Sanity>Serendipity aka Normalcy>Writing

Really, if you are looking for connections, they will pop up everywhere. EVERYwhere!

As far fetched as this:
(After having (auto-) evoked interest in Jeet Thayil, I look him up online. I find some forum, in which [verbatim]:)

Jai Malhar

Sep 24 2004, 12:38 AM

What do you think of Jeet Thayil? I once wandered into a book store and there was some desi looking dude reading poetry in a sombre voice, like somebody had just died, but I sat down and liked what he was reading. Later, I looked up his name in the bookstore's schedule of readings and found the name Jeet Thayil. Since then, I have looked upon him as some sort of a protege of mine, for no good reason of course. I haven't read any of his poetry, but still, I look at his career with great avuncular interest.

*** bohemian behenji

Sep 24 2004, 12:59 AM

so miya malhar ji, are the troops that you lead all poets? your comment about jeet thayil being your protege intrigues me. so you write poetry? i was not terribly impressed with jeet's poems. they reek of '21st century wastelandesque' angst. not that that's a bad thing:) just not my kind of thing. will ruminate some more on thayil and give you my response best, bb

*** Jai Malhar

Sep 24 2004, 01:29 AM

Bhenji, Of course I don't write poetry. I can barely write prose. I regard him as a protege because I once walked into a book store and he was reading poetry. This sort of thing forms a bond. It's a guy thing.

***

Now quite apart from the fact that I have an irrational dislike for "best" as a signoff, this bb character seems to be one of those classic asking-the-obvious types.
But that aside, I'm even seeing this Jai Malhar's attitude as a marvelous coincidence, because I feel the same way about so many artistes whom I discover.
Have now given self kick and advised self to control impulse to create serendipity.


If this made no sense whatsoever to you, dear co-crawler of cyberspace, it just goes to show how far gone I am.
Sigh.
I'm going to go study Economics now. P.S. Poor JM and bb are in for a shock next time they Google themselves (oh wait, don't tell me even that is something only I do?!)

The poetic and the prosaic

I went to a Landmark today, the Fox Books in India these days, it seems. My dad was promoted recently; what this translates to, in real terms, is among other things a car-and-driver at disposal. Anyone's disposal. The per day mileage limit is so huge that Lucknow could not possibly use it all up. We've even been to Kanpur and back.

Anyway.
So I had the car today, much to my discomfort; not being used to royal treatment and all. So I had to deliver my day's plan to the folks first, before I could just up it and go, like I could if I didn't have to see if the driver had time for lunch, etc. etc. etc. But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth.

My first stop was Wave, a mall on the side of my house closer to Polytechnic and further from Hazratganj, where I was headed next. I went up to Landmark first, with Kundera on my mind. I just finished Ignorance, and after The Unbearable Lightness of Being and now this, I wanted more. As it happened, I found The Art of the Novel, which had been recommended. When I read the blurb, and the first few pages, I put it down. Sadly, this is exactly the kind of stuff I don't want to read right now. As if Terry Eagleton is not enough, not to mention Gauri Viswanathan, Edward Said, Raymond Williams and countless others whom I have to read as part of the English Hons. syllabus.
Then I didn't pick up Life is Elsewhere, [although come on, that's such a lovely title; like The Sun Also Rises. Sigh.] because I have an ebook version. Free.
There was also Testaments Betrayed, which was just a tad too obscure. Even for me.

So I wandered around.
Then I remembered S mentioning a book on Delhi, something that had gone out of and come back into print. Of course I had no clue what it was called.
So I go to the counter and ask the woman there to run a search on all books with "Delhi" in the title. She says But that'll show you even travel guides and stuff. I say Fine, I'll look. The list wasn't very long anyway, but nothing familiar showed up.
I call S, who is mercifully not asleep at 1 pm, and ask

- So what is that book on Delhi?
- City of Djinns.
- [No. Geez.] The one with kabootarbaazi in it (why it had been mentioned in the first place)?
- Oh, um, er.
- [Great.]
- No, wait.
- [Uh-huh. Lovely. Balance running out. Roaming charges. Drat. MTNL phones can't be recharged in non-Mahanagar towns.] Author?
- Er...Aijaz Ahmed...
- Can't be!
- No, no, something like that...
Something about...um...
AHMAD ALI!

The woman looks, finds it,
Twilight in Delhi! J and S yell.

Sigh of relief. Ok, got it.

- It's not in stock. You can place an order though.
- Does that mean I have to buy it?
Tough. I like a little leeway, man. That's why I hate the college Reference Section. You can't browse.

So I place the bloody order. There are by the way 3 hits for this search, Rs. 95, 195 and 295. Naturally I want the first one. Turns out that was from the 1993 inventory. So now it's either 195 or 100 more. No prizes for guessing which one I picked.

