Dinosaurs

 

To my eldest son, I bought a book about dinosaurs when he was five. I thought he would love to look at the pictures. But the book had more details about the dinos. The time they lived, stages of their evolution, a detailed taxonomy of the dino species and different theories about their extinction. Now that there's this little one of mine, five years younger to my eldest son, he too enjoys dinos. He's just 3 years and plays with different dino toys. He seems to know the names of different types of the dinos. He tells me this is allosaurus, this is stegosaurus, this one is brachiosaurus, and the other is argentinosaurus and so on... "tomotosaurus", "potatosaurus"... my ancient mind gets blown up. When he's in doubt, he asks me the name of a dino, by showing the toy or a pic. I tell him to go and ask his elder brother. Over time, he has come to think that my elder one is more knowledgeable than me. To little one, my elder son has become the all knowledgeable "father", and, I, an ancient dumb. Time flies!

Bangalore
28-Aug-2021

God of Small Things: An Impression

God of Small Things is a deeply immersive read from Arundhati Roy. The story of Rahel & Estha, two children, and their divorced mother Ammu and their other (Marthoma Syrian Christian) relatives and Velutha, a skilled worker from an untouchable caste, and other characters from Kerala's Kottayam (Aymenem). The novel is built on an excellent, complex structure, woven in its own language, unashamedly inventing new words, often to express the inexpressible (like Joyce). You read through the story as if you swim through an enormous river with powerful streams. Well! The author takes you through the river, each stream at a time, thus exposing you to a complex narrative. There is a dark, deep whirlpool somewhere in the middle of the water. The author builds the story around that part, that singularity: a death and a murder. Only to expose it towards the end of the story. To build anticipation. Though not for long. It gets predictive very early although the anticipation still builds to get to know the other details.

Often, events that are coming at the later part of the novel are introduced early. Through hints. Through symbols. Through sentences that appear suddenly out of context. The hints, symbols and the out-of-context sentences are repeated. Revisited. Beautifully! Building more and more meaning until the context gets finally clear as the story deepens.

Like Flaubert, the writing belongs to the realism genre. That means too much of details, sometimes irrelevant and banal at times. But it suits the book to expose the the complex socio-political structure lying underneath. Those Casteist, Marxist, Aristocratic, Imperialistic elements. The technique is brilliant, though not one of my personal favourites.

But I have a major problem with this book. Namely, the lofty moral position that the narrator takes up. The looking down at everything and everybody. Even mundane natural things. Even the way a character eating chips or dressing up. Even the way a character stands or walks; opens her mouth! A major part of literary realism is expended to explain how filthy everything is, how evil people are, how morally corrupted society is and how dark life is. The darker part of human nature being singled out and exaggerated. This makes the book too grim.

In the whole story, you find only Rahel & Estha as people of pure souls. And then Velutha, another pure soul. Only because he was betrayed and murdered? Ammu is portrayed in slight darkness. All other characters are evil, greedy, cunning or snobbish. Which is strange. Grim.

And at the end, unlike Flaubert, no redemption offered. As grim as it is! But, to repeat, a excellent, deeply immersive read!

Unsane

Unsane is a 2018 purely Kafkaesque movie by Steven Soderbergh, which questions our sense of reality. How long can we hold on to our own reality? How long can we believe in it? What if others don't believe in the reality we try to relate to them? The thin line between sanity and insanity is not purely dictated by us. It's by and large defined by others. The moment others do not relate to my reality, I am doomed to fall into insanity; at least will be considered insane. The coming back, especially if you are helpless and weak, is pure luck. And, the experience haunts you forever.

Wild Tales

Wild Tales is a 2014 Spanish movie. It's a sequence of six short stories, all of which portraying the plight of humans who are cornered in life due to different reasons in different circumstances. The violent way humans responds to their conditions, to the injustice done to them and to the loneliness they endured in their suffering. 

