The Bee Hive!

(Image Courtesy: http://rubiestone.deviantart.com/art/hive-59898663)

I read this somewhere. It’s not that inspiring a line to begin this note with, but I guess I don’t have anything else. Language can be really constraining, if you can’t pick the words. So yes, the line is… “Imagination is fed by language, watered by history, nourished by art, and liberated by social thought.”

Why this line you ask? Well because life is just simply the sum total of all that you can imagine.

---

Some really important person once thought and put down two interesting ideas into something called religion.

1. God made humans in his own image.
2. God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

I guess if I am to believe that to be true, I would also agree with all those people who complain that he/she should not have rested on the seventh day. World would have been a much better place if he/she had stopped being lazy and put in a little more effort. I live in this world, constantly enthralled with its chaos that I add to, hoping for order! Hoping for stability, a notion of life with perpetual happiness and satisfaction… And it never happens.

I am surprised, I crib, I cry, hoping for some answers. And then, I start setting up routines, I create my own order, coffee in the morning, meeting the same old gang of friends every single time after class, making dinner at nine. And every once in a while, I start seeing the monotony of this routine and I wonder why do I need it? Life should be chaotic. I should try to go up on an escalator that’s going down sometime. I should try to sketch and paint sometime. I should open the windows of my room when it’s raining sometime. Just for the heck of it!

In between the clash of order and chaos, I see that I have successfully spent 25 years of my life accomplishing nothing. I don’t like my routines and I don’t like being away from them. It’s a kind of ambivalence that ‘My Dinner with Andre’ leads you into. A state of suspension… A middle ground… Where every single trophy that you have won, every single moment of sheer happiness that you have experienced, every single moment of utter pain that you have been through… seem distant. As if they were moments from somebody else’s life, being run in front of your eyes like a motion picture.

Yes, I do have a complaint against God’s procrastination. If he/she did make us in his/her own image, I guess he/she should have spent the seventh day teaching us his/her language. Life would have been so much easier if we could just imagine it. Imagination is fed by language, if I don’t know the language in which the world was created, how can I ever imagine what’s my purpose in it?

---

But then, I should let God be. I like being an atheist. The world was created by the sheer chance of things working out for our mother planet. There was life and we evolved from a single cell organism. That’s our history. Nothing very fancy to it… Just took a few billion years and here I am watching, ‘My Dinner with Andre.’ The world, that I belong to, has an amazing history. It has some beautiful, eternal stories that nobody would ever forget; stories of courage, love, hate, tragedy, comedy, drama, melodrama, pain, suffering… The world is fascinating in broad strokes.

And I am a part of it. But, then people say that the beauty is in details. While the world might seem fascinating in an encyclopedia, the real world is all about details. Small little details… here and there! Everywhere! Look at how a white sugar cube changes to brown when you make an end of it touch your coffee and you will get a glimpse of what color really is. Look at the wrinkles on the faces of an old couple sitting on a bench and you would realize what being together really means. Read a really bad book end-to-end and you would realize what patience is. Sometimes, we just remember a good coffee, an old couple and a bad book; we just don’t remember the details.

What can I learn here? Should I focus on the broad strokes, should I go for the details? What should I be really doing? I guess there is something to both of them. Like a friend told me, “Run behind one for a while… and when you get bored… run behind the other!” Life seems like a long, meandering, chase scene from 'Ronin'. The good part is that it’s exciting this way; the sad part is that it’s very tiring. It goes against the very idea of stability that everyone seems to want.

My being will always be watered by my past, by our history. In that sense, I don’t have a restart button. It’s a very convenient idea, I tell you! But, it’s a myth. Hence, imagination of my being is probably the additions that I can make to my past, being in the present, hoping for a better future. The future in that sense embeds itself in the imagination of the past. And the present is just a pendulum between what happened and what can be done about it?

---

I wake up every day to see the sun shining down my window. It’s a painter’s delight. Seeing the blue of the sky, merge with the endless yellow of the sun. It’s a combination with infinite possibilities. The sky can possibly surprise me every single day with odd white combinations of clouds, with the moon showing itself beside the sun, with the orange that fills up sky on a sunset. But, I rarely look up into the sky. I keep walking, head down, straight on red strap of a black road. And all that I remember is that I need to reach somewhere and sometime in the future, I will reach there.

