Apparently, the toughest bit about doing standup comedy is the intro. The first few seconds, if not minutes, when you have a break or make moment with the audience. To bypass this agnipariksha, most standup comedians take the easy way out by trying to lighten the room by asking a rhetorical how-are-you-doing question or say something inane about the city they are in. The collective response from the crowd can help the one with the mic relax and ease into their material. Very rarely do you come across as a comedian who would attack from the get go. Most want to be liked and remembered for their wit, not nasty humour. Which is understandable because the fastest growing culture of our times is cancel. So, you better not do something that limits your chances of an encore. Good career move. That said, if I were to perform on a stage, I won’t say hi-hello and directly kickstart with:
“Any homophobes in the house?”
[letting people giggle/gasp for exactly 6 seconds]
“Yes, it’s time to come out.”
Blasphemy is a damn interesting concept—it’s just another concept, nothing more—and what is brilliant about is it divides the room into believers and non-believers. Not exactly on religious grounds but also first principles. Particularly in a conflicted country like ours. Even those who vouch for their secularism and call themselves vangaurds of free speech are somehow rattled by the B-word. It’s an amazing plot twist. To understand this behaviour, you’ll have to step back and understand where this word comes from. As one can expect, in Western notions, it has Abrahamic leanings. Unlike what it has come to mean today, the overarching root is to speak evil of something (not specified though). Which brings us to the question, is humour really the equivalanet of evil? Does a laugh have the same intensity as a scream? The phem in blaspheme means ‘to utter’ in ancient languages. I wonder what exactly were they uttering back then. What topics are safe and what not? Letting the believers decide these answers is like letting a molester decide which topics are too touchy to discuss.
One of the many benefits of being a fiction writer is you can transfer the burden of conversation to somebody else. You want to share a decaying thought but since you can’t do it in public, you will make a character in your story say it. Like an actor who lives many lives in one, changing characters from one play to another, one movie to another, a writer too lives in the head of many through her characters. It’s a privilege of the highest order. You can make imaginary people behave in a certain manner, as you please, and you are not answerable to anybody. You are, to use one of the most expensive Bambaiya terms, a sasta god. After my early dabble in bad poetry, I quickly transitioned to writing bad short stories. Back then, my dialogues were flaccid and flow, terse. Eventually, I learned to condense with hard-hitting dialogues. Most of which I also happen to tweet with zero context. Anyway, coming back to making somebody speak for you: If he had a soulmate who hasn’t found her soulmate yet, she would have agreed with him when he said, “Orgasm is temporary; sexual shortcomings are forever.”
Lokmanya Tilak was in favour of Hindi as the national language. Later, Gandhiji held a similar stance. They saw this language as a unifier. Heck, even Rajaji introduced Hindi curriculum in Madras presidency to encourage the adoption of the language down South. When we read the long essays our freedom fighters, revolutonaries, thinkers and shapers of the past had to say about the lingual diversity in India, and the challenges it posed to our social fabric, it is evident that they all made compelling arguments. Bhagat Singh was 23 when he was hanged by the British, but before he became a timeless martyr, he wrote extensively on sociological subjects, including languages. In his writings, he advocated Sanskrit and so did Ambedkar, taking a leaf out of Israel’s ongoing experiment with reviving Hebrew. What is incredible about all these disjointed discourses is all these personalities, belonging to different ideologies, were thinking of the bigger picture. The reason we are probably the largest English-understanding, if not speaking, nation in the world today is because we took some keen decisions during the early summers of our independence.
Those who know loss understand the core tenets of existence. To live is to lose and by factory setting, we learn to cherish what we have. No, it’s not always inside our heads. Some things are tangible; some emotions are universal for a solid reason of predictability. You are bound to break your heart, face unlucky days and bounce back too. If we are to admit that we think too much and while thinking too hard, we cease to exist, then it brings to doubt one’s immunity to existential crisis. Does that mean, everybody struggles with existential crisis? Better still, if not a lot of us exist anymore, why are so many of us dealing with existential crisis in the first place? Some predictable answers are in order.
If there are 3Ls to live by, they are liberty, logic and learning. All the three factors are interdependent and feed on each other. Without liberty, there is no logic and vice vers and without them two, there is no learning in the end. If you are going to chase only logic, you are bound to fall short of liberty because humans are practical beings. Chasing butterflies and eating lotuses come with operational challenges. Similarly, if you are interested only in liberty, then logic is going to take a backseat. And the endless monkey-balancing will provide you ample amount of learnings. Congrats.
In the movie Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (2021), someone asks Tom Hanks’ character why is he a vegetarian, and the response shared is splendid: “I just can’t imagine eating anything that has a mother.” The sort of sentence that makes you shut up. Shashi Tharoor had a similar take on this subject: “I just don’t want to bite into anything which in its natural living state might have bitten me back.” There are many such sound arguments in favour of vegetarianism and I wholeheartedly respect them although I don’t see myself becoming a vegetarian anytime soon. I don’t drink or smoke and there are very few things that are synomymous with pleasure for me, so dietary restriction would be harsh. However, I totally get the sentiment of harm inflicted on birds and animals for the sake of an industry (read: profit). That said, I don’t go around conflating one issue with another either. To equate vegetarianism with actively supporting casteism is no less ill-informed than equating non-vegetarianism with conscious upholding of the mistreatment of birds/animals to be mass slaughtered. Whatever one chooses to eat, it’s entirely up to that person to pay the price for it. Literally and figuratively.
I am at that age where every couple of months, I get to know about a friend losing their parent. It’s a helpless state of affairs. You can’t do anything for them. Zilch. Only they can process their situation and go about, to return to normalcy at the earliest. When you lose a parent, you are fundamentally losing someone you’ve known closely your entire life. That void is bound to be massive. Yes, with the passage of clouds, you will learn to deal with your grief in a mature manner. Yet, you will keep returning to moments that were so much bigger than you. That’s how parenthood works, I suppose.
A weekend blogpost is incomplete without my dad making a cameo –
Pappa: “It rained so heavily last night that I couldn’t go to the park for my walk.”
Me: “So, what did you do then?”
Pappa: “I went there anyway.”
Your dad has the same witty nature as mine. God bless both of them.