymous, and his trail led to an ironic grave.

It has been years now, and my lesser talent forces this minimal summary halfway through Bale's third version, as has happened before. Nothing can rob your innocence like this Phoenix. I have not foresworn the edicts of Bale; there is a wealth of invented detail in this digest. As all imaginations soar, let none intersect: the world has once been invented, let us not invent it again, as the writers of India do, again and again. Perhaps it comes from the proximity to divinity they suffer.

A Swim.

Hold it in, hold your breath, hunch and walk,
but thoughts press on the forehead strong,
Long u walk, sleep seconds off on your arm,
scrape dreams from your eyes, rip drums in your heart.

what to lose, what to name? u can forget-
they are not even dressed as a name in your mind-
they whom you ignore, the colleagues you ignore,
the books that you throw aside, they the name of-
your fluttering nerves, your stuttering voice,
your flickering vision, your weakening poise,

give in to it, yield, sorrowing of aspect, joyful in repose!
stride in this shameless, fearless nudity,
for downcast dolour is a faceless nudity,
a soul baring forth a primal fear-
alchemised to poetry.

The Purge

I will not record what he said while crying: it was a striving intellect ceding to grief. He remarked that the pain was curiously physical: his whole forehead had pulsed with pain: his disbelieving grimaces were unable to return to repose. Later, while talking about it to a girl, his heart had beat hard, and his chest suddenly had a Gordian knot. He was surprised, he had not expected such fathomless attachment. But it was his mother who had died. He had always rebelled against attaching any significance to relations, especially to motherhood. Finally; he thought with frustrated irony; that meant something, even to his 'mind'.
As this is a study, not a story, I must mention that periods of emotional collapse and heinous indifference had alternated. This had begun as soon as a few hours after the news reached him in Madras, not many days after, when it had finally decayed into memory........
His father had always been mildly patriarchal, now he tried not to see him as a desolate stranger in a black expanse. The image flashed the moment he thought of him. His brother he was curiously indifferent to, even now he is. The family's remnant, with three males, struck him as obscene.

"The arabs have a thousand names for the camel, the Inuit a thousand names for snow, the Indians a thousand names for relatives, because there might well be as many."

His play had featured the help his father had received from his mother's sisters during his bypass, and Karthik had promptly given into their ministrations.

He had also improved drastically with the violin. Finally he didn't give a damn about where his fingers were going, so long as they were going somewhere, and this largely made sure that they went the right distance. Of course, he still wasn't Srinivas, and mostly would never be, Srinivas claimed that his grandmother corrected his errors with a cane to the knuckles, while playing.
While playing, they all trooped in, and listened. The greater the number, the greater his unease, and the fingers, chained to his mind, profaned the composition. Of course, they all loved it, and irony distracted him from grief, though the scene reminded him of an uncomfortable one with his mother. He had felt too conscious with her around. (A mother's rapt attention is not very conducive to any pursuit, really. As I write this, I know that Karthik would feel momentarily devastated.) He had given up and told her very sincerely to leave, he was completely unable to concentrate. And it was Endaro, a song he deemed himself unworthy of playing, much like Chandalas were denied entrance to temples. He felt profoundly remorseful now......
One of his aunts had assured him that while her daughter played the veena, she closed everything, including the windows, and even, insanely, the lights. A realisation shot up in his mind - he had looked forward to playing the violin in front of every one, dreamed of playing it in front of audiences; some talented amateurs in Singapore, like Srinivas, and readily assimiliated him, despite his skepticism. He knew he was evolving, he had never really doubted that there would be a day when he would play to his mother without the irony that she loved whatever he scratched on the strings. This effaced some of the guilt, though still, how long would he put simplicity off in the name of the intellect?

He told me that, probably, he could think of himself as 'just another kid' though that was clearly impossible. Of course, I countered back - you cannot deny that you often relished being immature with your parents and family - knowing that you were absolved in advance.

His intellect, sometimes pretentious, sometimes sincere, had done this, and even his absolution lay in the same labyrinth.

Borges, Brown, and ingenuity.

