Of the Symbolic and the Fake, Etc.

Life changes. Everyones'. The Lonely Wanderer's too!

I finished the degree and got out of the student life. And a new life started.

That is me receiving the Ph. D. from Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, the director of IIT Madras, during the 50th convocation of IIT Madras on July 19, 2013.

I joined a company in its R&D team. Becoming financially better, I started my efforts to manufacture an offspring. That was successful. A baby boy. He is now six months old and kicking. Yea, literally: if you sit near him, he will practise his front-kicks on you:) Being a father: pain and pleasure. Both at a time. Like everything else in life, but not the same. Thanks, my son -- for transforming me into a father. That changes everything. Or, many things, at least. What the heck! Why am I saying all these? If you are not yet a father, or a mother, for that matter, you will possibly not understand what I am saying. I would not understand what I was saying had I not been a father, for sure. On contrary, if you are a father or a mother, then you don't need me to tell you about it. Both ways, perhaps, this is a dead end. In case my yearning for writing takes me towards it, we will, maybe, talk about it later.

With Vijual Sandeep, on Nov 16, 2013.

We were talking about changes. Yes, sir. Changes. Working for someone is actually a pain. You spend your quality time in your office, doing your job, along with your colleagues, morning to evening. If you are lucky, you will be doing something you love. In my case, I believe I do what I love. Reading, understanding, learning, sharing, developing signal processing algorithms. I love that. I cannot say it is signal processing anymore. My beliefs during my college days have already been shattered. There is no signal processing independently in the industry. One cannot conform to that alone. One has to expand. Expand. Expand ones realm beyond ones horizon. I learn machine learning, computer vision, pattern classification and so on; a little bit of everything. Period. No more technical terms and discussions. This is my fucking personal blog. I have a separate blog to write technical things. [I always pledge that I will not use such obscene words anymore. But sometimes, I can't help it. It just comes out of my mind. Habit.]

So what we were talking is about the work life. That is no good, I claim. Because, since morning to evening, one has to do the job. Nothing else. That is what is disgusting about it. I get different kind of impulses at different times. Sometimes to do my work, some other time to read a novel, and another time to write. To write. That is to be myself. To give a release to my ever reverberating mind. Excuse me if I sound self-boasting or pompous. My mind is not great, but what I said was the truth. It is always reverberating, quite often disturbing my sleep. It is full of thoughts, sounds, visions and memories, and so on. Most of the time, it is all crap. Another most of the time, it is just pornography. How vulgar and wasteful! Rarely, it is beautiful. It is about this beautiful that I am going to talk about in a while now. 

But wait. Patience is the key to lead a normal life in this ridiculously absurd world.

Just going backward a little, again, we were talking about the work life. The lack of possibility to go with the impulse reduces my freedom and my happiness. And my [I did not want to claim this] creativity. Besides, you miss the sun and the day. You miss the life outside. I mean the nature, not boring humans. That is really a loss, I think. That is like the loss of the "real" in psychoanalytical sense. I am put in the "symbolic" inside the office and I loss the "real" of the world. Then my "imaginary" starts working. I develop fantasies in order to be happy in the "symbolic". I don't want to talk about it. I hate it. And I resist the fantasy. I try to understand the "symbolic" and the "real". I try to repress the "imaginary". Well, I don't really repress it. Thanks to my inner culture, I try to understand the "imaginary" and try to deal with it intellectually. As I wrote sometime back, a problem that is understood intellectually and came in terms with emotionally is no problem anymore.

Today, while I was coming back from the office, travelling with my friend on his bike, we were caught in the traffic jam. That's an everyday business in Chennai. We are over-crowded. My wait longed for about ten minutes. I looked above at some instant. And, I encountered the "real". As a reminder of the fake nature of the "symbolic", the "real" extended in front of my eyes, and then inside my mind. I saw the twilight of the evening slowly flourishing over the horizon. My mind felt incited by its beauty. Birds, most of which being eagles, were flying towards me from the horizon. They looked happy and delighted. They looked calm and charming. They looked free and independent. Colour is the fake nature of the world. It is through this fake characteristic, the world itself arises in front of me. The reddish-orange tinge of the twilight in the horizon, the blueness of the sky right above my head, the green shade of the top of the tree I was seeing afar and the blackness of the birds that appear as distant shadows above me. That was -- how would I fake it in words? -- beautiful.

At that moment, I became what I really was. Just a dust in this giant, vast universe. That's just how I experience the loss of identity.

My house -- read this the house that I have rented -- is clean and tidy. You can see a woman's touch in everything. That woman is me. I am man and woman. Why not? I am no fake. I am honest. I am a hermaphrodite. The ardha-nareeswara. My wife is studying in a place far away from me. My son is torturing his mother by staying with her. I live alone here, like a right-conservative (thanks to Clint Eastwood's character in Grand Torino) who fixes his own house. Self dependent. I cook my food. I enjoy cooking, though I hate what I am cooking. November is a cold month in Chennai. But this winter does not seem to be as cold as it was in 2009. Yet, it is nice to sleep in a cosy bed, under the blanket, thinking of all these things. I can sense life under my feet. My soles are cool. My toes are motionless. I feel them with my mind. The sensation moves upward. And I feel like a man and like a woman at the same time. And I don't fucking care what the sadist feminists and the masochist macho-maniacs will think about it!

--Sandeep Palakkal, Chennai, Nov 25, 2013.