The Contemplator

A picture is worth a thousand words, no doubt. But someone like Dostoevsky rises above such clichés and how -

"Only rarely did he speak. If at that time it had occurred to someone to ask, looking at him, what this fellow was interested in, and what was most often on his mind, it would really have been impossible to tell from looking at him. Yet he would sometimes stop in the house, or else in the yard or the street, fall into thought, and stand like that even for ten minutes. A physiognomist, studying him, would have said that his face showed neither thought nor reflection, but just some sort of of contemplation. The painter Kramskoy has a remarkable painting entitled The Contemplator. It depicts a forest in winter, and in the forest, standing all by himself on the road, in deepest solitude, a stray little peasant in a ragged caftan and bast shoes; he stands as if he were lost in thought, but he is not thinking, he is "contemplating" something. If you nudged him, he would give a start and look at you as if he had just woken up, but without understanding anything. It's true that he would come to himself at once, and yet, if he were asked what he had been thinking about while standing there, he would most likely not remember, but would most likely keep hidden away in himself the impression he had been under while contemplating. These impressions are dear to him, and he is most likely storing them up imperceptibly and even without realizing it -- why and what for, of course, he does not know either; perhaps suddenly, having stored up his impressions over many years, he will drop everything and wander off to Jerusalem to save his soul, or perhaps he will suddenly burn down his native village, or perhaps he will do both. There are plenty of contemplators among the people. Most likely Smerdyakov, too, was such a contemplator, and most likely he, too, was greedily storing up his impressions, almost without knowing why himself."

Anza-Borrego

A reflecting rock (Meant both figuratively and literally)



Took it on a trail today in Anza Borrego Desert. Went there to see the wildflowers. Managed to click some snaps even though they are past their peak now -



Also spotted a red diamond Rattle snake on the return journey

Wednesdays

A month ago - I was in Paris, wandering through the mazes of Louvre on Wednesday.

3 Wednesdays ago - In Goa. Buying lots of stuff for 'paach-paratavana'* in Mapusa market.

2 Wednesdays ago - In Delhi. Eating Papad Paratha in parathewali gali.

After coming back, getting used to routine and as another anonymous Wednesday - that day where the week is half full is about to go by; all those Wednesdays appear more distant than they actually are :(. The rate at which one gets back to routine and feels nothing about it is alarmingly amazing :).

[*Since there are no non-veg food items allowed in a Konkani wedding, there is a special meal arranged after 4-5 days which is mostly non-vegetarian. As the wedding was set in a small village, almost everyone staying there was invited. So we'd to buy stuff like half a sack of mussels, 4 huge Surmais (king mackerels) that cost around 5000 in total, 30 kg Chicken, X kg of various sabzis, 20 odd coconuts amongst other things. The food, cooked at home with neighbor's help was amazing.]

Metaphorical shadows

It is interesting how a certain metaphor can transcend cultural and physical boundaries. Granted that all the broad human emotions are the same world over and as a result, the recurrence of particular theme should not be surprising. [The lines written by William Blake - Every Night and every Morn, Some to Misery are Born; Every Morn and every Night, Some are Born to sweet delight and 'मुखी कुणाच्या पडते लोणी, कुणा मुखी अंगार' by Gadima talk of one concept in slightly different ways.] But when the same metaphor is used across different languages, the similarity is quite striking. (Does this also pose a question mark on the opening statement of Anna Karenina viz. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.?)

The recurring metaphor is for loneliness, no one but your shadow to accompany you.

1. Saaya hi apne saath tha, saaya hi apne saath hai - Jaane kahan gaye woh din
2. My shadow's the only one that walks beside me - Greenday
3. Gum ke maare pukare kise hum, hum se bichhada hamara hi saaya - Dil Apna aur preet parai

Of course, there could be many more such examples. No 'shadow' of a doubt there.

History repeating itself

Bindra wins gold. We are, of course, very proud of him.
At the same time, India is about to lose to Sri Lanka. The cricinfo live commentary is filled with user inputs demanding the sacking of 3/4th team.

...

Tomorrow, most of the editors will put these two things in perspective. In their editorials lamenting about the state of other sports in India. They will be happy with their clever observation, paradox etc. Readers will click their tongues, say Tchk Tchk or something to that effect. And agree in general about the whole thing over a cup of tea.

