Fatigue and freedom...

It doesn't (mustn't) feel nice to get stuck, in space or (more so) in time. A stagnant response in either of the two domains, I believe, produces a sense of discomfort. A careful observation would reveal though, the irony in the action that one must take to come out of that stagnation. Here, there is of course a question, whose demand for a reasonably justified answer can not be ignored. The question is undoubtedly about the choice. That I may lead myself in to a pretty malodorous mess is equally probable to my being lifted in a far more comfortable and exciting phase. Of course there are predictive models available at various levels to which one may use to make the next move. But then again these models are models and existence is, in itself, stochastic. A desperation often triggers the movement out of a stagnation and hence a calculative approach in this regard is less plausible (my writing this post and the development of it up to this mark may make most of the readers think that way). In pioneering and striking works like Eight and a Half or Synecdoche, New York we get to see the manifestation of the troubles of one otherwise brilliant mind trapped in intellectual fatigue. Now here I may trade dangerously and consider all minds to be as wonderful and beautiful as can be. In terms of moral status they say it is okay, and intellectually this is not as bad as almost every nation uses such an assumption every 4 or 5 years. Hence an inductive analysis would show that this collective thought process is also equally prone to a fatigue, both intellectually and morally. Moral standards have changed over generations giving rise to revolutionary movements in art, culture and social structure and mostly it came out of a desperation. It would be erroneous to assume that there were no concrete or constructive thought processes to all those movements. Where in art and culture the arguments for the righteousness and aptness are almost aways multifaceted and never-ending, in socio-political cases one finds a way to quantify the outcome of any such rebellious movement. To me it is in general difficult and ambiguous to judge the pros and cons from any such analysis. The questions one may ask would involve the cumulative intellectual ability of a mass, moral norms and of course realistic inter(intra)-socio-symbiotic relationships. These questions are serious as George Carlin points out very beautifully. That I was trading dangerously with my assumption few lines before is just what we always do. I tend to forget that I am a rhino giving opinions and surprisingly I even complain. I think I am tired and I wish freedom, but am I desperate enough? I mustn't let this act of complaining blur the distinction between appearing tired and really getting tired. Hence at every stage of the movement to reach for freedom from stagnation, there must be a loop, of feeding back to my senses, exactly what I was tired of. Else the opening of Modern Times would repeat endlessly.

A nation of rhinos...

Rhinos are the future, even if the Indian species of them, as the sources would say, are listed as a vulnerable species. A statistical joke, I presume. That reminds me of another joke which I have known since when I cannot even remember. It's about a rhino laughing a week after it was tickled. Well, we all know how thick can the skin of a rhino be. This post is not about jokes like the one I mentioned, but the answer to the question as why India must not worry about that "vulnerable" attribute of this species. 

In the last 20 years we witnessed so many campaigns which made all the Indians aware of  what all can be done to the human skin to make it fairer, smoother and  younger. But the one which we really have managed to get was not on their list. All that while, when they kept shouting and telling us to be more beautiful and younger we were taking after the rhinos! Our skins kept getting thicker. And soon we will evolve collectively into a nation of rhinos. Now, do we need a Darwin to see this? I presume not. We have learnt from our own jokes already, and hence these days we laugh at almost everything. What the word crash is to rhinos is the word pride to lions. But why must we worry about crashing in the future ? We know what Neo said, don't we ? - "Everything that has a beginning has an end." Our skins are thick. Death, massacre, immorality, corruption, they can't get under our skin,  can they? And we still laugh even when there is no joke. 

For once let me contradict myself in some sense as Nietzsche would say in his Twilight of the Idols, (How to Philosophize with a Hammer) - “One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions.” The rhino-skins are thick, and they are soft. In fact they are pretty sensitive to insect bites and sunburns. Even in this contradiction, you see, my evolutionary prophecy is still consistent. The most insignificant of things can insult the great Indian religious, and cultural heritage (how confusing and diverse they may be). And we do the same as the rhinos do to caress their wounds, we play in the mud. And do you know what the rhinos do to leave messages for others? They leave huge piles of dung. And the experts say you can tell a lot about a rhino from that pile. Following generations would be grateful for the pile of shit we are leaving for them. You see I am right when I say rhinos are the future.

About a movie I liked...

