Nothing either good or bad, but thinking made it so..

The Metro plus theater festival is on, and I've just watched this play.

Hamlet the Clown Prince - The premise is that a bunch(whats the collective noun here? ) of clowns get together to interpret Hamlet in their own inimitable way, making several misinterpretations and some clever insights and generally having a ball with this tragedy. The play is supposed to be in English and Gibberish nonsense language which was mostly Italian/French/Spanish sounding.

I did not know what to expect of this play, and did not get there with any high expectations from the performance. It was a Rajat Kapoor invention, and as i browse through some of the history of the play online now, i see it's been around for quite a long time. So, that explains the fact that the construct was not as immature as i was presupposing it would be - Hamlet spoof sounds like such a cliché. It was, infact, a remarkably tight and clean performance, with very few slurs and smudges (even Antigone had seemed somewhat less confidently presented)

The play started with a long monologue with a clown standing under a stage light, enunciating clearly in gibberish with the occasional English word and extravagant gestures to go along with the sounds - the intonation and gesturing providing one with nearly enough information to connect the occasional comprehensible word. That set the stage well for the dialogue to come, though the play wasn't as strongly in gibberish as the initial monologue suggested. The idea of using Gibberish was somewhat under-utilised, but I thought it was an excellent move because as the clown playing Hamlet rightly pointed out, hardly anyone wants to hear the thee-thou-thy s of Shakespeare in 2009. And it would be difficult to pull off a comic Hamlet without trifling with the original lines beyond a reasonable degree. So, it was a good choice to provide the occasional word with which one could recognise the passage being enacted and even if one did not know it, the meaning was made amply clear with the physical action and the odd English word. Also, ofcourse, gibberish is made to sound reasonable when its being mouthed by a clown. In some parts of the play, like when Ophelia dies or when Hamlet hatches the plan of the play acting to evoke the reaction of guilt in his mother and uncle, the original lines were given with the kind of seriousness that reinforced the impression that these werent actors just clowning around. Infact as the play progressed, more and more of the original text was rendered , some in jest, some out of place, but mostly cleverly. I suppose they do work on it still, the balance between retaining the original and much revered(rightly so) dialogue and the modern transformation of the same.

The man who played Uncle Claudius also played the Ghost, and in what was obviously the scene much of the audience particularly enjoyed, the Ghost plays Dumb Charades with Hamlet, being unable to speak out his tale, and Hamlet has to figure out from that how his father died. And the specific effect of having that poison flow through his ear was to make the ghost dance with uncontrolled flailing of limbs which seamlessly transformed itself into a really rather well done dance sequence, until Hamlet reminded his father that he was to die. Also the King and Queen have some occasion to sing some operatic pieces in the play, and they do so very well too. Again, a pleasant surprise.

Some interesting little touches like Hamlet thumping his chest when his father is dead and the powder flying out of his dress to form his father's ghost. and the little interlude

Hamlet: A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
Claudius: What dost thou mean by this?
Hamlet: Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

being enacted out in more detail were noteworthy

And then, to add to this all, there was much interaction among the clowns themselves, as actual people outside the context of the play. We knew of the clown Soso(Hamlet) and his relationship with the woman playing the Queen and they both had some repartee happening regarding feminism, commitment issues with men, the particular defects of Soso's that the women poked fun at("It not the size, its how you use it").. etc. These personal relationships and exchanges of opinions were all tied to what was happening in the play at the time, well enough to provide a contemporary dimension to the old tale.

In all, I liked it very much indeed.

Of Antigone, i shall briefly say this - the script of the play by Anouilh was a bullet train through the original Sophocles version, I imagine. The crucial difference in the scripts, whereby neither Creon nor Antigone truly care about the ritual of burial, makes the tale more contemporary, but also diminishes the strength of Antigone's argument in favour of civil disobedience to some extent. Naseeruddin Shah and Rathna Pathak were as good as one would expect such veteran actors to be, though at some junctures in the play the dialogue seemed somewhat forced or uncomfortably seated, and one felt like it was the language that created that little ripple from time to time.

The most disappointing part of the whole performance was the audience, who did not deign to differentiate between irony and punch-lines treating every instance of a tired King's tragic expression of the futility of the whole argument with Antigone with a resounding guffaw or an even more insulting titter. The "comic" nature of much of the play became such an established fact with the audience that towards the end when everyone died and Creon was left staggering under the weight of the combined loss, most people were laughing out loud. What a sad experience that was.