...

Olympic gets over on Aug 24th. After the brief euphoria, declaration of land/cash prizes and motor-parade home; most will switch to Champions Trophy starting in September.

...

Now replace Bindra by Seshan and Cricket by Corruption in above example. Continue the exercise. Draw conclusions. Comment and Lament. Feel as smug and as witty as the editors. Now you are free to forget and move on :).

...

An attraction named Mumbai

I waited for the question and it came, sprayed with the requisite dash of wonderment. From India? Bombay, I said, and sat back smugly in my mind waiting for the Pavlovian effect that I knew this association with Shangri-La would awaken in the veins of young male Pakistanis who have never visited this burdened, heroic city except via their dreams and the 70 mm screen.

If I had said Mars or New York or London I would have lost my audience right away. But I had said Bombay. Bling Bling. Within minutes of being asked whether or not I had met various filmstars and being told that he was the proud owner of a bottle of Shah Rukh perfume, Fawad stuttered out a proposition. It wasn't a marriage proposal, but it was as suicidal. Would I join him, his cousins and friends in the stands to see for myself, first-hand, how much Pakistanis love Indians?

-- Nina Martyris from 'Cricketing Ties'

What a day!

What a day for watching sports! India managing to end Australia's 16-0 streak once more. At the same time on the opposite coast, Federer winning a marathon 4.5 hour match against Tipsarevic despite not being at his best. Watching both the matches at the same time - one on laptop, another on TV was...great.

I just hope Chargers do an India and end the 17-0 streak of Patriots. That'd make a perfect weekend :)

Reading and references

Finished reading Lolita and picked up ‘The Kite Runner’ (Intend to finish it before movie releases). Lolita, though exceptionally well-written; was at times difficult to read since Nabokov liberally uses French sentences and expressions and not commonly used words in English. Top it with the references made to Russian dancers and French authors; and you are left with the choice of either searching online dictionaries and wikipedia or plowing through undaunted with the strange unsettling feeling that something important has been left out. I won’t go as far as in saying that it is annoying [akin to one you feel when you know that someone is trying to hide something from you or just considers you not smart enough to understand it]; but it does leave me with an after-taste of mild dissatisfaction.

Reading ‘The Kite Runner’ after Lolita could not have been pleasanter. Most of the Farsi words are explained, but there are still quite a few (like pari, mard) which the author does not bother to explain. Apart from the words, being an Indian I think I understand the way the Afghans lived twenty five years ago; their customs like respecting the elders and festivals like kite-flying; the social hierarchy, the way people think and talk – better than say, an average western reader.

The pictures that are formed subconsciously in my mind as I read it are far clearer than reading Lolita. (As a crude example; I can envisage a Mumbai train station far more clearly than say, a London tube station – assuming that both the descriptions are equally well-written.) Of course, not a small part of this is due to the fact that the book is written in flowing, captivating style; but the familiarity of the background and characters plays more important role.

By extension, I can say same thing about reading in Marathi as opposed to English. The references, the descriptions – at least most of the times, form so clear-cut images that there is little gap between reading and comprehending. (I fail to think of a better example, but it is like regular intake of medicine vs. injecting it through IV.)

This fact also seems to affect my speed of reading and ability to concentrate/ read through the pages without any distraction for these two languages. It is a well known fact that when we read, our eyes don’t try to take in each and every alphabet. Moreover, a group of three-four words is read at a time in a kind of hopping fashion. It is my conjecture, that one reason I can read faster in Marathi is the ability of my mind – of course due to longer exposure to the language – is better developed to fill in the gaps between the alphabets (or syllables in case of Indian languages), guesstimate the word or group of words, take in their meaning and form pictures before the mind’s eye after comparing with the feelings, places, things, references stored somewhere on the brain’s hard-drive.

Now that I have written it down; it appears to me that it is too obvious to state it :). However, it prompted me to think in another direction – when can one say that he/she has command over a particular language? The usual criterion is the ability to read/write/speak that language well. But, there might be more to it. Even if you are confidently able to read/write/speak a language other than your mother-tongue; it still takes some more time to develop an ability to start thinking in that language. So far, I believed that would be the last step in mastering a language. It is in fact true for all practical purposes.