Khair, still undaunted, I continue to browse. After looking through a depressing Non-Fiction section which is full of terrorism and religions of saffron and all other colours, I return in the general direction of Kundera, and then decide to spice up my life by going to the other side of the same shelf (which you can't lean against, by the way, it just slides away!).
Then a board boldly declares, POETRY, so I look for Emily Dickinson, whom I didn't buy in Daryaganj last time; I spent my last bit 150 bucks there on a jacket instead. No, poetry does NOT keep me warm.
I don't find her, but stumble instead upon Jeet Thayil, whose name I had heard [here] only recently, not knowing he was a poet. So to create serendipity, I opened These Errors Are Correct and found a poem called 'My Paris'. I read,

Maybe on the Metro
singing my three and a half songs

I like this line so much (and of course one of the songs I knew, but anyway) that I wanted to copy it down. So I take out my handy pen and notepad and begin to write.
As finish writing Maybe, this chap in Landmark sanctioned uniform comes and says

- Madam yeh allowed nahin hai.
- Kya?
- Copying.
- Are you serious?
- Yes, Ma'am, yeh allowed nahin hai.
- So you mean I should memorize this?
- Memorize kar lijiye...
- You realize you're killing any creative impulse.
- Ma'am...
- MAYBE ON THE METRO
SINGING MY THREE AND A HALF SONGS. Not going to forget this anytime soon. [Fume and storm out happily]

Yes, it was unnecessary. I agree.
Perhaps I just needed to vent somewhere.

Now what's eating me is that S was the one who recommended The Art of the Novel, which I didn't like, and S who recommended Twilight in Delhi. Hmm. Hakuna matata.

Did I mention I also bought much-needed new shoes today? And also much-needed second pair of jeans?

So not a wasted day after all!

Of late, he had caught himself, only too often, asking her the same questions he had asked and been asked once, long ago. What perfume are you wearing? Where do you go when you want to disappear?

He felt the need to keep notes. Compare them. Place her reactions and the reactions of someone else, long ago, side by side and see how similar, how different they were from each other. There was no way to stop, he knew. Do you realise what high standards we are setting for anybody else?

She had taught him how to love, it was a life skill as far as he was concerned. He wondered sometimes if she had only meant to teach him to love her, what she would think if she heard her own words being used, misused.

It was not guilt that he felt, not really. More a niggling sense of plagiarism. He copied her ways, having known no other. After a point every woman looked the same, faceless, no personality. And yet she was so fallible. It never did appeal to his ordered mind, this capacity for human error. She filled his life, even as he forgot her, with old habits. It was not love, not even its dregs, but the ghost feeling that one has after taking off a watch worn for years together.

The ditty came back to him. Doggerel. Where do words like this come from? So unaesthetic to even an unpretentitous ear.
He had to stop reading, mid sentence, put his book down. He blinked. The feeling went away. He went back to reading. It struck him that the feeling assailed him when his brain was clear. He read away, with more concentration.

Amreeka!

(So) how are we to free our selves from what the Pa rents said?
(The) Pa rents rule our lives when li ving; ev en when they're dead!
(A) me ri cans can talk to shrinks, and hosts of break fast shows;
(In) In di a we live with what we get un til it grows
(Un) bear a ble to des per a tion, and we mis con clude
(Ki) "Am ree ka hi theek hai, boss, this coun try is toh screwed!"



* * *



This was written on the spur of the moment, but these days I'm less and less inclined to believe that poetry (to misquote the greatest Romantic poet) is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, and more and more that it is recollected (in tranquility, or not!).
Anyway, I wanted to play around with meter and rhythm, and was curious to see what happens to the scansion of the lines, especially the Hindi words, when they're exaggeratedly highlighted.

I remembered the book I was reading this summer, hunting for inspiration or direction while composing Wind, Sand and Stars:
Music Composition for Dummies. Yes, there such a book. The book mentioned natural speech rhythms, and I found it really fascinating: another thing I have always been interested in is mapping the frequencies of speech, not just "nervous=shrill", but a Speech Pattern Graph.

This little stanza is an attempt to capture the natural cadence of what is, I suppose, urban Indian speech.

The emphasis, in decreasing order, is:
bold italics > bold > regular > (parenthesised)

Last Call

Long, torturous conversations
devoid of body language,
all wit and pleasantry
till we started to feel.

Stories came out,
secrets
and not so secrets.

We fell
not in love
but into memory
which is older and richer.

[Untitled]

I was watching a kite as he desperately flapped his wings for a breath of warm air to lift him up; someone asked me why I was standing there. He escaped, and in that split second I knew, once again, nothing about him and his flights of futility, searching, anguish in his heart, for a whisper of the familiar truth. "Metaphore, metaphore", they cried to him, and no avail.

***

Neruda wrote of love, war and the unreachable heights of Macchu Pichu. Dali painted compositions exquisite: never had a rose been so filled with latent potency, poisonously floating above a matte lanscape of clocks, cesspools and slow decay in a desert land. The man in the bowler hat stood still at that mysterious threshold, the murky sea roaring silently behind him, never spraying his suit, time never slowing enough to let that apple fall from its suspended place. Monet held the light in his hands, letting it fall by degrees on the grass, the trees, the sky. David stood alone, the sadness in his eyes invisible to anyone who could not see past his sinews. The spark from the Creation of Adam came and rent his heart to the very core. Cambell's soupcan said silently to him, "Metaphore, metaphore".