Lift not the Painted Veil..

The Painted Veil, a short novel by Somerset Maugham ostensibly deals with the spiritual awakening in the life of Kitty Fane, a young English wife in a close-walled colonist society in HongKong. She is presented to us in the midst of an affair with the passionate and passion-worthy Charles Townsend, who offers a thorough contrast to the silently adoring husband, Walter, whom Kitty rather despises for his lack of colour and verve. She is all that a young woman of that age was generally brought up to be - pretty, thoughtless and to paraphrase her own latter estimation, a woman that a man would want to sleep with enough to bring himself to offer her security for life. She has landed that man, Walter, and is secure of her power over him – after all, an intelligent, scientific-minded man who sees clearly that his wife does not respect or love him, and continues to be enamoured of her is surely the most slavish of beings, and one's power over such a soul cannot be doubted. But Kitty miscalculates the extent of Walter's self-blinding devotion, and the discovery of her infidelity not only effectively crumbles the pedestal he places her upon, but also shatters the sense of self-worth he has. At this point, Walter's mental state is profoundly interesting to me, he hates himself for his blind adoration of a lowly object, he despises Kitty for her inferiority, and he is certain that Charles Townsend is not the passionate and devoted lover Kitty fancies but a pragmatic, self-serving, second-class human being who would only see the situation as something from which he himself ought to emerge with the least impact. He sends Kitty to Charles with a seemingly magnanimous offer, one where she and Charles would be left without any further hassles from Walter as long as Charles firmly commits to Kitty immediately. The flip side of this offer is that if Kitty cannot marry Charles she will have to acoompany Walter in his suicidal mission to Mei-Tan-Fu, a Chinese region with rampant Cholera. The masterly estimate of his fellows that Walter displays here is one that Kitty recognises too after she meets Charles and sees for herself his weakness and shallow insincerity. She returns to Walter with a stern resolve to accept his murderous choice, disllusionment and pride jostling with each other in her mind.

After this point in the story, Kitty's awakening proceeds swiftly as she meets with Waddington, a self-deprecating, sceptical English man whose cynical outlook sets off rather well his honesty, sense of humour and general good-will. He likes nothing better than his bottle of Whisky, and yet he is a favourite of the local French Catholic nuns who, in addition, disapprove of his chinese mistress but treat him with kindness and gratitude for his helpful nature. Though Kitty appears to have a worthy confidant in Waddington, and her initial steps towards a thoughtful outlook on the life within and without are taken in his company and sometimes with his help, she is more alone now than we have seen her so far. She starts helping out in the Catholic refectory with the children, teaching them sewing and caring for them, and also ponders often upon the hidden knowledge of life that the people around her seem to know and she doesn't yet. She learns that she is pregnant and in a rare instance of honest courage, declines the convenient answer of “It s yours” when Walter enquires about its conception. She often agonizes about it, especially since we have come to know along the way that Walter has a surprising but genuine love for children. Walter dies shortly after this, leaving some doubt as to whether he chanced to catch Cholera from his patients or actively set about testing something on himself which caused his death. His last words which were the last lines of Goldsmith's Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog are as ambiguous in their intent as anything we have seen of Walter along the course of this tale.

Kitty is advised by the Mother Superior at the convent to leave the place now that her husband has, since she would require to be confined soon and would require much medical attention. She returns to HongKong to settle her house and affairs there and for the short duration there is treated as a heroic woman who accompanied her brave husband on a dangerous mission for the good of the locals and is now suffering her bereavement with great courage and dignity. Charles Townsend's wife Dorothy insists upon her staying with them, and though Kitty still despises Charles's true nature, she succumbs once more to his attentions and then, with much self loathing, leaves precipitately to her parents' house. In a rather contrived blow, her mother, whom she blames for her shallow youth, dies suddenly even before she reaches home, and her father informs her of his intention to leave for Bermuda to take up a high post there. Kitty offers to accompany him, vowing to return atleast some part of her favour to a long ignored provider of the family, and also to bring up her child without all the mistakes that were a part of her mother's plans for her.

