Halfway through the track

I often think about many of my friends for whom life has been mostly a positive affirmation – fame, position, stature, natural ease, ambition, everything juxtaposing (as if by a stroke of luck) in just the right proportion. I see them making their way through life without the least bit of visible effort, basking – though a bit narcissistically – in their self-glory. I look at my own life in comparison – grumpily stuttering my way through all the wrong roads, often not knowing where to go, often wandering off in totally undesirable and solitary bylanes.

During many of these unproductive wanderings, I often remember those apocalyptical words of Thomas Mann, which, over the years, has continued to live with me and haunt me: ‘… for knowledge Phaedrus, has neither dignity nor rigour: it is all insight and understanding and tolerance, uncontrolled and formless; it sympathizes with the abyss, it is the abyss.’

As one of my friends has often put forward this question (rather rhetorically, and not without intending to produce a dramatic affect): ‘If we are like this, there has to be a purpose; why are we the way we are?’ I must admit that I don’t have a straight answer to this one. One of the negative effects, I guess, of too much introspection (and aimless wandering) is to see the elusive promise of redemption fall apart. As Camus puts it so matter-of-factly in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, the promise of a mythical paradisiacal homeland is not something many of us can fall back on.

Yet, for most of my friends who move through their lives effortlessly, shinning through their successes and always keen on ensuring all the right moves and gestures, there seems to be no such need for a redemptive promise or a mythical homeland. They belong to this world, to this time. This is their homeland. Their self-glory is sufficient a reason for them to exist and to exist happily. And no matter how much I sneer at the shallow foundations and self deceiving nature of their pride and self-glory, the fact remains that they savour and live their lives in a manner that I’d never be able to; though this doesn’t mean that people like us are essentially depressive by nature. It only highlights the fact that for most of them, life is to be lived: straight, healthy, and without the unessential complications; while for others like me, it continues to be a haunting, dazzling puzzle to be unravelled – one day at a time.

- Written on 11 May, 2010

Another Moment in Time

The grey-haired man lingers on - with his guitar, his cigarettes, and his girlfriend. He doesn’t even bother to take position. Men and women let time pass in café chairs with their beer - or cerveza, as they like to call it here. The Carlos Franco murals look on indifferently from the walls. The slowness of the place, the sunshine, the absolute lack of hurry kind of gets into everyone.

After a while, the girlfriend takes the centrestage - kissing first the guitar and then the man. The old man sitting right across the table lights a cigar with a sigh, and continues to scribble in his notebook – God knows what. A sparrow comes from nowhere and sits on my glass of Mahou, the local beer which fortunately, doesn’t taste too bad. I look at the sparrow and feel - quite naively - that it’s an important moment. I try to think of something. Nothing comes to mind though.

After I take a few more sips, the guitar comes to life; the girlfriend turns out to be a dancer, giving one impromptu performance after another as the man strings on. The middle-aged man on my left, with a professional looking camera, now suddenly finds something to do. He starts to click on, making a futile attempt to capture the spontaneity of the girl as she turns round and round and round in a musical ecstasy.

My glass gets empty. I look around to ask for one more. An old lady with a drawing board comes to me and asks if I’d like to have my cartoon drawn. I smile apologetically at her, feeling, somewhat ironically, a bit cartoonish myself. I thought telling the man with the camera it’s no use mate. Instead, I look for the sparrow, now most certainly gone somewhere else.

                                                                     - Documented in Plaza Mayor, Madrid (6 February, 2010)

Oh Calcutta!

Gunter Grass, the German postwar writer, in the course of his three seperate visits, had spent a significant amount of time in Calcutta, a city with which - in his own words – he has a 'love-hate relationship’. During the few hot summer months (in mid-eighties) when he stayed in Baruipur, a distant suburb of the city, he and his wife Ute Grass used to commute every day to city by the crowded local train as ordinary citizens, something which more priviledged 'post liberalization' mortals of the city (like my erstwhile Calcutta colleagues) can’t even dream of. In fact, I used to be an object of much curiosity in office since for four years I (an overpaid Management consultant) travelled in local trains (an experience which I much enjoyed and had resulted for me in a few genuinely enduring friendship with co-commuters). While Calcutta (and the local media) rejoiced when Grass got the Nobel Prize, Grass’ own experience of the city and the attitude of her people was not so admirable. Here are just a few of his observations (though these may appear as ‘another westerner’s view of Calcutta’, I personally found much truth in it).

Grass on Calcutta and her people (several comments):

I was shocked and stupefied by the indifference of the privileged to the misery and poverty all around. I asked myself: it is their own country, their city and their people; yet how can they be so composed and leave almost everything to a few foreign charitable organizations…?

