Fake accents and great writers
Going by our core behaviour and the insatiable desire to belong, humans can be categorized as more tribal than primitive. In simple words, we want to be part of the club. Please let us in. We will do everything that you ask of. We will dress like this and eat like that and walk how you want us to. This switch is at the heart of humankind. You can notice it in every society, institution and organization we build together. To form what we eventually call ‘us’, we need to define, and, if need be, create ‘them’. A Manchester United fan is expected to be unhappy about Manchester City’s success. When you are Team Pepsi, you are encouraged to be critical of Team Coke. Unless you break the chain of oneness, it’s difficult to turn the switch off. After all, belonging is as essential to a human being as breathing.
It bothers me a little that Meryl Streep, despite being arguably the greatest actress of all time, doesn’t even feature in the top-100 list of the highest paid celebrities in the world. Kylie Jenner remains perched at #1 position. Of course, one’s business acumen has nothing to do with one’s innate talent. Money and art are two different corners, right? Wrong. When you are the best at what you do, it’s natural to assume that you would be representing your legion. Turns out the market doesn’t work like that. There are certain pulls and pushes to manage for a successful person to be extremely wealthy. Even if you are from the entertainment world, chances are you would be toppled on the list by a 15-year-old TikToker if you don’t know how to play your moolah cards right.
Different cities have different relationships with gods. In Mumbai, you smile at those massive Ganapati idols during Ganeshotsav as those cute eyes smile back at you. In Gurgaon, you are constantly confronted by cows crossing the road at their own pace but you don’t necessarily honk at them. In Mangalore, there is a temple on the roadside at every speed-breaker and even if you don’t plan to bow, the slowing car will make sure you do. Here, true to the spirit of a small city, almost everyone believes in gods. In fact, the non-believers are the ones who are outed in social discourse. The basic question posed is, “how can you not believe in something?” A fair question, to be sincere. Although I don’t have an answer to it, I find it amazing that a Hindu resonates with a Muslim and a Christian because they at least believe in something. Believing in gods is more important than knowing which god is being believed in. The odd man out would be the one who is failing to find his faith.
Of all the breakups I’ve read or known about, the one that felt coldest is Sita dumping Rama. After all the suffering and isolation, she was like “I am outta here!” and left the scene like a kween. An unintetion rhyme. She came from the earth (her name literally means a burrow) and went back to it in the end. However, Ramayana didn’t end with her departure. Rama later raised his twin sons and they had their own share of travails to deal with. Unlike scriptures, the beauty of mythology is there are no misinterpretations here; just a matter of what version you are interested in. In some versions, the story finds closure in Sita’s return while in others, we reach the point where Lahore gets its name from Lav (one of her two sons). Come to think of it, the word breakup takes a different form altogether when the land actually breaks up for you to return.
You must be familiar with the cliche “life is short” but I strongly believe it’s not what you think it is. One way to understand it is to accept that time is transient and moments are temporary. Nothing lasts forever and by equation 1 and 2, life doesn’t last forever either. Simply put, life is short. My theory is slightly different. What happens in life is you realize sooner or later that those who make your life worthwhile aren’t going to be around forever. One year, your adorable grandma would leave you and then another year, your favourite cousin would drop dead and then just when you think that you are done losing your fave folks, your favourite comedians (Norm Macdonald and Sean Lock) would pass away in quick succession, and then a childhood friend would do the same. And then, all of a sudden, an admirable singer would succumb to a heart attack, making you wonder “is there a right age to die?” So, what is really happening here is that others' lives are getting shorter, not yours. However, with their truncated lives, your life is becoming a bit more difficult to live.
As of now, Indian Americans are the wealthiest ethnic group in the USA. They are also the group most likely to graduate (and then complete post-graduation) amongst Americans. This development is singularly fascinating when you consider the fact that the desi lot started out small and invisible on the American shores less than 50 years ago. From bagging scholarships to destroying the competition at the dizzying National Spelling Bee to becoming synonymous with doctors/engineers (as opposed to the generational shop owners), this group has certainly come a long way. However, they can’t beat Indians back home in one regard: accent. An Indian-born fellow would go to Amreeka for his MS and pick up the strongest of East Coast/West Coast accents within a couple of years, and then return to India only to be stuck with that accent for the rest of his life. This strange appropriation can only be outmatched by Pakistanis who seek Arabic/Turkic ancestry for validation.