The plot being laid out in some detail, I'd like to gointo some of the impression the book delivers. Firstly, I found all of the characters impossible to care about. Maugham himself seems to have feelings ranging from indifference to thinly veiled dislike for his characters here, and is always content to leave all potentially positive aspects of their lives shrouded in a gray obscurity. Secondly, I had described this book as being “ostensibly” about Kitty's growth. I add that detractor there because the kind of growth we see in Kitty is trivial and self-deluded even , when viewed under a rational light. She ascribes her youthful shallowness to her mother's upbringing, and then her lack of respect for Walter to his blandess of demeanour and character though we see glimpses of his capacity for thought, passion and action along the book. These are still forgivable as immature, and one looks to her later self for real improvement. She is looking for acceptance from the French sisters, is intimidated by their hidden knowledge(which is entirely her own perception) and feels better about herself based on her work with them But I rather felt that the changes she is seeing are rather superficial and her quest for the hidden knowledge is no more than curiosity in a new land and one that she has not the capability to pursue seriously. She has undoubtedly gained the maturity to view her personal problems with some perspective amidst the suffering and dying masses, and her surprise at Walter's continued self-hatred over his mis-estimation of her is a valid one. The indelible words of Rick, “the problems of two little people dont amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. “ are about what she would tell him if she could. But what I see instead is a continued feeling of repressed guilt on her part and disrespect towards Walter that she never attempts to analyse or overcome.

Maugham avoided the cliché of their reconciliation or renewal of loving vows, but in doing so he needed to leave her half-awakened and Walter gently ironic to the very end. His last words seem to simply anchor his character as being nought but a large cloud of ironic self-loathing. Kitty's turn to acquire some self-loathing was another master stroke on Maughams part, one that somewhat reconciled me to her character. I had thought her smugly self-satisfied with her changes and her growth and it made for excellent exposition to witness her realisation that in her ardour for truth she had over-vilified Charles' physical and sartorial imperfections, and then to see her give into his advances while being entirely conscious of her own fall from grace again. She however retains that disarming ability to throw away these marks of self-degradation from her without any seeming effort, as though she is so sure that she is growing up to be a better person tha any imperfections she may exhibit are to be immediately forgotten. But that excuse doesnt sit well with a reader who has not taken kindly to her at any point in the tale.

From the moment I read Walter's reference to the Elegy of the death of a Mad Dog in the book, I have retained a firm feeling that Maugham wrote this whole tale as a mocking take on books about the wakening of spirituality in their protagonists. Such books normally rely on the slow gaining of understanding and clarity in the protagonist, especially of the superior qualities of some previously despised or disregarded personage in their lives. Here, Walter obviously fits the bill for that character.He is shown to be caring and passionate about Kitty, a good judge of character in all but his beloved wife, a man of high intentions regarding his career as a bacteriologist, a gentle kind administering angel to the children and locals suffering from Cholera. And yet, we are clearly shown through Kitty's eyes that he does not work for the sake of the people but rather for some impersonal reason, which is not even the glorious cause of Scientific advancement, but something less definable, tinged with a death-wish possibly. He is not the reward that a self aware Kitty could be proud of in the end. Charles Townsend is pushed from grace right at the beginning as a self-involved, uncaring, philandering man with naught but the most superficial advantages attributable to him. However, when Kitty meets him again at the end of the book, she reveals her own immaturity in painting him as being viler than he was, and also her own susceptibility to an immoral impulse. He is not the despicable villain that a newly gained spiritual awareness could look down upon with superior condescension. The sisters in the convent and Waddington are the tools or aids in the evoking of awareness in Kitty, once she was forced into the knowledge of her own prior immaturity. But, the sisters are seen to the end by Kitty as beings of a different mould and order, and Waddington's idea of the path to nowhere does not sufficiently satisfy Kitty's quest for a more concrete destination.

The return of Kitty to HongKong after her husband's death and her image there as a heroic woman are obviously meant as a satire on the perception that can be put upon any set of events when the inner life is so clouded, but her acceptance of it and her efforts to leave it undisturbed seem a mockery of her own growth over the course of the tale. The ending of the book is so rushed and contrived that I thought Maugham grew tired after that point of even tolerating his own characters and rushed off Kitty to another land where she could live without any old associations to trouble her, with her role as a loving daughter and adoring mother ensuring that her own self-estimate of her maturity were reinforced easily. Such facilely acquired self worth cannot be my cup of tea, im afraid. However, the ultimate trick that Maugham has pulled off in this book is probably to avoid all the facile routes to self awareness and reconciliation and instead subject the reader to all these ambiguous feelings about the characters and their actions. The initial chapters are rather unremarkable and so is the last portion about Kitty's return. But the entire middle section of the tale is written with impeccable balance so as to give one doubt and pause at any interval one chooses to sit back and reflect on it. I might balk at befriending any of the characters in the book, but the writer undoubtedly possesses some mastery of his craft as he presents a book where the characters insiduously lodge themselves into the readers' mind, and demand some estimate of their selves and their actions.

