The long and arduous wait got over ten minutes back when the first rains of summer gracefully descended on the Queen of the Arabian Sea. A colleague of mine expressed our collective fear in the evening when he said that the summer rain seemed to be betraying us like the economy. Sitting in the balcony, puffing on my Ramdoss, looking at the flaring KSEB transformer a few hundred feet away, I understand why they call us Keralites a pampered race.
It is three years since I started this blog, sitting by the side of a lake, drinking my cold coffee, biding my time.
After 300 Posts, 3,076 comments (of which 2,584 were approved) and 14,840 curious travails of technology called spam comments, it remains that my blogging pretty much typifies Alice’s ordeal in wonderland.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where –” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. (Alice in Wonderland, Chapter 6).
Naughty naughty cat this one.
But why write, especially blog? Though I am under strict instruction from my lady doctor and my boss to not think for more than 3 seconds, once in a while I hide in my cubicle and think voraciously till my pack is over and I have to go get another. Thinking is banned in public places.
In a recent article, Sachitanandan, the malayalam poet, talks about Vyasan, the authour of Mahabharata. He talks about D D Kosambi‘s interpretation of the history of Mahabharata where Kosambi cites perhaps the oldest recovered text of Mahabharata which had about 10,000 slokas compared to the 24,000 sloka and the 100,000 sloka of the arguably future versions. Surprisingly, this text of Mahabharata does not even mention a character called Krishna nor has the Bhagawad Gita embedded. Now the mammoth proportions and the classical tragedy of the Kuru clan notwithstanding, millions of wannabe writers and philosophers over the many millennia, would have sustained an incisive professional jealousy with the man who created the character of Krishna and condensed the Upanishads into the Gita. Sachitanandan at this point reveals the possibility that Vyasa may not be one person. Anyone who added to the Mahabharata could have become a Vyasa. Vyasa as a collective. Historically that might explain the superhuman effort that went into the compilation of Mahabharata, and may be explain the diversity of its ideas and intricacies.
Blogs as a collective. Two thousand years from now, neither you nor I will dispute the ‘fact’ that Blogger wrote this mammoth treatise called blogs. But even today, are we evolving as a super-collective, interlinked, symbiotic, regulating super organism. May be we do not see it when we look at ourselves, but may be the Hubble telescope sees it, the NewyorkTimes sees it, may be the Obamas see it. We don’t know, may be we are like ants – a super organism.
The article gets more interesting. Vyasa had written the epic after the death of Dritharashtra, which is after the war. And Vyasa himself is a regular in Mahabharata. There are several instances where Vyasa tries to prevent the war, but he fails. So may be when he failed, the next best thing for him to do was to chronicle the events as they happened. Sachitanandan says a writer is perhaps a person who fails to intervene.
Do we write because we cannot intervene? Cannot afford to intervene? or we failed in intervening?
As for me, when movies and politics get cluttered and uninspiring, there is always poetry to look forward to,
madira meiN jaane ko ghar se chaltaa hai peenewaala
kis path se jaaooN asmanjas meiN hai wo bhola bhaala
alag alag pathu batalaathi sab paR maiN ye bataata hooN
raah pakaD tu ek chalaa-chal paa jaayega madhushaala
Each passing year, is a time to look back and make a critical introspection. But that never happens. I am good at reading between the lines and categorizing Bloggers with some certainty. While this skill has been sharpened over the years in identifying intellectual-sex-maniacs, hypocrite-fact-devoid-dolls, hypochondriacal-flowery-roys, apolitical-perverts, template-humorists, developmental-rapists, marx’s-daddists, and clueless-rightwing-sitting-ducks, it hasn’t really helped me change any of their attributes which are part of this blog too. While discussing a blog, I went to the extent of claiming that the blogger ‘views history as starting at one place and ending at another’. At least one tenth of such criticism could have resulted in a few better posts in my blog. But like all other bloggers I continue to be critical of the society at large and quite oblivious to my short comings. But I will fight and then kill you with data, not extreme prejudice.
But an anniversary is also an opportunity to drill into the groundwater of yesterday and splash it on the present for a few moments. It could be enlightening and a some time pass. So let me list down a couple of posts (I hope to find 10) which I might re-wind to, mostly random posts.
The 7th Standard Text book controversy
The Kerala Government continues to refuse demands for withdrawal of the 7th Standard Textbook which promotes Atheism and questions God.In completely unrelated news, the Monsoon has literally kept out of Kerala, the state football team failed to reach the Santosh Trophy semi-finals and K Karunakaran turned 90.