I watched the latest Woody Allen film, Midnight in Paris,  and I liked it. That could have been all, save (as always) I had something more to say. As any of Allen's films, this one is cutely humorous, shining with the maker's label of easy and practised wit. Some one who has seen Allen's other films would readily be enjoying a familiar ride through the trademarks in the dialogues, frames, and to a large extent, acting styles. As for the story, Owen Wilson playing the protagonist, it takes us through the mind of a writer who is fascinated with the second decade of the twentieth century. To him the twenties were the best time to have walked the face of the earth, more precisely, Paris. Through a fantastic turn of tale, our hero, gets to travel back in time to that age (being in Paris though) and meet names, whom he has idolized for long. In  many dramatic interactions with the heavyweights of twenties' art and literature, he comes to realise the indiscretion of his obsession of indulging in what one may call an alleviating nostalgia. His interaction and a consequent emotional attachment to one Adriana (primarily Pablo Picasso's flame in the film), who he finds has the same obsession as his, was his mirror of discernment. As a matter of irony it was himself, he finds, trying to dissuade that lady from giving in to "her" obsession. The tributaries of the main plot, which I would deliberately leave for the readers to go and see, work in a wonderful unison with the main plot to give the film a content and enjoyable drift. There were many things which I liked a lot, for example the casting. Having to deal with several stalwarts of that time, Allen and his casting team have done a near perfect job to create the host of individuals, marked distinctly in their appearances and idiosyncrasies. Allen is too good an artist to have let those performances overdo and hence they never seem to be a caricature of any sort. Instead they appear very amusing and light. Their lightness, and the humour in their being in the story is tackled in a way which, to a very large extent, one may find in a work of Jerome K. Jerome. In a sequence in the film we see our hero gets lost, while walking back alone from a wine party. He reaches a point somewhere in an alley in Paris and the clock strikes the zero hour. Right at that moment he sees an old Peugeot pulling up just in front of him. He submissively gets in the car and the journey in time begins. This happens over and over again, only all of those times Gil, (our hero, the writer), now waits for the car precisely at that place at that hour. This, I guess is the fulcrum of the plot. To me it is the best thematic motif as well. One can readily see the indication to as how one loses track in thinking in a particular way which is self-indulging and non-conclusive. Gil likes walking that path, he waits for the moment when he can plunge into his  musing of living the glorious past. The zero hour and that particular crossroad pinpoint the idea so beautifully. There is another sequence almost at the end of the film when one of the heavyweights (literally valid as well, your seeing the film will confirm it) of the golden age actually helps Gil to grow and finish the novel he was working upon. This is another wonderful piece in the film. As one, who deliberates into a thought of glorious past and those wonderful names of that time, often wishes to have had an encouraging pat on the back or an appreciative help. It is a mode of discussion that many of us use. "If that fellow had been around, she/he must have dealt with it like this.....but well those times are gone",  or something similar one would come up with. It's a homage to time, if I may say. That, those men and women were great, came only through time. That a creation or an art form becomes ageless is an attribute of the tests that time takes on it. Often when I get to see the legendary films of yesteryears a pre-conceived respect precedes  my critical approach towards the film. Time in itself is the all powerful master of our senses. And one fights hard to see through, see ahead of it with hope, anticipation and logic. A sublime combination of all these gives one the vision, which makes the greats great. Let me wind this one up with the beginning of the film. The film opens with an array of  picture-postcard like frames. You see Paris, through masterly trained eyes of a city dweller. Allen is a city man and we have seen all of that in his previous works. With frames from all around Paris he introduces, in a very photographic manner, the city's allure. It's a plain and simple, yet very effective ploy to make you walk the streets, admire the celebrated and know the unknown of a city. Paris has been mesmerising since time one cannot even imagine and it still continues to be, irrespective of the time Gil wishes to be a part of.  Should I not say here that I have played Gil many a times in my life. Sometimes I enjoyed it, sometimes hated it, but I played it nonetheless, and I liked the film.

Anomia and me...

I am happy. To be honest I am more than happy to know that I have a very sophisticated disease. It is a kind of feeling that Jason Gillespie might have had when he joined the double-century club. It was only yesterday that Bhaai (obscurely known as Akash) got to know this word from wordsmith and not to his surprise the first thing that came to his generally clean mind was my name. The word is Anomia. Dictionaries or references are not unanimous in the explanation of the word, but of course I will go by the one given by wordsmith as it suits my case beautifully. It says Anomia is the inability to recall names of people or objects. My word! None...absolutely nobody cared to think that I might be having this disease in those horrible times when I used to go through agonising phases of remembering even the most common names. Now they will know and hopefully will feel for my being in such traumatic situations. Being a bengali ( and that too one with Anomia) the word or the sound that I use the most is "Ye" (instruction for non-bengali readers : sounds more like "Yeah" without the 'h' sound) . Its usage is almost equivalent to that of pawn's promotion into any other piece once the pawn makes it all the way across the board. I have seen people (mostly my father) using "Ye" to substitute for most of the parts of speech in a sentence. Only the intonation of a noun "Ye" is different from that of a verb "Ye" or an adjective "Ye". You actually convey the whole message with minimum possible words! That's efficiency. But understanding that sort of a conversation or statement calls for experience. 