I just revisited the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie today, and I remember the first time i wrote of it, one of the comments was that it was “definitely a fan's POV”. Now, this is something i had to fight to come to terms with, that I was a part of a uber-popular mass frenzy, as it was occuring(now it seems a ovr-preening "i prefer the less trodden path kind of silly superiority complex, but the fact is it was a new experience entirely). Its hard enough when one grows past a particular stage of musical immaturity and then comes across that meticulously planned and recorded tape which contains several samples from the repertoire of the Backstreet Boys, Aqua and to add an edge to the collection, that little nugget from a lesser known acoustic guitar strummer. I could rationalize it by constructing an argument with the centroid around the novelty of western music amidst the classical carnatic/devotional music prevalent at home and the ray of sunshine that was the ceylon radio. Alas, with books, i did not share that excuse. One of the earliest books i remember reading was by Dickens, and I was familiar with Mr.Micawber and Little Dorrit long before I read of the adventures of the Famous Five. Lord of the Rings was a much loved world of adventure, before the tale of the Sorcerer's stone came around to my purview. So whence the adulation for the tales of Harry Potter and his young companions, with all their providential helpmeets. Well, if i seriously think about it, I love the fact that as Harry grew and matured, so did the books. The people change in ways one could really identify with, and the situations and events morphed into less fluffy portions too. Then there was the sheer joy of identifying that little throwaway detail some three years past along the books' timeline, which then came back to play a real role in the current installment. Rowling really knew how to keep her loyal readers interested in the unfolding game. So, with time, i grew more comfortable about outing myself as a fan of that HP joyride.

However, ]why compare this series with Tolkien's at all? If i took that comparison further, i could pit Tolkein's plenitude of detail in his imaginary world against those I encounter among Borges' short stories. Ofcourse, the obvious difference between them is the duration and scope of the setting. Tolkien's is epic, Borges' can comes across as passing whimsy. However, the more substantial difference, i think, is in the need for completeness felt by the authors, in their tales. Tolkein was chronicling the adventures of band of denizens of Middle Earth, the details were ones noted by an omniscient, impersonal narrator. Borges writes in the first person mostly, and the chronicling is more autobiographical, or to put it less definitely, more self-centered, in no pejorative connotation.

The collection of short stories by Borges I am reading now, is titled Labyrinths, and the theme runs throughout the compilation. Every story in it reminds me of Escher's paintings, where there is a predominant sense of symmetry, or a figure and ground ambiguity, and more often a combination of both. The ideas conveyed in the stories, their purported as well as hidden thought trains, always seem be a combination of philosophy and religion. There is the pervasive sense of the infinite, the ever-repeating cyclic reality. To put in a nutshell, labyrinths infest every page of these tales. Now to approach these from a straightforward fictioneer's angle, would probably lead to an output stale-ly reminiscent of so many other flighty philosophy-for-dummies style novels,. On the other hand, serious works of Philosophy suffer from a need for tortuous arguments for every choice made at a fork in the path of reasoning, which would be incapable of retaining that sense of soaring freedom that comes from a work of thoughtful fiction. So, Borges, brilliantly chooses a style of pseudo-journalistic(i mean, an imaginary piece of scholarly or journalistic writing. I would like to say imaginary, but this needs to come up several times, and pseudo is simply far more hyphen-friendly) writing where the story is narrated in first person mode, by someone who is recording a well-researched, and atleast partially factual event or item. This allows him the freedom to refer to imaginary manuals and encyclopaediae or even scholarly articles on the matter, without having to present their details. He conveys the gist of the pseudo-references, but is not sidetracked by their minutiae. He also incorporates feedback on the theory propounded by the protagonist using footnotes from the editor of the journal or some peers reviewing the article being submitted, or the prior works referred to. This makes for a superbly economical means of presenting the other side of the coin without having to take a detour in the middle of the presentation of the same. Borges is also a vastly well read man, and apparently a believer in the idea that every piece of work he wrote was in essence something that was already written. (Infact, one of his stories is based on this theme, and he says 'Every man who speaks a line of Shakespeare, is infact Shakespeare.) So he takes advantage of the footnotes to also mention the germinal sources of different ideas he may be proposing, as a part of the treatise. And in addition to all the above-mentioned signature elements of style, he clearly possessed a thoroughly analytical mind with infinite curiosity and a sweeping scope of imagination.