The message from up above is clear. God Exists and he is punishing us!
Who is condemning Raj Thackeray? Is it the Namma Kannadiga who once and for all destroyed the fabric of Bangalore when Rajkumar died, who destroyed shops in Brigade and MG Road which didn’t have hoardings in Kannada. Remember Bangalore is just 36% Kannadiga. Is it the Tamilian who blocked buses and trains from Kerala in the “National” Highway on a petty Railway Zone issue. Is it the Assamese who is about to kill a couple of Biharis who are building roads in their state. I hear it when Raj Thackeray asks why Bengal needs to erupt when Saurav Ganguly is dropped from the team. Do they gather around their televisions and condemn Raj Thackeray?
US school shootingsToday they had a small prayer meeting where a slain child’s mother prayed with the killer’s mother – maybe they talked to god about those small things only mothers talk about. The clippings on the networks were heart rendering as a small village prepares to bury their little ones. They have forgiven the man who did it all and his family is receiving the forgiveness. It is easier to forgive than to receive it with all the humility and grace – and Carl Robert’s mother is doing exactly the same.
Do you deport a person who has stayed in the US for decades,paid his taxes,obeyed the laws of the land citing nuances of immigration procedures.Do you separate him from his family because the law is blind.Do you uproot people in flesh and blood,crush there livelihoods and break their lives because your legislations are unchangeable.Will you throw a child out of school citing issues of national security.
Modi asked the crowd, “What should be done to a man who stored illegal arms and ammunition? You tell me what should have been done to Sohrabuddin?”
The crowd replied, “Kill him, kill him”.
“Well, that is it. Do I have to take Sonia Gandhi’s permission to do this? Hang me if I have done anything wrong,” responded Modi.
There’s nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don’t live up until their death. They don’t honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can’t hear it. Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die
The Loveless Tale of KarmaOnce,a long time back I left my elder sister. Tonight I do not know her name. I do not know how to talk to her. She stayed there, I moved on. She, the tree, the green grass and me, the animal, the human. Nature selected me or so I say. The pain of separation does not bother me anymore. But why do I feel incomplete when it rains, when I see those blue mountains. Is it that a shroud of forgetfulness clears. A sunbeam enters the stagnant pond. Loud music from the next room, another shroud, another night sets in.
Its been a while since we left our village. Tonight, I take my big roaring machines from the city to my village. Tonight the younger sister will break a twig off her older sister. She will forget everything. The city needs to grow, grow into the villages. Our machines will build highways over the villages, we need to reach places fast. The village was forgotten long back, we need to build our cities faster, we need growth and development. The path to progress, the poison smoke of the factories which build our vehicles and our air-conditioners will be located in the hearts of our villages. Our urban ugliness will be shared, like leprosy, to our elder sister. The loveless tale of Karma.
The movie reeks of a fancy dress competition, with Kamal playing 10 characters (a lousy world record for INR 100 crore) AND 5 of the 10 characters : George Bush, Christian Fletcher, Shinghen Narahasi,Kalifullah Mukhtaar and Krishnaveni literally wearing masks. Going by this logic Kamal can get one of those Rs.5 tiger masks from Marina Beach and claim he is playing a tiger in his next movie.
No Country for Old men – Best Picture 2007
“The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it.I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job ““- not to be glorious. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. You can say it’s my job to fight it but I don’t know what it is anymore.”
Our forefathers realized that sacrifice is a very fundamental social reality. There is no higher sacrifice than death. Because your life is the maximum you can give for a cause, and it is a very strong factor in driving a cause. Hence sacrifice becomes the initial capital of an ideology. The idea of unity among the oppressed class leads to the idea of sacrifice for the oppressed class. This is the greatest sacrifice the Party can do for the social human being. The meaning, value and history of KrishnaPillai’s or Bhagat Singh’s sacrifice is that they did not do it for themselves, but for the society. Hence martyrdom constructs ethos. Ethos creates an Organization. And then the Organization develops, expands – it becomes a Miracle, it becomes a Spectacle, it becomes a Mob.
That was nice 🙂
Congratulations, by the way.. may you outlive your prejudices .. hehehe
mmm…3 yrs, 300 posts. Impressive… impressive… and on top of that, 3076 dumbasses commenting??
Oh, and make it 3077 now, will ye?
PS: Congrats btw, and when do you plan to retire? (?)
Not only Vyasa, it is said that Homer too was not a single person, but a collective. Probably true for all epics in all languauges…
And congratulations on 3 years of non intervention 😉 😀
Belated Blogday wishes saar! 🙂