Let’s use a cliché. Life is a journey. I keep reaching destinations. While reaching those destinations that eventually become milestones, I set up routines to get me there. But, somehow when I talk to old friends, I can’t possibly imagine telling them about these milestones, without mentioning the insignificant stories that I experienced while I reached there. The milestones are a one-minute conversation. The stories fill-up hours.

All the laughter, all the sorrow, all the excitement, all the fear… everything seems to be in the story. The times when I was awake all night long just to meet a deadline, the times when I made an egg explode in a microwave, the times when rode a bike on a mountain road in pitch darkness without headlights. These stories are so much bigger than the milestone of graduating, learning how to cook and a trip to Leh.

As I watch ‘My Dinner with Andre,’ I understand what being nourished by art means. Art is the singular, most powerful form of expression. If I can’t express my life, if I can’t express my dreams, hopes, aspirations… then I have no sense of the past and the future. And my present would be an utterly confused state of being… looking for words, images, sketches, scribbles… anything to fill up the empty spaces.

---

I remember sitting on a porch in the only small little enclosure that seemed to be dry as it rained all around, wondering if I could ever enjoy a rainfall. If I could just let go of the idea that I always have to be in dry clothes and just enjoy being in the rain. Like a child running madly in his backyard enjoying the pelting drops of water on his face. If I would ever open up my arms and let the wind take me away into its world of freedom for just a brief moment of time. As I kept sitting there wondering, it suddenly struck me that I could do it right then.

There is nothing extra-ordinary about this experience, nothing that changed my world… my being. But, it was one of the most serene moments of my life. A thought converted into action in a brief span of seconds. Harmless as it might be, it is liberating. Imagine a world where there would be no darkness, imagine a world where there is no waste, imagine a world where one does not have to pretend and behave in a socially acceptable norm. As I see this world with bulbs and electricity, with windmills and recycling plants, with underground movements and human rights, I realize that we create our own problems and then we endlessly try to solve them.

When I see a streetlight, I sometimes wonder if I could for once turn it off and just see if the moon is enough. When I look at our science which says that a perpetual motion machine is impossible, I wonder if I could just live in a forest for a bit and just see how it manages to sustain the intricate balance of life so effortlessly. When I see that I have a right to life, I wonder if I also have a right to a way of life. In that sense, as I look into wildlife, I realize that every other species does not necessarily need a right to life, but they always have the right to a way of life. And that is what makes the food chain work.

Imagination is liberated by social thought. As I sit down here at the end of, ‘My Dinner with Andre’… as one of the only two characters in the film looks outside the window of his cab, searching for memories in every street of the city that he has lived in all his life… I wonder how constraining it is to just embed myself within the collection of people around me called society. But, I can’t just live alone! So the only point of liberation that I find is that people around me who feel the same way. At least some of them do. I am looking for my own way of life within millions of people trying to explore their ways of life. And someday I will get there.

---

This is the bee hive that we live in. Where everybody has their own language, where everybody has a past, a present and a future, where everybody tries to express themselves every single day, where everybody should have a right to a way of life. A set of interconnected cells where a change in one cell influences all the cells connected to it. A story of a never-ending chain reaction… The world is brimming with energy and I am glad that I am a part of it. That I can imagine, I can create, I can destroy… and probably I can just be.

(Tribute to 'My Dinner with Andre', The Couch in my Maastricht Room, 31st January, 2010)

Voices from Chernobyl

This is not original. I guess, something so real cannot be created within imagination. But, I must confess that reading Voices from Chernobyl: : The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster changes you. In its own small little way, it makes you aware of the fact that misery has many forms and it has its own life. And sometimes, you just end up praying that you don't encounter this form of it.

I want to bear witness . . .

It happened ten years ago, and it happens to me again every day.

We lived in the town of Pripyat. In that town.

I'm not a writer. I won't be able to describe it. My mind is not capable of understanding it. And neither is my university degree. There you are: a normal person. A little person. You're just like everyone else—you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You're a normal person! And then one day you're suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone's interested in, and that no one knows anything about. You want to be like everyone else, and now you can't. People look at you differently. They ask you: was it scary? How did the station burn? What did you see? And, you know, can you have chil-dren? Did your wife leave you? At first we were all turned into animals. The very word "Chernobyl" is like a signal. Everyone turns their head to look at you. He's from there!

That's how it was in the beginning. We didn't just lose a town, we lost our whole lives. We left on the third day. The reactor was on fire. I remember one of my friends saying, "It smells of reactor." It was an indescribable smell. But the papers were already writing about that. They turned Chernobyl into a house of horrors, although actually they just turned it into a cartoon. I'm only going to tell about what's really mine. My own truth.