Now, i read no more than one or two stories at a sitting, partly because of the ponderous reflections they engender, and partly because there are only so many mazes one can go through in a given period of time before a sense of dazed repetition sets in. One story i read today was of a man, Runeberg, who spent his life on theories about the actions of Judas Iscariot. He started with the previously existing vindication of Judas as a mercenary traitor, that he had to betray the Lord because that would bring the revolution to a critical mass, to spread the word of Jesus amongst one and all. Runeberg argues about the superfluousness of this action, saying that if all the miracles performed amongst the crowds would by themselves bring about the necessitant awareness. However, his aim is not to dismiss the significance of Judas' action, but rather prove that in its very nature of a superfluity, it gained significance, it took on the mantle of being pre-ordained. The Lord, in his human incarnation, lost the infiniteness and immortality and became subject to change and death. Now, it took a man to reciprocate that sacrifice made by divinity, and thence Judas reflects Jesus in himself. This theory was trashed by Runeberg's peers from several fronts which i did not entirely understand. However, he then rewrote the theory, to state that Judas chose unlimited asceticism, and just as ascetics renounce pleasure, for the spirit, Judas renounced morality and honour, since he believed himself unworthy of good. God suffered for a brief period, on the cross, Judas suffered for eternity for his sin, his sacrifice was meant to be eternal. This was also ignored largely by the populace, or denigrated, and then Runeberg wrote his last defence of Judas. It went thus. God made the ultimate sacrifice in choosing a human form, mortality, and all the weaknesses of the flesh. Being God, one can only imagine that the sacrifice was complete and utter, that he chose to renounce everything that made some infinite balance. And you see where it goes now.. God made himself Judas, the basest of men.

During that tale, i was gripped by the idea of abasement in the pursuit of excellence, the part that humility and self importance play in such a facilely interchangeable fashion, all from the point of view of Judas' actions. And then I see, Runeberg was doing the same, wasnt he. He started with a proposition that was partly defendable, rooted in a real world, and took it further and further from that reality, in the pursuit of the most logical argument in defense of Judas. Infact if one takes into account what the critics of each theory had to say to counter his output, there seems to be the similarly shaped symmetry present, though i am not entirely clear on the details of their refutation, to be so, i would have read as much as Borges had. And there are probably multitudes of other Escherian structures in the short story that i shall come across on future readings. Truly, an artist was Borges.

far from Tabrizi's Kabul..

On a grey saturday that followed two days of the bluest sunshine, i could fancy nothing better than to sit curled up with a book, and what i happened to lay hands on was a copy of 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' by Khaled Hosseini. Kat was telling me today that she loved the Kite Runner movie, and that it would move anyone's heart. Its been a while since i read anything of the sort, and so I decided to give this second book of Hosseini's a try.

Its a book set over a period of four decades, mostly in Afghanistan, following the lives of two women and their experiences in what are clearly incredibly turbulent times. The story begins with Mariam, a child of five, and the day she heard the word 'harami', exclaimed in the bitter resentful voice of her mother. In this portion of the tale there is much scope for moral judgements and biases and all the drama that it brings along. Some of the shifts in perspective as the girl of five grows into the daughter of fifteen, and the 'crash and burn' of her life at that point when it becomes undeniably all too real, seem a tad heavy-handed, and yet they leave one with an expectant attitude towards the rest of the tale because however dramatic the narration may seem, this is not a tale of black and white convictions but rather one that promises several shades of dawning light, and one already knows its not going to be the blinding white ray of hope or happiness but rather a grudging dusty beam of grey that is yet hoarded with glee. Mariam is set up very traditionally and Laila is ebony to her ivory. The connecting point of the narrative to Laila from Mariam is also well handled i think, at the point where Mariam's house has a mysterious(not so very probably, considering the readers know its her father) car, and then we go into this entirely other world where women are treated more familiarly and yet the contrast between this and the previous setup is milked in every possible way for its poignancy i feel. Laila is instantly relatable to, and yet she is, as is everyone in this tale, surrounded by a thick mist of loss and tragedy seems to hover around her every step in a shadowy foreboding of the grim future.