I visited the grand and palatial Victoria Memorial symbolic of British domination, and there I hoped too find a museum where India, Bengal and Calcutta would be portrayed as they exist after independence. Yet what did I discover? – A Victorian junk-room filled with colonial paintings, presents from Lady Curzon to Queen Victoria, war sketches depicting British victories… and many people, students, teachers, villagers, looking at this false, irrelevant foreign collection in that lumber-room.

It was an absurd experience for me to see how Gandhi’s birthday was celebrated, and that too by leading politicians who seemed to be determined to take India into the twenty-first century with principles (or lack of it) which stay in absolute opposition to what Gandhi willed.

Only a miniscule will live in ultramodern luxury, a new techno-feudal class, small, indifferent, and exploitative to its core.       (How true!!)

How can you call a city the cultural centre of India (a term most Calcuttan loves to use)… when more than half of the city’s population is illiterate? Isn’t it shockingly ridiculous? I also wonder how after the disastrous flood which almost swept away Midnapore, you could begin your celebration with such fanfare: Durga puja, Kali puja, and so on… Music and light while nearby villages lay submerged in water? This swift and collective amnesia I find incomprehensible…

For those already preparing a defence in their mind, Grass (who had actively helped rebuilding his own country, literally from ashes) was not alone in his criticism. Almost a century back, in 1895, Rabindranath Tagore, whom all Bengalis (including I) hold dear, had this to say about the people of the city (the occasion was a memorial meeting for Vidyasagar who himself had endlessly scorned the ‘theoretical snobs’ of the city):

…day after day we begin but never finish; we make a show but do nothing concrete; we do not believe what we set out to do; what we believe we do not carry out; we can spin out words without end, but cannot make the smallest sacrifice; we feel pleased with ourselves by exhibiting our pride; but never think it necessary to be worthy; we depend on other for everything and yet rend the skies finding fault with them. We take pride in imitating others, we feel honoured to receive their favour, yet we try to throw dust in their eyes and call it politics; and the main object of our lives is to make clever speeches that fill us with intense self admiration. Vidyasagar had infinite contempt for this weak, mean, heartless, lazy, arrogant, argumentative race of men.

While it pains me tremendously (and hits my pride equally), the fact remains that in the last thirty years or so, we, as a city, has not been able to produce anything significant - in any discipline (with the possible exception of Sourav Ganguly in cricket). We still love to pat ourselves by talking (not without pride) about the sixties when Louis Bank used to play in the Trincas. Unfortunately, that’s where our pride – and knowledge of history - ends.

I sincerely apologise if I have not mentioned Sector V*...

                                                                               * Sector V in Salt Lake is where most of the IT companies of the city are located

Art as self destruction

Thomas Mann, in his novella ‘Death in Venice’, famously wrote: ‘Evil is a necessity. It is the food of genius’. Though the concept of ‘evil’ has changed a bit since Thomas’ time (both the writer and the saint), the idea remains as powerful. In Visconti’s film version, the protagonist, a musician of strict morality who believed in leading ‘a balanced life’ and art as ‘an abstraction’ (based on the composer Gustav Mahler) is mocked by his friend (alter ego) as having achieved the ‘perfect balance’ in his life. ‘Now the art and the artist has become one’, his friend jeers at him, ‘both hitting rock-bottom.’

Always drawn towards the conflict of the rational Apollonian mind vs. the self destructive Dionysian creativity (thanks to Nietzsche who I guess first pointed out the classical conflict), Mann’s lines set me thinking once again. I could immediately recall some famous examples of art (and artists) shining through the depths of darkness:

• Dostoevsky’s guilt stricken womanising (he toured Europe with a girl half his age while his first wife was dying of tuberculosis), compulsive gambling (which ruined him again and again), and amidst all these (topped by his ever increasing epileptic seizures), managing to create some of the greatest masterpieces ever written


• Mozart’s pompous, boastful and showy shallowness, his perverted jokes, lies, obsessive flirting, secretive gambling - and The Figaro, The Magic Flute, the Don Giovanni...


• Einstein’s womanizing, his cruelty to his own children and complete apathy towards his wives and many mistresses


• Goethe, ‘that venerable saint from Germany’ writing lustful poems (Marienbad Elegy – thanks to Google) about his sexual desire for an 18-year-old boy. This I guess was when he was in his sixties or seventies


• Da Vinci’s relationship with younger boys whom he took as pupils and then went on to exploit


• Oscar Wilde's love affair with blackmailers and male prostitutes, young choir-boys, crossdressers, and homosexual brothels of nineteenth century London contrasts beautifully to his immortal creations. In a recent visit to his grave in Paris, I found these words written: ‘Here lies the best man that ever lived’ – I couldn't have agreed more


• Picasso’s passion for women was probably outmatched only by his passion for art


• Our own Satyajit Ray no less; though unnecessarily portrayed as the ‘picture-perfect family man’ by the obsessive Bengali media - Ray's work, like all the above examples, I guess, could stand on it's own

The more I think about it, the more the distinctions get blurred into a complex psycho-causality which is way beyond the capability of my mediocre mind to decipher. Hesse had made an attempt in his novel ‘Narcissus and Goldmund’. Mann himself wrote the story after being drawn to young teenage Polish boy in a Venice hotel.