Still, there is that tiny part – the unfamiliarity of the culture that language is part of. (Example of English is not much useful in this case, since it has ceased to be language spoken only by the natives of England long back) which does not allow you to get complete ‘feel’ of the language. It is not a major hindrance but it will prevent you from understanding at least some things completely since you will miss out on the references which are quintessentially part of that culture and hence, of that language. This is the most challenging part when you attempt a translation – especially between two culturally unrelated languages.

This, of course is just an observation [and it sounds sillier and more obvious to me each time I write it :(] and this limitation should not prevent us taking up a book in a different language. However, we should brace ourselves to accept the fact that there might be at least a very tiny fraction of it which would remain unclear to us.

Lolita

currently reading Lolita. Controversial topic, but brilliant word-play and story-telling by Nabokov. One such striking sentence -

There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of
attainment to spoil it by the awareness of an appended taboo; indeed, it may well be
that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of
pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised--the great rosegray never-to-be-had.

To the City of Bombay

"The Cities are full of pride,
Challenging each to each—
This from her mountain-side,
That from her burthened beach.
They count their ships full tale—
Their corn and oil and wine,
Derrick and loom and bale,
And rampart’s gun-flecked line;
City by City they hail:
“Hast aught to match with mine?”

And the men that breed from them
They traffic up and down,
But cling to their cities’ hem
As a child to their mother’s gown.

When they talk with the stranger bands,
Dazed and newly alone;
When they walk in the stranger lands,
By roaring streets unknown;
Blessing her where she stands
For strength above their own.

(On high to hold her fame
That stands all fame beyond,
By oath to back the same,
Most faithful-foolish-fond;
Making her mere-breathed name
Their bond upon their bond.)

So thank I God my birth
Fell not in isles aside—
Waste headlands of the earth,
Or warring tribes untried—
But that she lent me worth
And gave me right to pride.

Surely in toil or fray
Under an alien sky,
Comfort it is to say:
“Of no mean city am I!”

(Neither by service nor fee
Come I to mine estate—
Mother of Cities to me,
For I was born in her gate,
Between the palms and the sea,
Where the world-end steamers wait.)

Now for this debt I owe,
And for her far-borne cheer
Must I make haste and go
With tribute to her pier.

And she shall touch and remit
After the use of kings
(Orderly, ancient, fit)
My deep-sea plunderings,
And purchase in all lands.
And this we do for a sign
Her power is over mine,
And mine I hold at her hands!"

-- Rudyard Kipling, 1894

Now, would he be deemed as an outsider today?

The Religiousness of Science

The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear in earlier stages of development—e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no Church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as Atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

...

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it...A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.

...

But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.

Chapter: The Religiousness of Science
Title: The World As I See It
Author: Albert Einstein
Complete text here.

Writers and the first hand experience

"As to life in a prison, of course there may be two opinions," said the prince. "I once heard the story of a man who lived twelve years in a prison --I heard it from the man himself. He was one of the persons under treatment with my professor; he had fits, and attacks of melancholy, then he would weep, and once he tried to commit suicide. His life in prison was sad enough; his only acquaintances were spiders and a tree that grew outside his grating - but I think I had better tell you of another man I met last year. There was a very strange feature in this case, strange because of its extremely rare occurrence. This man had once been brought to the scaffold in company with several others, and had had the sentence of death by shooting passed upon him for some political crime. Twenty minutes later he had been reprieved and some other punishment substituted; but the interval between the two sentences, twenty minutes, or at least a quarter of an hour, had been passed in the certainty that within a few minutes he must die. I was very anxious to hear him speak of his impressions during that dreadful time, and I several times inquired of him as to what he thought and felt. He remembered everything with the most accurate and extraordinary distinctness, and declared that he would never forget a single iota of the experience." About twenty paces from the scaffold, where he had stood to hear the sentence, were three posts, fixed in the ground, to which to fasten the criminals (of whom there were several). The first three criminals were taken to the posts, dressed in long white tunics, with white caps drawn over their faces, so that they could not see the rifles pointed at them. Then a group of soldiers took their stand opposite to each post. My friend was the eighth on the list, and therefore he would have been among the third lot to go up. A priest went about among them with a cross: and there was about five minutes of time left for him to live."

