A narrow passage to India
By cosmic design, we have a certain amount of guilt embedded in us. There is no escape from it except acceptance. If you fucked up, you should not only own it but also try your best to correct the course. Feeling guilty for the sake of being guilty is a bit like dancing in quicksand. Not going anywhere worth going. So, a better alternative would be to remove your face from your palms and do the best you can. Of course, this idea applies only to reversible situations. It doesn’t work for a son who feels guilty because his mother died giving birth to him. That is a different arena altogether.
During my secondary school days, I was blessed to have found a brilliant English teacher. We called her Suhasini teacher and took collective delight while singing the national song in assembly. If you know the lyrics of Vande Materam, you would know why. Anyway, the reason why she is featured in this blog today is she was the person who quietly taught me that respect is a matter of action, not words. One stare and students used to straighten up in microseconds. She didn’t need to pull anyone by their collars or ears or slap us left and right. She was the first one to complete her syllabus, the first one to do timely revisions, the first one to bring back corrected test/exam papers and so on. Remarkable was an adjective coined for her work ethic. I wish more schools had at least one such teacher.
Do you feel trapped sometimes? Yes, sucks. Nobody can keep themselves buoyant with enthusiasm through and through. We all happen to hit the shit creek sooner or later. And that’s when we ask ourselves tough questions. “Does any of this matter?” “Why am I getting cobbled chasing something I’ll never achieve?” “Is there an easier option out?” “Is everybody else as messed up as I am?” “What will happen if I try to break out and start all over again?” And similar unanswerable stuff. If you ask me, just because you feel trapped doesn’t mean you are in one. More often than not, we overestimate our problems. Instead of dealing with our issues one by one, we tend to look at them collectively. As a result, we feel overwhelmed and hopeless. A smarter way to deal with such personal crises is by being pragmatic and setting timelines to solve one problem at a time.
My amma might not be the sharpest tool in the box but she is very eloquent in Tulu and Kannada. She is a prime example of how lingual bias works in our country. We judge people who don’t think in Hindi/English by their proficiency in these dominant languages. Time and again I’ve noticed how the so-called vernacular folks can be damn thoughtful and witty. It’s the battlefield of translation where communication becomes the greatest casualty. Tragic piece of colonial baggage. When you peel away all the societal prejudices, then a joke in Odia sounds as ‘cool’ as the one going viral in English. Given how rich the lingual fabric of this country is, it’s worth wondering—to begin with—how much we lose as ‘people’ when we don’t locate confidence in our native mediums of thoughts. Only a matter of time before a monolingual society takes over as a new norm. Besides, how many years did it take for Kinshasa to become the world’s largest French-speaking city? Speaking of which, amma recently retorted my I-am-an-old-man-now shtick with “yes, you are very old, son; not a tree that was born with you is alive anymore.” This translated quote can’t possibly match its Tulu allure.
Last week, Jai Bhim (2021) did something that hadn’t happened in over a decade. It displaced The Shawshank Redemption (1994) from its perch on IMDb. Amazing feat for this Tamil film based on a true story that resonates with India’s casteist realities. If you haven’t watched it yet, do yourself a favour. By the end of it, you’d be convinced that in our 70+ years of independence, justice became a mirage for a majority of citizens only because law and order was never a priority. On paper, everybody was equal but in practice, the executive (read: police) and the judiciary (read: judge) ensured that the society remained as unequal as possible. In a country like ours, where cases remain pending for decades and courthouses have limited working hours, one can only feel pity for those who are waiting at the doorstep. The worst is reserved for those who are stuck behind bars. Which brings up a terrible doubt: Who is waiting more? Those who are inside the prison (the prisoners) or those who are outside the prison (prisoners’ family)?
Noise is noise. It has no ideology and it has no religion. Give it any sort of cosmetic dressing, it stays just so. Why? Because noise only leads to more noise. For a nation deeply rooted in spirituality, India is quite a chaotic mess. It only exposes our utter lack of peace of mind. I hope we reach a stage in our civilization that we turn into those who can’t stand excessive noise, whether it’s emanating from a car horn or a firecracker or loudspeakers blaring out bhajan, azaan or carols. Zero tolerance for noise pollution, thank you very much. Imagine the calm that would feel like.
What separates us? If your first guess is distance, then you are miles away from the right answer. Without further Hitchcockian suspense, it’s silence. When you meet someone new, you connect through sound in the form of words. And after a steady flow of words, you finally reach a stage where words don’t have to be exchanged much anymore. Fewer words say a lot. And if you are very lucky, then silence would be enough. Just enough for two people to stay in proximity and not feel left out by a conversation. That, my dear readers, is what separates us. Ironic as it is, the complete silence between us completes us.
As a kid, I wanted to be several things but most importantly, I just wanted to grow up. I couldn’t wait to be an adult. For some reason, I thought it would deliver me to a better place. Plot twist: Adulthood sucks hippo’s sweaty balls. Childhood was simpler, sweeter and filled with endless possibilities. The sheer lightness of carelessness that can’t be matched by any other feeling in the world. Today, I have to wait for Sunday to wake up and not feel overwhelmed by the amount of pending work. But then, it’s cruel to compare childhood to maturity. Back then, I wanted to be Mowgli one year and a bus conductor the following year and this went on and on. But above anything else, I just wanted to grow up tall enough to be able to fold amma’s sarees without letting them touch the floor.
India is a satire in motion and yet, it fails to produce comedians who are particularly funny. Especially from the English-speaking parts of the metros. Most of them end up becoming clichés thriving on borrowed templates from the West and pretend to understand a vast country they don’t even have the patience to talk to. But whatever be their curse of mediocrity, each one of them has every right to express themselves freely on the stage. And that is non-negotiable. Freedom of expression begins at home. Whether they make a bewildering religious analogy standing in a country that is so thickly sexist that it hasn’t produced a female POTUS in almost 250 years of democracy or throw half-baked desi insinuations to a crowd that is statistically racist. Despite these cold ironies, all that matters is a comedian gets to say it out loud. It doesn’t matter who agrees or disagrees with what is being said. All that counts is the sacrosanct nature of their art form.
Do people around think you are not ambitious enough? If so, don’t worry. Being ambitious is alright as long as you know what you want from life. In case you really don’t have a clue why you are alive, don’t be harsh to yourself. Go easy. You have time. You will figure it out. Everybody does. Your ambitions don’t dictate who you are. You dictate what they are for you. Remember the difference and thanks for attending my sed talk.
I usually try to add an anecdote featuring my conversation with pappa but I haven’t spoken to him in a while. So. Anyhow, back in 2015, before leaving home for Gurgaon, he handed me a 100 rupee note. I didn’t ask him why or what. I simply kept it in my wallet and he kissed the top of my head. He didn’t know that Gurgaon is 1400 kilometers away from Mumbai. All he knew was that Dilli is far away, a city he has never been to. And that his dear son would be needing 100 rupees someday during an emergency. And it hasn’t been used yet.