It was like this: They announced over the radio that you couldn't take your cats. So we put her in the suitcase. But she didn't want to go, she climbed out. Scratched everyone. You can't take your belongings! All right, I won't take all my belong-ings, I'll take just one belonging. Just one! I need to take my door off the apartment and take it with me. I can't leave the door. I'll cover the entrance with some boards. Our door—it's our talisman, it's a family relic. My father lay on this door. I don't know whose tradition this is, it's not like that everywhere, but my mother told me that the deceased must be placed to lie on the door of his home. He lies there until they bring the coffin. I sat by my father all night, he lay on this door. The house was open. All night. And this door has little etch-marks on it. That's me growing up. It's marked there: first grade, second grade. Seventh. Before the army. And next to that: how my son grew. And my daughter. My whole life is written down on this door. How am I supposed to leave it?

I asked my neighbor, he had a car: "Help me." He gestured toward his head, like, You're not quite right, are you? But I took it with me, that door. At night. On a motorcycle. Through the woods. It was two years later, when our apartment had already been looted and emptied. The police were chasing me. "We'll shoot! We'll shoot!" They thought I was a thief. That's how I stole the door from my own home.

I took my daughter and my wife to the hospital. They had black spots all over their bodies. These spots would appear, then disappear. About the size of a five-kopek coin. But nothing hurt. They did some tests on them. I asked for the results. "It's not for you," they said. I said, "Then for who?"

Back then everyone was saying: "We're going to die, we're going to die. By the year 2000, there won't be any Belarussians left." My daughter was six years old. I'm putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: "Daddy, I want to live, I'm still little." And I had thought she didn't understand anything.

Can you picture seven little girls shaved bald in one room? There were seven of them in the hospital room . . . But enough! That's it! When I talk about it, I have this feeling, my heart tells me—you're betraying them. Because I need to describe it like I'm a stranger. My wife came home from the hospital. She couldn't take it. "It'd be better for her to die than to suffer like this. Or for me to die, so that I don't have to watch anymore." No, enough! That's it! I'm not in any condition. No.

We put her on the door ... on the door that my father lay on. Until they brought a little coffin. It was small, like the box for a large doll. I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it.

Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, father

The Willow Tree (2005)

Change is such an eternal complexity that questions your sense of being. No matter how much you try to force yourself to remain constant, the flux inevitably takes you away into a journey towards a deeper self… something closer to your sense of your presence in the world. Something eclectic; it’s something so utterly unknown that you have to conquer your senses again. Your perceptions, your emotions, your life!

The fascination with the hope of exploring something new always affects your equilibrium, a delicate balance of relationships, connections and friendships that make you the person that you are. It changes your soul. Youssef encounters this change as he is diagnosed with a tumor in his right eye. As he struggles with this news that could possibly mean his death, he writes a note to God and tucks it between the pages of a volume of the Mathnawi, the mystical masterpiece by the Persian Sufi poet Rumi. The note says:

"I'm the one you deprived of the beauties of the world and who never complained. Instead of light and brightness, I lived in darkness and gloom and I didn't protest. I found happiness and peace in this small paradise. Are all these years of suffering not enough that you now want to cause me even more suffering? Will I come back from this trip to my loving family? Will this illness bring me to my knees? To whom should I complain about what you are doing to me? I beg of you to show me more compassion. Don't take my life away."

There is a certain power in events that define your life. As he gets to know later that the tumor is benign and he might actually be able to see after 38 years with a successful cornea transplant… he writes another note.

“I know I was wrong. My biggest mistake was not knowing you well enough. Now I know you didn't cross me off your book of compassion. You didn't forget about me. You're with me and protecting me. If only your goodness could be complete. Now that you've taken my hand, I beg you to lead me all the way. More than anyone else I long for the light. If I come out of this darkness, I'd be with you forever.”

As he struggles, through the night, at the end of which, his bandages would be removed, the inevitable question of change somehow drives his emotions to the point that he takes off his bandages in the night itself. To be able to see! What would it mean to a person who has been blind for 38 years? And suddenly there you are, trapped in the blackhole of his life, as you want to know, how does this notion of a new experience of life, changes him as a person?

Happiness revels in relativity. There is a certain difference between need and want. You might want something desperately, but then you might end up realizing that you don’t really need it. You might need something as a part of your life and you may never realize that you have always wanted it as well. Between the need and the want, happiness is trapped in the vicious circle of wanting things that you don’t need and needing things that you don’t want.