He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he seemed to believing, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time into portions--one for saying farewell to his companions, two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking over his own life and career and all about himself; and another minute for a last look around. He remembered having divided his time like this quite well. While saying good-bye to his friends he recollected asking one of them some very usual everyday question, and being much interested in the answer. Then having bade farewell, he embarked upon those two minutes which he had allotted to looking into himself; he knew beforehand what he was going to think about. He wished to put it to himself as quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living, thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and where? He thought he would decide this question once for all in these last three minutes. A little way off there stood a church, and its gilded spire glittered in the sun. He remembered staring stubbornly at this spire, and at the rays of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from these rays of light; he got the idea that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would become one of them, amalgamated somehow with them." The repugnance to what must ensue almost immediately, and the uncertainty, were dreadful, he said; but worst of all was the idea, 'What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again? What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!' He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it."

The prince paused and all waited, expecting him to go on again and finish the story.
"Is that all?" asked Aglaya.
"All? Yes," said the prince, emerging from a momentary reverie.
"And why did you tell us this?"
"Oh, I happened to recall it, that's all! It fitted into the conversation--"
"You probably wish to deduce, prince," said Alexandra, "that moments of time cannot be reckoned by money value, and that sometimes five minutes are worth priceless treasures. All this is very praiseworthy; but may I ask about this friend of yours, who told you the terrible experience of his life? He was reprieved, you say; in other words, they did restore to him that 'eternity of days.' What did he do with these riches of time? Did he keep careful account of his minutes?"
"Oh no, he didn't! I asked him myself. He said that he had not lived a bit as he had intended, and had wasted many, and many a minute."
"Very well, then there's an experiment, and the thing is proved; one cannot live and count each moment; say what you like, but one cannot."
"That is true," said the prince, "I have thought so myself. And yet, why shouldn't one do it?"

-- Taken from 'The Idiot' by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, who is considered as one of the greatest writers of 19th century, himself was such a man, having experienced the mock execution arranged by Nicholas I to punish 'Petrashevsky Circle'.

I guess this could very well be considered as the turning point of Dostoevsky’s literary career. After this harrowing experience, he wrote master-pieces like ‘Crime and punishment’, ‘The idiot’ and ‘The brothers Karamazov’; no doubt thoroughly moved by it.

It is a matter of debate whether to write extra-ordinarily, your life should be eventful or whether it is the genius of his mind that can recreate any emotion without experiencing it (somewhat similar to the debate whether the circumstances shape a person or his intrinsic/innate qualities) ; but I am pretty sure the second category is the rarest of the rare. It is, in fact, very difficult to catch the emotions experienced by you effectively in the first place and very few can achieve that.

In that sense, we see why the English literature is so rich as compared to almost any other language, barring perhaps French and Russian. English speaking people went to all the corners of the world, and expressed it through their writings. Indian writers, on the contrary, are woefully short of such ‘happening’ lives. Do we have a Hemingway or Sartre who fought actually in the war, a Dostoevsky whose writings have such a conceivable shadow of death, or even someone less illustrious like Jared Diamond who roamed around the world researching the evolutionary biology?

Of course, I don’t think there is anything to feel ashamed about it. As a society starting to wake up late from its slumber and daunting problems like poverty and foreign rule, we are at disadvantage in this regard. However, things are changing for sure. As Indians – or for that matter, people from the third world countries are getting used to the globalization, living a more complex life – it is getting reflected in their works. Recent example would be Kiran Desai’s ‘Inheritance of loss’ or Orhan Pamuk – whose works portraying the identity crisis felt by the Turkish people in the struggle between western and age old principles, getting recognition at the highest level.

A look at the Nobel Prize winners for literature shows almost total domination of English and few other European languages. But, considering the recent trends, we can safely say that the new century, belongs to the third world that was unable to find its voice hitherto.

Saddam, Nithari and UP

Here is a video of Samajwadi party workers attacking their own country-men to protest Saddam's execution. I wonder, why they are not protesting against the Nithari incident or for that matter callous remarks such as these.

