Ahankaar

Ever so often this past week, I have been surveying the ruins of this year. I draw solace from my use of the word survey. It means that I have been able to prop myself up enough to at least see the decimation and attempt a tentative jab at the foundations to test the tensile and see what can be built back. 2015 was a battleground and I did not win. One might argue that wins and losses are relative terms and only time can determine what certain episodes can mean in the narrative of your life. I will accept that, but for the moment this is a very depleted me and I accept that, first.

Academia, research, and its processes, has a way of showing you your aukaat at regular intervals. It demands rigor and deep study. You then make intellectual claims of having understood something and you send of your work to be reviewed, commented on, and judged. You do this every time knowing that the stakes are high in terms of what the results will do to your confidence and how you think of yourself. Especially this year, when I have spent the better part of the year battling two bloody battles that had already left me wounded and diminished. I was also trying to swing two jobs and while it is always an honor to be asked to teach as a visiting faculty and shines your CV, it sapped every bit of me in trying to balance the responsibility of shepherding a class even though I enjoyed it.

So, I have been thinking a lot about ahankaar because that was at the crux of why things spiraled away. Isn’t it always? And because I believe that things happen for a reason, I do know that getting to watch Katyar Kaljat Ghusli yesterday, only means that I need to pay heed to, interpret, and translate what it is going to mean to me because it was the most important film I have watched this year. If you are unfamiliar with happenings in Marathi cinema, KKG, originally written and performed as a play, is a visual and aural treat – especially if you are a music lover of any persuasion. And if you are a Hindustani classical music lover, it is nothing short of a fiesta of epic proportions. Each song in the film is a finely crafted piece of work so much so that there is a move by UNESCO to draft KKG as an artefact of immense cultural heritage value. It made up for every Sawai Gandharva Mahotsav I have missed these past many years. Wah. As a film, it could have benefited from a little bit of curtailing because it begins to drag towards the end, but as a feat of music and cinema it moves you tremendously and this is Subodh Bhave’s directorial debut! Sanjay Leela Bhansali needs to watch this on priority to see how the rendition of a period piece can be rightly done. Critically though, you can question religious stereotypes because it does beget a bit of bigotry that is shown to be only partially redeemed.

Offline life, aside. I was also thinking about ahankaar with respect to this blog when I was watching the film. The statistics that WordPress has fed me this year are stunning. I notched a record number of posts this year. In fact the blogging of all my years combined are perhaps still less than the posts I wrote this year alone. I came to this space because it allowed me to feel okay about being me and though I was largely private about the hell that I was attempting to ford, my posts did come from a place of attempting to cope and normalize crises of self-doubt and confidence. I also experienced what it was to have readers.

I have been blogging since 2005, but it is only over the past year that I realized that I was writing to an audience. This combination of needing to cope and having readers was potent and encouraging, but not always pretty. I cringe at some of the things that I have written over the past few months and the amount of artifice in some of my posts and have told myself to stop. I recognize that impression management and performing are an integral part of any human interaction and online social interactions be it on Facebook or blogs, feed off on this in a huge way. I have no qualms with it and often wonder why Facebook gets such a bad rep about being exhibitionist because over a period of time, we really don’t behave any differently on any other platform. Our mediums of communication don’t change what we want to communicate about our SELVES in any drastic way though the structure and content of WHAT we are writing may differ. It is as it is and I am a part of it, but it has now started feeling like a burden given my own investment in this space and I feel like moderating it a little.

That said, this blog and receiving a response to what I was writing helped me weather some of the storm and since I am back to relatively calmer waters, I won’t be using this as my crutch anymore because lately it has stopped putting me in a happy place. I also discovered that having readers is not always a good thing even though I LOVE receiving comments. Some, I have enjoyed interacting with. Some, I sigh over. Some have dug deep through the archives leaving me unsettled with how much I have put out there for strangers to browse through and read. I don’t wish to withdraw anything and having done this myself with bloggers I like, I totally get that this is but normal behavior and can even be a compliment. Some, flattered to deceive and disappeared. I will admit that I was bewildered at this and wondered a fair amount about what I could have written or said that was so offensive. This sent me off on another round of self-doubt and I understood then that I really need to have more equanimity and balance in understanding why I write, what I choose to write, and for whose benefit this is all about. After all, nobody owes anybody anything and lest this be construed as passive aggressive, I am grateful that it pushed me to introspect.