Let me come back to my miserable days, when several times I would find myself struggling so hard to remember Woody Allen's name. For those who would argue (especially women) that forgetting has to do with indifference towards a subject/object, I would say it's not true at all.  In fact I love Woody Allen's works. They are wonderful. But when it comes to remembering his name, in reference to a very important discussion, I tend to mess all up and names like George Orwell, Orson Welles would keep coming up from nowhere.  A different example would also prove the fact that I seriously have that anomia thing. Few days back I was listening to a song and as usual kept trying names for the singer. (You guessed right) I could not remember the name . This time the approach was a bit different though. I asked Maitreyee , "Is it that singer ... that Singh fellow ?" She answered, "It's Mahendra Kapoor." And I knew that was the name I was looking for in my memory and that is the same person whom I meant when I said, "that Singh fellow". It's just that anomia in me which creates that sort of an abstract expression. And now I am pretty sure that, it is only because of that anomia that I managed a 69 out of 100 in History in the Madhyamik exams. If only they knew.

You must have noticed those badges like "We are the people", or "Lose weight now, ask me how", right? What if we anomia-philes wear such badges with captions like, "What's in a name?" These badges will come handy when we would meet somebody somewhere, talk a lot about all things under the sun, yet would eventually fail to  remember his/her name. To all those who have suffered from torturous red-eyes, dissuading barbs, and many such tormenting things because of your apparently unknown problem with remembering names, I call upon to form this elite group of anomia-philes. It feels great to know that I can have such a wonderful name to an otherwise menacing attribute. It's just that great feeling of telling everybody around, "Oh, I have this anomia you know, it's killing me (I wish it did)", and that to after messing around with names of all sorts.

Variables and Constants

To those who would stumble upon this post while googling about the fundamentals of variables and constants in computer programming - my sincere apologies. Whenever I fail to find the perfect title of my highly irregular posts, I choose to play around with words which, if their most common usage is considered, can be disconcertingly allusive. And I do it without the slightest hint of a bad conscience. There are so many words that have suffered this fate of attributing something pretty far from their original meaning and I think it's only very sensitive of me to feel for them once in a while. As you would notice in time that I am already pretty far from what I wish to write here and I have been pretty consistent (or "constant"  for that matter) through all my (highly irregular) posts.  Among many allegations that I have faced till date (the number is astronomical in magnitude) the one that I like the most is that of the change that people have seen in me in different times. The allegators (I don't believe you don't like the word!!!) would say "You have changed". And I would readily appreciate their keen power of observation. I do change. And that's where I meet my variables and constants.

The act of questioning one's being and one's activity in that existence foment the change that I am alleged of. The change comes with new visions, new feelings and new sensibilities (and new vices). I have noticed (appreciating my own power of observation this time) change in itself is a constant in my being. The being gets subjected to many experiments of life and the consciousness creates a theory with (mostly ambiguous) many parameters. In the end as all logical people would agree, the goal is to create a theory with as less parameters as possible. The fraction of the parameters, which I would call variables, is often put into the firing line though. Elite words like ethics, principles etc. are challenged vehemently. Myself, having being an efficient (could not help using the word) theoretical physicist in making, cannot let the age-old assumptions to prevail forever. And hence they face the test of time ( I play "time" from time to time). Any one of them failing sees the change coming in. And I change.

This post (I wonder whether I should care at all if it is already beyond comprehension) cannot finish without  the scale of comparison as all would say "nothing is absolute". (This is the trickiest part and I must find one impressive trick.) Well, to that I would say, through this changes in life I am still with almost all of those people whom I have loved with utmost honesty ( a struggling constant)! The results are not alarmingly discouraging! The constants are sitting pretty at the moment. The variables never complain about their fate. Hence the journey continues.

Being an artist...

It is a not a question that one may ask but a fact that one must accept, that "art" in one of it's countless forms marks an integral part of every single human life. And it is a very common human habit to glorify THE artist to an unnatural extent who would present THE art to us. It's similar to the ever-growing authority of the "Godmen" of each religion who would continue to present God to common folk, who on the other hand would ever be eluded from the same. Again we may recall (however infrequently it may come) from the commentators of the popular outdoor sports as they, after a closely fought match, would claim it to be the victory of the sport itself and hence the competing nations. In this post let me put down what all I would be feeling about being an artist...I mean if I could ever be one.