While all the six stories are great, the one that I loved most is the sixth one in which the bride Romina violently rebelled against her finding that he groom Ariel had cheated on her and had invited the same woman to their wedding. This is one of the strangest rebellion I've been aware of. She can't accept the reality and starts yelling at Airel about how she's going to torture him throughout the life she is going to have with him. The violence, however, dissipates itself and leads to a reconciliation that re-ignite the love between the couples. They start their life immediately in the hall, in front of the startled audience, who hastens to leave before the couple starts make love.

Love is choosing. Choice is violence. To love someone is to choose him or her in lieu of everything else. Love is a kind of violence, a rebellious violence.

The Year With Books

In this blog, the only page I keep updating is this one, the page where I list down the books I read. The year of 2018 has been good for my reading, finishing twenty books, all of which read in Kindle. Last year took me from Crime & Punishment to Less through a lot of books on history, some on spirituality and a few fiction. Kindle may have made my reading more 'efficient' but it is the constant urge for narratives that drove me all along. In these busy years in my life, reading keeps me alive and helps me connect to the inner core of my soul. I hope, I will read more books in 2019.

Some Things ...

Life so far was series of struggles, done with much hesitations.

I'm not so confident, not humble either.

Passion pursues many things. Sometimes, it was fiction.... sometimes, psychoanalysis.... sometimes, simply dreaming... movies... mathematics... machine learning... algorithms... pornography... politics... culture... history... yoga... and so on.

Latest is vedanta.... The very weird logic that everything emanates from same thing that nobody ever claimed understood: Brahman. Stuff like ayam atma brahma, aham brahma asmi, sarvam khalu idam brahma, and so on. The thought that life requires some kind of control... some internal mindfulness... and so on....

To be honest, everything is stupid from a universal perspective. Yet, not everything is universal; no need to be so. Some things are mine and mine alone. No other sentient being [Haha, from Buddhist literature] can feel them, but me. That's the subjective aspect of life I'm talking about.

Meditation is an experience, an experience of depth, of silence, of calmness, of a feeling that the world is not what I see, of illusion beyond five senses and intellect. 

Yoga Asanas are another experience. The easiness or energy experienced around the spine after a good session of Asanas is something so nice.

May there be light!

If not, I'm not responsible. It may be some technical fault. Call some guy. Maybe, God.

27-Oct-2016

Bangalore

My Son's First "Show and Tell"

It was on 26-Oct-2016.

Teacher said we (actually my wife) chose very tough lines for him, yet he managed to a good extent!

Below were the lines, adding here just for the record.

Good morning!

My name is Vijual Sandeep.

I am going to talk about elephant.

Elephant is a very big animal.

It lives in the forest.

It is also seen in the zoo.

It has fan-like ears, small eyes, long trunk, four large legs and short tail.

The male elephant has two tusks.

Elephants eat plants and banana.

It is a good friend of man.

Thank you!

The Book of Disquiet ("I am Someone Else's Dream")

We, humans, are people who by and large live and behave conforming to our social identities. A waiter who looks and behaves truly as a waiter; a priest, truly as a priest; a manager, truly as a manager; and so on. You can often see a Brahmin, whose appearances, behaviour, habits and the symbols he is wearing gives an unmistakable look of a Brahmin. So does a Muslim, and so does many others. Barring the social identities, which we conform to, what are we? Merely humans? I don't know if I can say that. But I always feel I have to assume an identity externally to fit into situations, social expectations and my profession, although internally I feel differently. Yet, how others look at me, the identity they assume in me, which may be expressed in their occasional, unsolicited feedbacks, suggestions or remarks, is still something entirely different. This difference between what I internally feel what I am, what I have to assume and show externally, and what others assume about me, this suffocating rift between different identities of mine, is, what I think, Fernando Pessoa's writings try to express. Maybe, Pessoa is much more complex than this; maybe he is much more different. But I am talking about what I could capture from his writings.