Last checked it was 2022 and yet, outdated words like ‘blasphemy’ remain in vogue thanks to our mainstream media. On one hand, freedom of speech is supposed to be the lifeblood of a functioning democracy and on another hand, monkey-balancing is done for electoral purposes. What should intrigue us about the recent primetime news is, just a few days ago, we were sharing funny WhatsApp forwards on Shivling. Nobody used the B-word back then. The way things are moving currently, we appear to be fast stepping into a future where the so-called secular jokes on Hindu motifs won’t be tolerated anymore. Comedy and creativity will suffer for sure. Our comedians and creators, who are anyway wary of making fun of Abrahamic motifs, will find themselves afraid of touching Indic elements, thus reducing the scope of their content. Why? Because there could be reactions as well as overreactions on the streets. And that doesn’t sound like a welcome change.
In the past, this blog has argued that only sighs matter. Anyway, in case you didn’t know, the average penis size is between 5 and 6 inches, depending on the said geography. Although not much is spoken about manhood, even in the various mediums of art—Michelangelo's David is biblically Jewish but sports an uncircumcised penis for reasons closer to Christianity, not Renaissance—you didn’t care about this trivia of distinction because our society grants private leeway to male anatomy—something it refuses to do for female anatomy, leading to massive objectification of their bodies—it’s necessary to bring things (not just the thing, that would be indecent) out in the open. We can start by accepting that size matters. Maybe the only women who don’t care about penis size are the ones who have experienced good sex with well-endowed men. If not, the other extrapolation could be, that there are women who have experienced bad sex with well-endowed men and have understood that intimacy is more about affection. Moreover, there could be women who are fond of a good size but aren’t fond of the men those good sizes are attached to. Damn. Too many possibilities. All things said and discussed, it’s difficult to believe women who claim that size doesn't matter but display massive dildos on their bookshelves.
I used to be very scared of lizards. After moving to Mangalore, I somehow learned to be alright with the visiting faculty of tinier lizards. The bigger ones still startle me from time to time. This phobia is deeply rooted in my childhood when somebody threw a lizard at me and I screamed and ended up having fever, etc. My amma has been trying to wean me out of this psychosis for over three decades now. To give you a peek into our conversation during her recent visit –
Me: “Please close the kitchen window at night. The lizards can get in.”
She: “What if the ones inside the house want to get out at night?”
Me: “*speechless*”
A mediocre writer writes for his readers. A good writer writes for himself. A great writer writes for timelessness. Whoever your beloved writers are, the reason why you write them is because what they wrote identifies with you. Their work is ignoring the loop of time. That, to me, is the greatest enigma about literature. To escape the times we live in while staying grounded in the times we belong to. When you are a reader, you can choose many such writers who speak to you. But when you are a struggling writer yourself, you wonder who you are going to pay heed to. Think about it. If you were a writer with writer's block, which writer would you like to talk to? Who can genuinely cure you? The correct answer is nobody but the convenient answer is Naipaul.
As you grow older, newspapers stop surprising you and you watch TV for entertainment, not information. You know how the strings are attached and how the puppeteers function behind the stage. There is no such thing as agenda-less journalism. Everybody out there is serving a certain sort of masters. Some propaganda are sophisticated (even in their sophistry) and some are downright crass. But at the end of the day, everything we consume flows from the river of profit. The truth is too cheap a commodity in the marketplace of attention. So, the players play around, biding their time, feeling significant about their work, while the commoners smirk from a distance. They are disparagingly called aam (ordinary) janta but they possess a khas (extraordinary) understanding of the machinery. They quietly notice everything. There is a reason why Arnab never questions the central government. There is a reason why NYT supported the Iraq invasion and misconstrued Trump’s popularity. There is a reason why Al Jazeera doesn’t do a primetime piece on the thousands of workers who died for the upcoming World Cup in Qatar. There is a reason why the fellowships in the West are awarded to a specific mindset of coloured individuals. And so on.