Fredric Brown is unknown, at least, to the vast NUS library, which contains nineteenth century editions of Walt Whitman, and other American writers. He remarked once that its easy to write without plot, conflict, and resolution, without anything specific, so long as the world is persuaded that you are a genius. Jorge Luis Borges would be an eminent example. It is almost passe to cite affinities between Borges and Brown, in their masterful ingenuity, brevity and ironic wit. Let us also observe that while Borges wandered through medieval philosophers, logic, and ancient epics, Brown's life and career restricted him to toying with the SF , fantasy and journalistic tropes of his time. His varied tastes, however, hearkened back to the best of literature, to Lewis Carroll and even Spinoza. However, his work reveals a mere familiarity, rather than an erudition.
Brevity seems to have been an obsession with both, one compressing a vast, tunnelling erudition into three page parables, the other often disguising a single idea in a single paragraph as a story. A formal affinity exists between Borges' Circular Ruins, and Brown's brilliant Solipsist. The former sketches a mystic's successful attempt to dream a human being into existence, his subsequent fear that his dreamed son would realise that he is illusion, and his relief at discovering that he is also but the dream of another. The action - or symbolic inaction takes place amidst the ruins of a murky fire god, within four pages dense with allusions and symbols. The Solipsist races through a man's eponymous belief. He imagines everything away - only to discover that God is waiting for a man such as he, so that he might lapse back into a divine oblivion. Now it is his, not His, task to create everything back again. In Brown's magnificiently ironic ending: it takes him seven days. 'Solipsist' clearly conforms to the idea < paragraph =""> story structure, and reveals an astonishing, though in retrospect, obvious symbol : God is the only solipsist, and if so, all of us are.
While Brown's output is uneven, Borges is too learned to ever create something inferior, though several of his later works are plain and too obviously inspired by his precursors, lacking the ingenuity consistent in Ficciones and The Garden of Forking Paths - collections that sprung confusions like "The Aleph", "The Circular Ruins" and the brief, but epochal Lottery in Babylon at an unsuspecting audience.
Which erects a juvenile concern still unresolved - the value of ingenuity and intelligence in literature. To discount Brown as immature and 'pop culture' is puerile, to reject Chekhov is unacceptable. Hamsun's crepuscular protagonists are not limited by Borges' meta-fictional, antiquarian logic, but neither do they achieve any significant resolution. Walt Whitman's poetry is inimical to intelligence, but nourished by a spontaneous genius.
An artists choices are myriad - but perhaps a Borges' drily assessing his works in forewords and afterwords suffers less torment than Hamsun, or, more significantly, yields less to it. And for me, a frog by compulsion (Singapore.)and a dreamer by impulse, it is better to let the water seep in, and dream of sleep, and serenity.

Reflections on reflections.

The title was made impromptu, the ideas are impromptu, &c &c.
I keep thinking about thinking, and keep remembering that I think about thinking. My memory is largely filled with metacognitive reflections. This discomforts me often. Filled with archaic misconceptions about writing -"its about life, not about words" "you must be a part of what you write, not a recording third party", "greatness is a product of the ingenious and the genuine", I give in with guilty, almost adulterous relish to wandering among literary theories of my own making, scraps of other's thoughts, and most exciting of all...stumbling through the musky fog of my instinctual, almost chemical reactions to writing....(hopelessly, inaccessibly weird.)
Much of this itinerant theorizing is an attempt to arrive at a literary calculus. I use the word calculus because to my knowledge, its the only mathematical theory that measures change by freezing it in some way. By this calculus, I propose to arrive at a viable literary work, or experience. A strong voice recurs frequently in my mind, calling me to 'reality', though a clever imp plays deaf to it, pointing out that reality is merely my perception of it....
And hence this crazy little game goes on.

Back home in India. Not quite. In Siddhachal, Thane, Mumbai, India, which is a difference. Disorientation is a function of the imagination. I close my eyes and see Singapore, I expect to smell the faintly aseptic essence of TV rooms and Lounges, and dog-shit, garbage, lead-dust, and other smells violate me. My head is swimming in excrement, at least chemically. Trees are dusty brown, not emerald green, and roads are warty, grey-green, not the frozen, placid sea of concrete. How beautiful, though....not the noisy chaos, not the desecrated earth, the dust-choked trees, but the inert-lipped persistence of the people, the tunneling eyes, the brusque strides. Is it puerile romanticisation, or a sincere expression of my emotions? I might never know, not if I take a path that determines not to care.
The world is infinite, man, infinitesimal. Hence he sees it in different ways. Food nourishes different parts of the body unequally, so do man's views nourish various facets of his thirsting character. I feel I am special because of a simple fact. One day I am in a pure citadel, a jewel on the pacific, the other, in the mountainous end of a rotting, floating city. One day I am among people of engaging innocence and unblemished optimism, the other amongst gritty township's repressed, yoked individuals. I am nourished, no, I am intoxicated.
I might know neither, if I take the path that determines not to care.
But wanting to know is to demand infallible certainty, yearning to experience is to demand omnipresence, insisting on changing is perhaps to demand omnipotence. How I wish I was the collective consciousness, the spirit of the earth, God himself. Then I can do all. The genie says, three wishes I grant you...here, these are my wishes.....that I know all, that I experience all, that I can command all...not as myself, but as all...to be a drop, and an ocean, to be a blade of grass and the vast continent. To be an atom and the universe. Not as little, alienated egos, but as....ineffable expressions of pure spirit.
However, I cannot ask for that.....the genie would not grant me these.....