The rest of the tale, once the political environment begins to take over, is really indescribable in terms of plot. I had no clear knowledge of Afghanistan's history, and the tale that one sees unfolding, is of a monarchy coming to an end to be replaced with a liberal, socially-reformative government under General Daud in '53, and then within just one decade of relative progress, troubles restart and slowly the man who brought in the reforms falls out of grace, labeled a communist and a lackey for the USSR, and effectively creates the leftist alliance that overthrows him. The role of the western world in this shifting political scape is not very clearly dealt with, but its obvious that much of this upheaval is enabled largely by the ammunition flowing into either side from their hosts in the cold war. This battle is won by the leftists and the first thing they do when faced with no external enemy is to start factioning themselves, which is a scenario tiresomely familiar to us from our own politics and up come the Mujahideen, armed to the teeth by the Americans, and garnering support amongst the people themselves who are feeling let down by all the messiahs who came charging up to release them from the iniquitous rule of their predecessors. And as history repeats itself, the Mujahideen lose credibility and up come the Taleban, and the rest, as we all can almost chant in chorus 'is history'.

I do not speak of Mariam and Laila and the others in the tale after this point because honestly, i cannot find myself caring much for their travails there on. Hosseini describes the daily routines and details of little changes in lifestyles of small and insignificant people very well, and after a point that is all that I cared about and was in thrall to, as i read on. There is this short description of the Titanic sensation that grips the nation under the no-TV ban of the Taleban that is a rare chuckleworthy moment in the book. Overall, I disagree with Isabelle Allende who, on the cover calls it 'Unforgettable' and find the Daily Telegraph's comparison of Hosseini to Dickens rather a stretch and that too in quite the wrong direction, but agree with the Literary Review that calls it an 'energetic and thought-provoking read'.

Kat, my new flat-mate since March, is from England and is an English teacher here in Barcelona. She rides around on a wicked new bicycle, is a superb cook and a lovely person to share a glass of wine with.

Emer is Irish, I am Indian, and yet when the blender in the house turns yellow at the mouth, we know its the Irishwoman who has been indulging in too much turmeric again. It used to drive my old flatmate wild to see the white gleaming blender she had scrubbed for a half hour turn yellow in a minute of culinary use. Now we have a good laugh about the irony of transferred tastes.

Kat saw the yellow blender and heard us laughing about it and then gave us this little anecdote from her times sharing a house with two other english teachers here in barcelona. One got so very tired of correcting the malapropisms and mis-usage of words while teaching those hapless spanish students, that correcting some of those common mistakes became a reflex reaction. So, when Kat once said aloud that she had dyed the blender, there was an immediate, automatic, tired reaction 'You Killed the blender Kat, not died it' :)

Last weekend, Kat and I took a ride on our bicycles to the beach, which is not ten minutes from home and provides a long, smooth cycling track to ride along blithely enjoying the sun and the sea. It was all blue, bright clear blue, with a hint of a cool breeze, making it the perfect day for a ride. And then to round it off, we had an excellent cup of vegan icecream sitting on the old stone steps along the edge of a open space in the Capella de Santa Àgata, listening to a man in a black coat and high collar improvise on some Spanish tunes on a synthesizer. We were surrounded in the falling dusk by stained glass windows and high turrets, and it was a magical place to be.

T'was my birthday yesterday and the two aforementioned dears between them made it a lovely day. I was treated to some bright flowers, a bag of impossibly heavenly sunflower-seeds-coated-with-chocolate that melt like a dream in one's mouth, a hot-cake-in-cold-chocolate/orange-sauce to finish things up at night and the cherished feeling of friendly companionship in a new world.

excess and failure..

Disclaimer : I am far from happy with the coherence of this post and ought to take it off, but i write so very seldom nowadays, and i am going though an "action is character" phase of thought. so.. here goes

I lost my key this evening, and having a few hours to kill before the roommate got home, I went to the library near home to read. What i picked up was This side of Paradise by F Scott Fitzgerald. Have you had occasion to speak of him, and if so, do you also say "Eff Scott Fitzgerald" every time, like i do, or is it acceptable to just call him say Fitz or some other shorter name? I like saying F Scott Fitzgerald and identify him just so, every single time. It suits the man, like Plum suits Wodehouse and Dickens suits Charles of the Pickwick papers.