What I feel internally is not very coherent. It always drifts freely. I feel differently at different times. I have altogether different and often conflicting thoughts at different times. For that matter, none of my identities are the same. None of them are coherent. I have no integral identity. This lack of integrity is confusing and the root of a lot of existential anxieties. Normally, people may not take it seriously. Many may not even be aware of this. Some might be aware feebly, but would not have thought about it. What if I take it very seriously? What if I try to analyze myself and my identities so seriously? Then I will become Pessoa! Can I say that?

Pessoa identified his different kinds of thoughts and he realized they were even different types of thought processes. He was crazy, he gave different identities to them, inventing different names and biographies for each of them. He allowed each of them to write poetry, creating varieties of poems. Each expressed different philosophies, different themes. He called his different identities 'hetronyms'. 

'The Book of Disquiet' was written by Bernando Soares, one of Pessoa's many hetronyms, and this book is perhaps the only prose Pessoa has written. Written as a series of daily journals, the book expresses the core of Pessoa's inability to conform to an identity, or his lack of identities. If no identity is assumed, I feel myself only as a consciousness through which thoughts, dreams, imaginations are flowing incessantly, incoherently, discontinuously. What can I make of them? What do I perceive as the center of my thoughts? The thoughts and dreams are not part of any identity. So, I may feel they lie outside me. Everything I see, sense, perceive is me. I am in the clouds, in the horizon, in the wind. My life just pass through and my experience of it is quite detached from me. This detachedness can be sensed in every line in the book. Moreover, when I write it assuming an identity – Bernando Soares – what do Soares feel? He does not have a body for himself nor any sensory organs. What he sees, hears, experiences, are all through Pessoa's body. This makes Soares feel more detached from the experience than he should be. And that makes the writing more abstract and beautiful. For example, Soares feel he is imprisoned inside an infinitely large prison, which, because is infinite and hence is as large as the world, cannot be escaped. His inexpressible desire, which is repeated throughout the book, is not to have been existed. He does not desire to exist nor cease to exist, for both for him are meaningless. He desire not to have existed, to have been saved from the emptiness that he is experiencing. He is very keen in observing everything, living and non-living, around him. Perhaps, he is helpless in that he can't help observing all that happens, even the minute and insignificant experiences and sensations. A sight of the sunset, clouds, rain or the blue sky creates uncontrollable flow of thoughts in him. Thus he feels connected to the world around him. He is so alone yet connected to everything around. That makes his loneliness more suffering. “Whether I like it or not, in the confused depths of my fatal sensibility, I am all these things,” he writes somewhere. He also writes, “I look for myself, but finds no one.” And he is disturbingly aware that he doesn't really exist but his whole experience comes through some one else's body. Thus he writes, “I do not know if I exist, it seems possible to me that I might be someone else's dream.”

All the dreams, imaginations, thoughts, all uncontrollable, makes Soare's mind always noisy. This disquiet is what the name of the book implies. The Book of Disquiet. I am only half-way through the book. It is abstract, disturbing yet addictive.

Sandeep

Bangalore

17-Sep-2015

On Music

When I have nothing to hold on to,
I hold on to music,
Which helps me to be unaware of
The abyss of existential absurdities.

Lost Speech of the Nature

I love closeness of the nature. I always thought the nature taught me something. I always thought the nature spoke to me. I always thought I could hear the nature's speech.

When the cool breeze caressed my face, I listened to it, to understand what it was saying to me. When I saw a lone white cloud in a large empty blue sky, I thought the cloud was smiling at me, rejoicing in its own solitude.

I realize. A new knowledge comes to me. I decipher, from the silence of nature itself.

It was an illusion. Nature is just dumb. It teaches me nothing. It does not have its own speech.

It is I who learns from the nature. It is I who speaks to me as if nature speaks. It was my speech that I was hearing all the time. Nature thus lost its speech in front of me.

I am relieved. No more outside speech I have to listen to. It is my speech; it is my own responsibility.

It is my own radical responsibility.

Sandeep, 
Chennai, 
2-July-2015.