Optimism and Pessimism

Optimism is repugnant from many angles, especially the psychological. Psychologists have no problems cataloging unpleasant thoughts, even if the said thoughts are pleasant to the thinker. One such was of downward social comparison, basically a euphemism for getting an egoboo out of the shit others are in. Optimists are said to engage in that. Optimists also engage in rationalisation, or challenging negative viewpoints and leaping on to positive ones. Place this cognitive pole vaulter, in say, Soviet Russia (?) or perhaps into the cast of a terminally ill cancer patient...and still he is gonna smile through it all, descending to more and more undemanding and 'simple' pleasures. There are in fact, very few things that an optimist really honestly feels optimistic about, except perhaps, his tendency towards optimism (!). He is optimistic about everything, because he knows he will be a consistent optimist. Also, his faith in humans may well make him more trusting, easier to work with, a better 'team player' (bile attack.) etc etc....so that wherever the hell he is he is gonna be pretty well off.
Now pessimists, however, are far more honest. They don't want to project themselves, because their expert conscience more than deflates the 'hollow-gram' (please be charitable to the pun). Whats more, they can't fairly engage in DSC, because how cruel does that bloody sound! to them. whats more, they can't challenge negative ideas with any real vigour, because sooner or later, you are going to be keen enough to notice the overwhelming odour of chance and absurdity in one's life. Chance, and its evil progenitor, Fate, hang like a rumbling ocean with all the unsubtle hints of an impending Tsunami. Now, of course, you are gonna be calling them whiners. But you gotta talk, to whine. And mostly, pessimists reach absurd levels of loquacity in their adolescence and lapse into a defeated, soft-breathed silence. A pessimist is not, however, pessimistic about his pessimism. Metacognitively, he is proud and dignified about his commitment to honesty. Though he does experience the occasional kick of the conscience when his actions are too dissonant with the demands he makes on himself, he develops a profound, sombre dignity, laced with sardonic humour and irony.
The only time he engages in DSC is when it becomes Downward Psychological Condescension: at least he isn't a pussy like the optimist. A flaw in his thinking is his tendency towards negative rationalisation, that is, have neurotic suspicions of things that are, actually, not bad at all.
Pessimists change the world, or pretty much die trying without really cribbing too much about it. After all, what had they to lose?
Optimists adjust to the world like chameleons, green to the leaf, grey to the swamp. They change, not societies, but things. The pessimist thanks him for the new tools, and leaps into the fray, to change greater things.
And then, society changes, nourished by the blood of several pessimists, until it has a new facade, a new hope, a new direction? And the pessimists of the first become the optimists of the new order.
The rebel of one century becomes the conformist of the next, and so this age old cycle continues.....
There can perhaps be no end to this supremely vicious cycle, unless of course, somebody gives us immortality, undying beauty, godly character, and the rest of the supreme virtues, without asking us to get it ourselves. But there again, the pessimist won't go within a thousand miles of such an offer, because underneath that facade of self-contempt/dignity, seriousness/irony and other contradictions, he thinks he is the beacon of truth, and hence, of immortality, beauty, divinity and the rest of the supreme virtues.
Let us hope that these two will one day reconcile, by some proper effort of theirs.

Introduction.

My third blog. I am against the name itself. Blog. It sounds so.....pop. And the posturing. Ohhhhh God. I have noticed that almost every blog that I have read has a very intense element of posturing in it, this one not exempted. Style is a different element, it is in essence, projection, not posturing. You aren't striking a pose with your style, you are taking a stand, assuming a stance. That is mainly because of course, one of style's demands is that you displace your ego and write in a mad rush that will be subject to hours of patient, flab-developing editing. And, Karthik, you don't scroll up and read your stuff in some silly narcissistic way. Blogging is the watering hole, the pasture of the 21st century human. I find it surprising that people blog, but a lot of things about people surprise me, so that is neither here nor there. Why does one blog? Why do I wish to blog? No idea, really. Man was given language not to generate ideas, but to disintegrate them. A paradox cannot exist without language, can it? All Cretans could lie, and a Cretan could notice it, but let him say it out, like Parmenides, and it turns into a paradox: "All Cretans lie." A blog is a way of escaping from your ideas by writing them down in a self-indulgent, self-conscious form, in an attempt to repulse and attract at the same time. One writes to indulge in oneself, and hence one is self-conscious, hence one feels the need to attract a reader, and hence one needs to repulse the reader, so as to protect the very ego we sought to indulge. (and I am looking up again. Goddammat. I wish, so badly, to crush my ego and break it into little, screaming pieces!)
Now, arrive at an even more twisted level to the paradox. First is the lowest level, the innocent display of one's meager intellect (though by no means weak intelligence.). Second, the self-conscious attempt to develop an orientation without submerging one's self, making the blog both a megaphone and a mirror. Then, the self-conscious attempt to destroy self-consciousness, and explaining the first two levels, which is to turn the blog both into the life-line and the precipice, the last call for help from a man impaled in the crags of his own mind, in his own self-criticism, self-contempt, a call that haunts more, the lower he falls. And the last level is when you click the close button and put on your jeans that are getting too tight for you, which is both the reason for the blog, and its mockery.
What a bastard I am. I am not even making an effort to write this way.
In order to underscore another irony in this situation, (and also to show off my meager poetry writing skills) I'll post a poem now.

I am exalted in my quietude,
in white vaults of beatitude.
am I right, am I wrong?
crutch to weak, staff to strong?
Prisms cleave the ray's virtue,
minds dissect to seek the true
I am their sum, of wisdom new!
Traversed life, seen all, I
like white ray passing from on high
white am I, soft, sweet: serenity.

(and how convincingly I managed to lie.)