Now, coming back to F Scott(If one wants to try variants, its simpler to test them while writing than verbally, and i actually find F Scott quite suitable, atleast fr the nonce.), the first book of his i read, was predictably the Great Gatsby. And i did not know what to think of it. I liked it, without doubt, and i felt like reading it again the ensuing weeks, but if anyone had asked me what the book was like, or what it was about, i would have stuttered and stammered, just as I did today when it came up in conversation. So, a post seemed called for, to clear up the unspoken impressions that book left.

The first thing one remembers about Gatsby is how very likeable the man is, and how wide open and accepting he feels. When i close my eyes and think of Gatsby i see a man willing embrace the world at its own terms. That doesnt say it right. But, ofcourse. the man exudes almost no Ego. Thats the nub, see. He emanates a sense of shy, eager friendliness. That, from a man who probably made his fortune on bootlegging or at an ever more basic level, made his own fortune at all, seems a tad unreal. Your shy, friendly, open men do not usually feel the need to accumulate fortunes. So, what made him choose that path of financial acquisition? That was Daisy, the woman he loved and could not attain because of his penury, who then marries into the local aristocracy. Gatsby's image of Daisy is something that is entirely in his own mind, i am sure, and has no need to be rooted in reality to the slightest extent. Daisy and Tom, with their riches and their lack of conscience or awareness, are people one cannot be simpatico with. Everyone in this story is heartless, in one sense or another. Nearly every person in the tale is having an affair which each of them knows is indefensible, under the slightest questioning. And the narrator feels like a distant, and almost incidental connection between the locals whom the tale concerns. BUt taking these up in reverse order of listing, the narrator Nick is almost solely responsible for the setting of the story and its character. He reminds me of Henry James in a way, in the sort of carefully crafted perfection of distance he keeps us at, from these characters with whom we cannot empathise entirely. He is a near-neighbour of Gatsby's and brings out the sense of incidental connectedness with the town, along with the sentiment of an outsider at the core, that Gatsby himself seems to carry with him. Nick is also the person from whose point of view we see the flowering and opening of Gatsby's personality, and his sympathy toward Gatsby exactly replicates our growing fondness for the man. The affairs leave us feeling the dilemma of moral choices, where that of Tom and Myrtle simply feels nasty, that of Gatsby and Daisy seems somehow acceptable, and even something one is rooting for. The shades of gray present in the book are so manifold that it becomes a superbly nuanced tale, revealing just that new thread every successive assay, and in all making for a rewarding read.

Apart from this justly famous novel of his, ive read some short stories of F Scott Fitzgerald, compiled under the heading 'Tales from the Jazz Age' which is not a title one can resist checking out. There was this one fantastic tale about a rich family that lived in a mountain of diamonds, and actually had the gall to be irritated about the fact that they had to murder their guests who had learnt of their secret horde. It was magnificiently heartless, and it felt like a recurring theme from the Great Gatsby, that of the heartlessness of the rich. Again, this theme seemed to repeat itself in some of the women that were portrayed as being so endowed with beauty as to be thoroughly unsentimental about the emotions they invoked in other smitten souls. These things, together, make F Scott sound like a sour old man, but he always redeemed himself with some detail that he observed, some simple thing of beauty that he could not only see but also describe in delicate loving detail. He was a man of many contradictions, as far as i can make out from his works that ive come across. He idealized intellect and ambition, and yet deprecated the weight of self worth and the need for societal acceptance and adoration. He always seemed to be aiming for something idealistic, and yet going about it in a manner that had a tinge of shallow, short sightedness. His protagonists seemed to be men of much worth and ability, but also possessing that crippling sense of self worth, the one that simultabneously prides itself on its abilities, and is disappointed in its accomplishments. The final image he leaves me with , and the strongest one of all, is that of reaching out for something while knowing one is past the point of reach.. which is best expressed by these closing lines from the Great Gatsby

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning ——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F Scott is, in my mind, a man who lived in a made up reality, a man who possessed a genius for literary expression, and someone who never matched his own expectations. He is Pierre from War and Peace, he drank from the same fountain of eternal questioning that the Russian masters of yore did, and he has the added burden of the doubts facing the men of the twentieth century, a sense of the shades of gray in all that life contains, entwined with the ever-ranging quest for that blinding white light of clarity and fulfillment.

The recent thread of a theme running through my thoughts is that of action for its own sake, as opposed to action as a means to an end.