Picture: A Roman sculpture of Venus at the British Museum

October 28, 2009

Donatello and his time

This weekend, while watching a brilliantly crafted 4-hour documentary on the Medici family and their influence on the Renaissance, I felt as if a dream is unfolding before my eyes; a brick-by-brick recreation of some of the greatest artistic achievements of the human mind. Listing names would be futile; like trying to put a galaxy of stars inside a fruit basket. In that dazzling confluence of some of the most revered names in human history, I came across the name of Donatello.

Donatello (1386 – 1866) was one of the greatest sculptors of all time and one of the earliest pioneers of the great new artistic movement then sweeping through Florence, which later became the ‘Renaissance’. Rejected by many, in his life he was as much a non-conformist as one could get. He himself not only rejected most of the conventional art existent during his time (at the expense of facing public ridicule), but also developed a great notoriety for sometimes smashing his creations to pieces rather than handing them over to ‘unworthy patrons’ who would not understand.

His artistic conviction, however, was not limited to venting of angst. He also created some of the most path-breaking sculptures (like the bronze David, the first known free-standing nude since ancient period) of his time, breaking all existing conventions and fuelling great public debates, often facing mass hatred. He however, stood his ground. Alongwith Brunelleschi, he was instrumental in forever changing the face of Florentine and European art and architecture.

In our present age, where the concept of ‘selling’ and ‘getting acceptance’ lies at the source of every activity (including art), life and times of people like Donatello needs revisiting. It is artistic conviction like his (and not mere striving for popular acceptance) which lies at the source of all great creations and creative milieus of our history.

A Prayer for Swapneel and his brothers

Swapneel, my son, is six-and-half month old. He sleeps with his hands stretched on both sides like wings, his face assuming an almost comical seriousness. He often smiles in his sleep; amused and self-contained in his world, a world where I’m sure (atleast hope) things are quite different from that of ours.

Yesterday, lying by his side, I was reading ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. The contradiction was kind of strange and disturbing; looking at my child as he slept, innocent like a flower, and at the same time reading about the insane horrors of our own heritage, of our own past.

And then, I came across these bizarre lines:

“Comrade, I did not want to kill you… you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand grenades, of your bayonets, of your riffle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony – Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these riffles and this uniform you could be my brother…”

I don’t know which way lies our future... how many more to come.

Lying there, book in my hand and my child by my side, I prayed… I prayed for Swapneel and all his brothers,wherever they are.

- Siddhartha (May 6, 2009)

Once again

What is monsoon

if not memories


of narrow streets

watched through the window


the grey sky

the freedom

to go out

and wash away


- Siddhartha (April 14, 2009)

As I move on

December 24, 2008 (a few days before I moved to Mumbai, leaving so much behind...)

As the strange beckoning of the unknown makes my soul restless once again, as wanderlust pulls me out of my moss-grown comfort and sends me packing, as my last days of stay within the comfort of 'a sleepy hometown' draws to an end, I look back once again through the multitudinous memories of the past few years. How had it been to remain firmly rooted for so long (rare indeed, considering the times in which we live)?

During the last five years, on an average, I'd spent about fifteen odd days every month travelling. The arrangement, on a whole served me well. While enjoying the stability of staying at home, the constant traveling kept my restless wanderlust at check, ensuring my 'rolling stone' status, with my mental window always open to the outside world. My travels had taken me through the laid-back beach town of Alibagh (the unforgettable monsoon) to the fast and happening KL, the lush green tea gardens of Assam and Dooars to the desert countries of the Middle-East, the small industrial towns like Rourkela to the nostalgic and surprisingly cosmopolitan Dhaka.

Now, as my five years of ‘staying at home’ is coming to a close, I have a feeling that the warmth and camaraderie of my colleagues and the wonderful memories associated with these travels (as my picture albums will vouch) will remain as my most significant professional 'takeaways'. As I retrospect through these bylanes of memories, my mind is getting filled with the endless tapestry of faces, landscapes, and anecdotes associated with these travels, reminding me once again of the inexhaustible possibilities and richness of the human life.

However, the pictures in my albums will only tell half the story. The pictures will ramble (like tell-tale) about everything that can be captured with a camera. Yet, there’ll still remain many an image which the camera could not capture, images which even reminiscences will not be able to recreate. These are pictures which make travel worthwhile. It's in search for these pictures that I'm packing my bags once again. Being brought up on tales of travel and adventure, I'm always weary of gathering moss. And as I'm once again leaving behind all comfort and getting ready to roll-on, I remember those inspiring (and challenging?) words of Dylan – 'How does it feel...?'

I wish I could tell.