How does your notion of love change with the addition of another sense? How did he perceive his wife before he could see her? He might have imagined her to have the most beautiful face that he could ever see. Because it was her face. There is in no inherent logic to it, he doesn’t even have anything to compare it with as well. But when you can compare, do you stop loving her because there are prettier faces in the world? How does your worldview change when you know that you don’t need anybody to guide you when you are walking down the street? When you have lived under the burden of sympathy all your life, how does it feel to be independent? How does it feel to be free from the entire notion of a support system?

People, who love you, somehow always expect you to remain the same, so that they can love you forever. What happens when you change? Suddenly you encounter a new burden after you have been liberated, the burden of the past; of a dependent life. The freedom that you get is accompanied with the guilt of being free. And suddenly you realize that change is not always beautiful. Within the chaos in which we lead our lives, change has a butterfly effect and you are left to grapple with the consequences.

When his mother finally asks him, “What have you done with your life?”

Youssef suddenly realizes this burden of the past as he shouts, “Does anyone understand how much I've suffered all these miserable years without saying a word? Everyone felt sorry for me. You, my wife, everyone around me. I don't need anyone anymore. I want the life I'm entitled to. I've lost the best years of my life. Look around and see what I've got. Do you call this a life? A handful of nothing? Four trees and a house… I thought was a little paradise? I'm sick of this paradise. I want to live my own life. Yes, I want to live my way!”

And then as if suddenly realizing that he is about to lose the one person he shares the strongest of connections, he asks, “Can you understand that? Can you?”

But, by that time, his mother has already left and he is alone. Loneliness is the one thing that makes you realize that there is no difference between need and want. You need and want the same things. It’s just about perspective. As Youssef struggles to find meaning for his life, he faces another change. His body seems to be rejecting the cornea transplant and he is going blind again.

Everything in the end means nothing and all that you can hope for is another chance. As he struggles through the day when he gets this news, he finally finds the volume of Mathnawi and the first note that he had written.

He places his finger on the first line of the note and it says…

“My God, I am asking you... for another chance... to start a new life!”

Synaesthesia

Splinters of magnificent color… Colors that broke the logic of brightness and contrast, hue and saturation… All that they seemed to obey was the rationale of beauty. Music in that sense was a perfect harmony of colors, of the blues and the yellows that merged together to create the perfect symmetry. Sound was paraphrased into vision. It was surreal and she was lost in the middle of it all. Being deaf had a different meaning for her.

She wondered if it was all because of her love for music. Her acoustic guitar bought at the age of eight was still her most prized possession. She loved playing it while she could still do it before she lost her hearing entirely. Over the years, she had learnt to live without sound, the perfect interaction of chords and strums that made her swing to the music. She loved every bit of the blue notes, the improvisations, the syncopation, the polyrhythm… everything that made life so much more livable.

She had dreaded every moment of the realization that she was going deaf. Life in that sense can be cruel sometimes and living every second with the eternal fear of losing something that is the closest to your heart is utterly painful. Sometimes ignorance is such a bliss. She held onto her guitar for hours, playing till her fingers bled, as she tried to listen to every bit of music that she could before it will all get over.

He wondered if could ever help. If he could ever feel her pain, let her know that he understood how she felt. He knew that she was losing a part of herself and he knew what that meant. He knew that she would never be the same again and he was losing her, the way he had her. In a way, both of them were losing something closest to their hearts. They were both in pain, they were both inconsolable and they both knew that they were the only ones in the whole wide world who could understand each other.

But, things that you love never change. He realized it after he tried everything to make her happy. At the end of it all, he took her to an Opera and she smiled… for the first time after a really long, long time. She enjoyed the reactions that she could see on faces. She enjoyed the composition as it swirled between the high notes and descended into the low notes. She could sense it, she could feel it; she could read music that filled the air. She kissed him as they got back home and he knew that he finally got it right.

He picked up her guitar and gave it to her. She looked at him wondering what it all meant as he asked her to play. She knew everything there was to know to hit the right chords, she remembered her favorite tunes and she started playing… every single one of them. They were awake the whole night as she kept playing and he kept listening… hoping that the night would never end and she would remain as ecstatic as she looked then.

Their days meandered through music which she so desperately wanted to hear. He could sense her pain as she continued playing her guitar and wondered if could ever make her listen to herself. She was creating elegance every time she touched her guitar and he felt helpless listening to all of it, knowing that he could do nothing to make her feel the peace of the music she created.