There was the class on Real Time Interaction where my professor spoke of the concept of “Flow” as one where a person is entirely in the present, acting in accordance with what is present to him, without needing any awareness of other states of being. Simplistic as he knew he was sounding when he compared it with the idea of a person enjoying work for its own sake rather than any monetary rewards, he did not halt himself from making his point plainer. He went on to speak of what it meant in the context of real time interaction in virtual environments and music performances, and the discussion veered off into the technological realm. However much i descry any attempt to have me appreciate the point of virtual worlds of interaction and gaming, it pleases me immensely when i see the sort of philosophical considerations these researchers twiddle with whilst designing single person shooting games even. In this same class, ive had the realization draw upon me that with music, so very often, the composer and performer are two different people who bring in their very own personality to the music that we finally listen to and are moved by. At that point, the professor was speaking of the case of computer music interfaces where the cornerstone of the system was in the apportioning of the two responsibilities to the computer and the human in a thoroughly fair manner. It was a strikingly new perspective, and one that makes me appreciate some things that i would normally cast aside as cheap-thrill-mongering gimmickry.

(As an aside, let me point out the case of the Mouthesizer, a gimmick if ever there was one.. and yet, when you think of how the wah-wah is, in its essence, a matter of the vowel pronounciations associated with the closing and opening of the mouth in varying degrees, its a perfect mapping, and one that brings the unintuitive electric guitar pedal to its knees. admitting to its unnatural design)

Another instance of the aforementioned theme, was the movie that i watched this morning, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Six months into my sojourn here, watching the city as presented by Allen was a pleasant experience, though every so often in the midst of a picture perfect setting the thought would intrude upon my passive mind that it was just a tad too perfect throughout. But then, i plead guilty to the same sort of romanticization of the city and its treasures, and when one has to balance out the three beautiful women, one doesn't stint the city its beauty. Penelope Cruz's entrance was an unbridled force that simply tore through the movie changing its tone that was simply a pastel palette until that point(except for the scene at Bardem's childhood home), into something to actively enjoyable. And then, at the end, we were left at the very same point where we began, and yet it was worth being made indubitably, the story of the lives of four people that shows no significant change at the end of the two summer months, making the passage of that summer worth nothing in relative terms, but somehow making up for that in its absolute experiences.

A third case of that theme, came up while discussing the fact the BJP is demanding changes to the historical records of Alexander the Great's return from the edges of the Indian subcontinent as being attributable to the travails of a long campaign. They claim that our forces were to be given their due credit for routing the conqueror's army from our lands, instead. Now, i have no claims to scholarship in this matter, or even a general principled demand for historical accuracy in these matters motivated by patriotic considerations or otherwise. However, the nub of the discussion was what we as Indians, would do to counter such high handed moves from political parties, that are so much on the rise. Moral and religious activism, general trampling upon of human rights of free speech and access to information.. Now, i must make the disclaimer that i do not have a concrete approach or solution to any such issue, but i do not think that taking out rallies with placards screaming disapproval is a really valid piece of action. There are many who tell me this is something, a show a protest atleast, and is better than people like me who do nothing about it all. Well, be that as it may, it does not accomplish anything when a bunch of educated, non-voting, non-partisan, city-dwellers stop traffic and generate noise on roads, when we have no combined strength in reality. When tribes and religious minorities and other groups carrying some identity express displeasure on some matter of political bias, they are heard from time to time, because they have the strength of united numbers, making a real difference to the vote count. We, on the other hand, are handicapped in several ways. For one, we are not amenable to the sort of cajolery that works with the uneducated masses(and i speak without condescension here). We are just educated enough to question some things, and just self-centered enough to not do anything concrete about it. People say, working professional cannot be expected to throw in their jobs and spend the best part of their time working on solutions to public ills, and that we can only participate in democracy in our limited way with rallies and chain mails and online petitions. I say, if you are going to that, give it more thought, and come up with protests that are more than just inane placards that say nothing that could not be thought of in a moment of idle banter by the coffee machine. We can do more and till we are organized enough to attempt that, i for on e am not going to be ashamed of not participating in these 'democratic' means of expression. I enjoyed the NCC trip while in college, to a nearby village school, to repaint their walls and clear their garbage, much more than i did my frustrated march against reservations later in bangalore. Address the smaller social ills individually, and be on the lookout to support someone with a real concrete plan on tackling the larger political outrages, i would say. Just to put this rant in context, this is an instance of where action for its own sake doesn't appeal to me. Without feedback and measured assesment of results, collective action is pointless.