To start with, let me stick to the commonly perceived definition of an artist...a master of her own art (Henceforth I would use feminine pronouns for the artist in discussion as it is equally likely to using a masculine one). As we see my notion is circular at its heart the need to define art at this point is felt (which most celebrated philosophers have debated over ages...you have every right to think that I must really be a genius). If, for the sake of this post, I can take art as the manifestation of special abilities, senses and emotions I can put more words in here. Well then, I assume here that an artist would put a thought about few things before evincing the beauty of the art she masters. It is also assumed hereby that a true artist would like to follow her art out of passion and passion only. Slowly the artist claims the peaks of dexterity and surely she engulfs (or gets engulfed into) the ocean of sublime satisfaction. But she is not alone in her quest of this ecstasy and hence she carries with herself the load of catering to the common folk. Here she faces the first of many real problems. The master artist knows the best about her art and yet she seeks appreciation mostly from those who have developed a taste to admire it but have not been any close to master it. Here I feel an artist can demand an audience trained to a basic level to appreciate her art. One may argue that an intensive training to feel sheer bliss or to explore the finest yet most inexplicable realms of sensation is impossible for the common audience. The artist has to agree but she may still argue that knowledge of basics definitely would come as nothing but an aid to explore those kingdoms of blissful delirium. She may also expect that the first experience of this delirium may move the audience towards learning a bit more of the art. She has every possibility of going wrong here(I would humbly be judgemental), if she starts considering the mob, she is trying to impress with her art, lesser by any means as it is deprived of the talent she has. As for me I would expect the artist to be more involved in being astonished with every marvel of her art than to be cavalier about possessing the gift to master it.

I assume here that the artist resolves this problem somehow and she feels like concentrating in discovering another jewel of her mastery. Now something disturbs her again, this time the basic needs. I was forgetting that she might be needing food, apparels and a shelter to survive. As we all know they don't come for free. And if she is stubborn to pursue her art (however true and original it may be) being ignorant to the indifference of the audience she would soon find herself perishing. She has two choices. Either she becomes artful in creating her audience or she gives in and compromises with her passion. Here I assume again (my assumption is valid as these are the words of various artists as we all get to hear more often than not). I assume that the beauty of her art, the sheer brilliance of the emotional high belittle everything else, especially the idea of manipulating people to get appreciation. But I guess it's a very narrow strip to stand on and only artists with the perfect balance would manage to survive. Others I can conclude cease to qualify as true artists (falling back to the definition again).

Wait...the artist is not through with her problems yet. She has this dilemma of judging her own works or performances with respect to a standard. The standard for the rarest of geniuses is their own peaks. For our artist, if we think she is the best in the business, it would not be a difficult choice to figure out which one is her best. But if she falls to the trap of comparing market standard of her art she might face another of the paradoxes. The conjecture that her art is not at par may stop her from pursuing that or may mould her to follow the market standards which to common notion is ordinary. The strike..the punch that would refrain her from sinking into oblivion must not desert her. Because it's the only weapon she has to climb from marvel to marvel.

As for me I wish to be the audience and I wish to ease the artist of her dilemmas for the sake of nothing but art. It's not difficult....it's not difficult.

Married and ahead...

"Congratulations" and "wonderful wishes" have been raining for the past fortnight. I got married. For almost all around us, it's a start to a new life. A new Arpan must have been born to take it ahead. Amidst all the fun and the excitement the old Arpan peeps in here and there. And he asks a question..."Am I to leave?...Forever?" I wonder whether I have the correct answer to this question. 

I have not sheded off the old skin yet and I am still far from getting into the new groove. All I can say is that I am thinking. The old self helped me to let go of the stringent principles temporarily for love and peace, he was patient enough to hear what others have to say. Yet he strived hard to keep his honesty. He did not change. He managed to let the wind pass over. Will he start loving differently after marriage? Is he supposed to lose the juvenile view of life now? I guess no. 

The girl I married fell in love with that puerile Arpan even when he let her down so many times. And for me I made peace with people around in having a ceremonial marriage.  She was my girl from the day we got along. If marriage had to change my love for her (increase in this case) then I must never have loved her. 

The old Arpan stays and lives forever for he is the one who wrote the story. And he is the one who will live it out. He tries and he errs. He shouts and he plays. And as always he loves his girl....