And then it all happened. Crossing a street in a busy market place, she saw a man playing his guitar, trying to make a living. She went towards him and as she saw him strum, she could suddenly see colors emerging from the chords. Resplendent, beautiful, eternally gorgeous colors. Surprised, she dropped a note in his hat. The man had been hungry for a long time. He took the note and left his guitar for while to get some food. She kept standing there waiting for him to come back. She wanted to see those colors again. She waited some more.

Suddenly, she felt this urge to pick up his guitar and play. She didn’t stop and picked up the guitar. As she played her notes, she could see colors floating around her, everywhere. People started gathering; mesmerized as she kept playing lost in the colors that she created around her. When she stopped, she saw that the entire street had stopped to listen to her. She kept the guitar back and left as the crowd clapped around her.

Her musical journey started all over again. She could see sound; the world was suddenly a lot more beautiful than it ever was. He enjoyed every moment of the realization that he finally had her the same way as she had been ages ago.

Sitting in the middle of a performance by her favorite orchestra that she had grew up listening to; she could see the whole stage covered by colors. He turned his head towards her and saw her smile. He took her hand and as she turned towards him, he saw a glimmer of sadness in her eyes. He squeezed her hand and asked her, "Does it feel the same…?"

She looked at him for a while and nodded her head in 'No.'

He looked at her and then turned his head to the orchestra. He didn’t let go of her hand.

Birthdays and et al!

Dear Amir,

Its strange and weird. I have never understood why do people celebrate the one thing that makes them realize that they are ever-so closer to death. Probably its because the idea is to celebrate what you have done with your lives in all these years and somehow everybody believes that they have done good with their lives. That it matters and somehow the way you lead your life and the choices that you made were the best possible among the options you had.

But, then for people like us, we have always known that we weren't always right. Our life is not the best possible among the set of options that we had in the span of choices that we made over the years. Small little screw-ups here and there, and here we are, an year older, hoping to live our lives a little better than the way we have over these years. Knowing the somehow everything will be alright, if we just let it be.

We look into the eyes of others, people who think that we matter and we see joy in their eyes. They wish to celebrate this damn event of our lives in their small little ways that they think are the best possible ways of celebrating it. We wonder if we can ever feel that joy. We can always sense it, we appreciate it, but I guess we are never able to feel it. Everything is just so reactive at times. We know that as this day comes every year, people all around, people who choose to be with us would celebrate this day and we would be a part of it. Very much there, but still not there. Hoping that we were wished by the one person that we really want to be wished by and that my friend, never really happens and it sucks big time.

All I know is that for people like us, happiness is relatively centered around our uneasiness with the whole setup. We are miserable in our small little worlds and that's what makes us freaking good at what we do. Just knowing that this uneasiness will never fade and hence, we will always keep growing and experimenting... doing new things just to feel a little bit more at ease. After a certain point of time, we will get tired and stop. Hopefully it would be just before we die. But till the time that happens, a birthday is the occasion when we celebrate this uneasiness that resides within us. This damned state of miserable existence that always makes us realize that we could have been so much more than what we are.

I guess, I just wanted you to know that I know exactly how you feel on birthdays, because I feel the same way. But then, shit happens... sometimes through the nose. And I am not saying that its all bad. Its just that its different from the normal idea of celebration that everybody is used to. So, I guess this is the song for your day.

Day to day

Where do you want to be?

coz now you're trying to pick a fight

With everyone you need

You seem like a soldier

Who's lost his composure

You're wounded and playing a waiting game

In no-man's land no-one's to blame

See the world

Find an old fashioned girl

And when all's been said and done

It's the things that are given, not won

Are the things that you want

Empty handed, surrounded by a senseless scene

With nothing of significance

Besides a shadow of a dream

You sound like an old joke

You're worn-out, a bit broke

An' askin me time and time again

When the answer's still the same

See the world

Find an old fashioned girl

And when all's been said and done

It's the things that are given, not won

Are the things that you want

You've got a chance to put things right

So how's it going to be?

Lay down your arms now

And put us beyond doubt

So reach out it's not too far away

Don't mess around now, don't delay

See the world

Find an old fashioned girl

And when all's been said and done

It's the things that are given, not won

Are the things that you want

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKJJRnuCwF4

Happy Birthday, my friend. I hope we see the world together.

- Shashank