I have always enjoy writing and find that it is the only constant and absolute thing of certainty about myself that I carry forward with me from this year. Everything else is shaken and stirred. I am thankful for this touchstone and really need to return to approaching it with honesty irrespective of having readers or who they are. It is integral to who I am and for something that I so deeply cherish, it deserves nothing less.

This is my X’Mas gift to myself. And if you are a music and cinema lover, Marathi cinema has this gift for you.

 

Finding poetry

I waited for poetry today, but it did not come my way so I went looking for it, but returned empty handed all the same. This is the proper words waala poetry, not the metaphoric kind of poetry that one finds in random moments. I am in dire need of poetry in the traditional sense of the term right now, but since it refuses to happen, I can only surmise that perhaps, sometimes, unless you already acknowledge the poetry that a short while ago, had enveloped you in its profoundness, newer verses may not find their way to you. So, this is an attempt to remedy that.

In an earlier post, I had written about listening to Mann kasturi re while reading the lyrics of the song. It is by far the most well written song for me from this year. What I did not write about at that time was another line that wasn’t part of any of the songs in Masaan, but which I found thanks to the film. I had at that time turned the lines over and over in my head marveling at the sheer force of its thought and how sometimes I too have taken a leap of faith based on nothing more than audacious optimism. I wish these lines had been there with me in those moments, it would have made those leaps far less terrifying. These lines are by Dushyant Kumar. I found them here and they said,

Kaun kehta hai ke aasmaan main suraakh ho nahin sakta,
ek patthar toh tabiyyat se ucchhalo yaaron.

Even if the ideas are common, poetic thoughts in languages other than English often resonate and appeal to me more simply because it is not the language of my everyday. I hold on to them and remember them for long after so much so that I can recite them verbatim – something that does not happen to me with thoughts that are expressed in English which is the language I am most fluent in be it reading, writing, or speech. The very nature of the ‘foreignness’ of languages like Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi and the unexpected contexts of encountering them are personally valuable to me because I wouldn’t know where to go looking for them if the onus were on me to find them because I don’t know enough about the tongue. So sometimes, when I do meet these verses, I find myself more vulnerable to their messages and what they have to say. Not only do I not know the first thing about poetry, I am also not interested enough in poetry to pick up a book of verses and read by myself. Hence, whenever poetry happens to me, I feel like these fleeting encounters that I have with verses in the midst of my prosaic life embody what the true essence of poetry anyway is – to create small embroidered pockets of restfulness that are threaded together by the prettiest combination of thoughts and words to usher in meaning that lights up your heart. It is why I love Hindi film songs so much. Their lyrics set to tunes offer me a short cut to poetic thoughts that I am only too happy to receive.

These lines by Dushyant Kumar have little to do with why I need poetry right now, but I feel I must record and acknowledge this because serendipity sending poetry my way is my only hope and perhaps this will appease whoever is in charge of these things.

P.S. I find my school education a tragic waste of my time. While it equipped me with the rudimentary basics of literacy, there seems to have been much that I missed out on. Chief of which is a rather underwhelming experience of learning about both Hindi and Marathi literature that were the regional languages I learnt in school. Why weren’t we introduced to thoughts such as these that occurred to poets like Dushyant Kumar? Why, after spending grades I-X studying Marathi and grades V-X studying Hindi can I not even think of blogging in any of these languages? I made a last ditch attempt to learn to read and write Tamil in my last five months in the United States and am semi-literate in my mother tongue now, but that is all. I spent three months learning to read and write Kannada when I moved to Bangalore, but I have forgotten much of that too because I did not keep up with practice and the alphabets are back to being squiggles that confuse me in my attempts to distinguish one from another. What a waste of time spent in school. So much so for coming from a country that boasts of linguistic diversity.

P.P.S. There are a couple of lines from my grade X Marathi text book which are the only ones I ever remember and something that I will never forget because the story of Phulvedya Mai (A lady who was mad about flowers) had a question as poetic as this – “Yevdhushya mannala jhapaycha tari kiti?” This heart so little; how much can one control its desires?
Another line in this story went – “Vede vha, vha thode vede. Nehmi shahane rahnyat, kai shahanpan aahe?”  Be mad. Be a little mad. What is the wisdom in always being so wise?

Touche. Poetry.