But Also

From this article in wikipedia -

Salam died at 70 in Oxford in 1996, after a long illness. He was buried (without any official protocol) in Rabwah, Pakistan.

Professor Salam was a devout muslim who belonged to the Ahmadiyya Community and therefore Abdus Salam is not sufficiently recognized by the Pakistani government for being country's first and only Nobel Laureate. In 1998, the government issued a stamp with his picture but only as part of the series of stamps "Scientists of Pakistan" and not specially dedicated to him

and more from a column by Ardeshir Cowasjee in Dawn (which prompted me to write this post) -

This community was finally (the exercise began in 1953) shorn of its majority rights and declared a non-Muslim minority after it had existed as part of the majority since the birth of the country in 1947.
...
Sadly, and most undeservedly, in the early 1990s he suffered a rare nervous disease which affected his speech and his bodily movements, leaving his mind perfectly clear. He died in1996, his body was brought back to Pakistan, and he was buried in Rabhwa, later renamed Chenab Nagar by that great ‘liberal’ Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif. Renowned internationally as the only ‘Muslim Nobel Laureate,’ this fact is denied in Pakistan, where his gravestone has been amended to comically read ‘The First blankety-blank Nobel Laureate,’ the word Muslim having been brutally erased.

Tragic, to say the least.

It may not be entirely evident, but I find this case of banishing the Ahmadiyya community from Islam to be strangely similar to the demand by hard-liner Hindu organizations to consider Jains, Sikhs and even Buddhists to be a part of Hindu religion against their wishes. [See this link for an example. Little more googling would yield many such links.]

I read somewhere, that the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are characterized by 'BUT' whereas Hinduism by 'ALSO' -- meaning they differ in the way people not belonging to that particular religion are viewed (exclusion as opposed to assimilation or it might refer to the fact Hinduism admits that there are other ways ALSO to reach the almighty; whereas Abrahmic religions insist that there is none BUT theirs). Is it not evident in the seemingly opposite ways taken by the extremists of each religion to achieve the same purpose - viz. to force their opinions/ideas of what the religious minority should consider itself to be?

Orhan Pamuk

That said, the drama we see unfolding is not, I think, a grotesque and inscrutable drama peculiar to Turkey; rather, it is an expression of a new global phenomenon that we are only just coming to acknowledge and that we must now begin, however slowly, to address. In recent years, we have witnessed the astounding economic rise of India and China, and in both these countries we have also seen the rapid expansion of the middle class, though I do not think we shall truly understand the people who have been part of this transformation until we have seen their private lives reflected in novels. Whatever you call these new élites—the non-Western bourgeoisie or the enriched bureaucracy—they, like the Westernizing élites in my own country, feel compelled to follow two separate and seemingly incompatible lines of action in order to legitimatize their newly acquired wealth and power. First, they must justify the rapid rise in their fortunes by assuming the idiom and the attitudes of the West; having created a demand for such knowledge, they then take it upon themselves to tutor their countrymen. When the people berate them for ignoring tradition, they respond by brandishing a virulent and intolerant nationalism. The disputes that a Flaubert-like outside observer might call bizarreries may simply be the clashes between these political and economic programs and the cultural aspirations they engender. On the one hand, there is the rush to join the global economy; on the other, the angry nationalism that sees true democracy and freedom of thought as Western inventions.

- Orhan Pamuk, Winner of 2006 Nobel Prize in literature. Taken from the article in The New Yorker, which you can read in full here

Also, from the same source - The Pamuk Apartments

Update: Have attempted to translate this entire article in Marathi. You can read it here.

Youth is wasted on the young?

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it. - Maugham

Update:

Complete text here, taken from 'Of Human bondage'

"He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who lookback upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life. The strange thing is that each one who has gone through that bitter
disillusionment adds to it in his turn, unconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than himself."

not beating around the Bush

President Bush making fun of himself. The google video is here.

Bombay Dreams

Bombay dreams - Cover story by Time magazine. Good article, except the goof-up where it says the former name of the Bombay was Mumbai. :)

Update :
The multi-media show by Time

'bear'ly a cat

I am sure satodias from the Dalal street would love this cat.

About quarter life crisis

Just wrote my first post on vichaar-manthan about Quarter life crisis. You can read it here.