***

Massimo stood before his mirror and wondered. What was it that made him fall in love with these things? They were so different. No, disparate, he corrected. Dark eyes looked out from the glass but not at him. Everything was like everything else. But they were called by different names. What was this Surrealism? Even the sunset on the shingled beach off the chalk cliffs was surreal to him. What was this Renaissance? Was not everything ever created a re-naissance of something else, something older?

These categories defeated him. He did not know what to do. When he wrote prose, it came out in iambs and turned into poetry. When he wrote poetry, it emerged in long, torturous lines which coalesced spontaneously into paragraphs and indented the first in every one.

Massimo scratched the front of his old jeans. He loved that sound, the feeling of that friction under his nails. The ginger cat came and went yet again, always returning in its constant emaciatedness to remind him - you eat, I get nothing. You make money, I get nothing. You are educated, you have access to Art, Culture, Music. I have nothing.

The cat was everything that was wrong with the world. Gripped by the old, inexorable guilt every time he saw the cat, he shut it out of sight but could not shut it out of his mind. He grimaced at the automatic pun that hit him. Maybe he was out of his mind. After all, he just realised that his sneaking suspicion had been confirmed, yet again. This cat was no ordinary cat. "Metaphore, metaphore", it called out to him in his language.

Schrödinger kicked in his grave. Any moment now, thought Massimo, I will realise that all the things in the world I had not attributed to Schrödinger's ephemeral cat also came from nowhere else, and will also conglomerate into one hideous heterogeneous ball of energy, only to Big Bang into the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is really the First Law of Everything: "Entropy Increaseth".

Massimo looked down at the newspaper which had carried his first review. "Postmodern" was there even in the title. That word irked him no end. It had been a year since that review and he had not been able to shoot himself. The gun lay in the drawer silently, as before. To shoot himself, he reflected, was to make too strong a statement. His grave, he continued to reflect, should carry an epitaph - monument. A single epigram would not do for his epitaph. How would he explain all his multiplicity of contents?

In a flash, the gun was out, two sharp reports were heard, and Massimo's brains were found spattered all over the Edwardian furniture, Warhol reproductions and his own prosetry.

His epitaph has one line on it: "And all for want of a horseshoe nail".

The cat lies buried at his feet, conquered.

Conquered? Massimo's life is over. The cat has nine to go.

Foucault's Pendulum

Why exactly I wrote this I have forgotten, it's been a few months since I finished reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. But it really hits you, the novel, despite the multitude of references, cross-references, obscurities. The plot is brilliant, as is the Plan. Terrifyingly so. It's a scary book, especially if you are like me, and like your regular little dose of fiction. If you must read it, go ahead. But I really don't know if it's worth the trouble with the Templars, the Rosicrusians and the workings of Garamond. The milieu is just as specific as the plot is universal.

Incidentally, I picked up this book because the title had been eyeing me (not, I don't mean it the other way round. Haven't you ever felt a book or painting or song follow you?). As it turned out, Foucault was not, as I had imagined, Michel Foucault, but Léon Foucault. So fortuitous incidents sometimes backfire. So much for instinctively buying a book. Instinct was so awry this time that I bought it at Midland [South Extension-I, New Delhi. Opposite the bhelpuri-juice wala], one of my preferred bookstores (they always have a discount on pretty much everything in the shop) for just over 200 bucks, only to find the same edition, no less pirated-looking, in Daryaganj [Sunday pavement book bazaar in Old Delhi.] for 60 a few weeks later.


He's like Belbo. Abulafia was his own child. His child took over his mind. Aglie and all the rest, the taxidermist Salon, everyone - they're all Abulafia's children, descendents of his own mind. If they hadn't killed him he would have killed himself. Hell, he is killing himself, by spawning all these little incubated creatures.

The Plan's going to kill him. Amparo's left. She couldn't come to terms with her own feelings. She didn't know whether she belonged or she didn't. No one handed her an agogo. What had happened was her own personal problem. That's why I left. I had to deal with things on my own. If he kills himself, I can't do anything from here anyway.

If even the Thing couldn't keep him, what's the use of this thing I thought we had made together.

I am everyone. Amparo, confused; the Diabolicals, convinced; Casaubon, incomplete; Diatollevi, dying, spewing shit even then, Lia. Lia, Lia. Shining like an inelegant wet-nurse.

Jesus.

I think I just might go buy The Name of the Rose as well. The thing is, if it's not so important to remember detail, this book is remember-ed and -able.

Mind F*** of a novel.

There's that thing written on my wall in my ex-room in the hostel:

Universality is a function of ignorance.
When you know only a few chords, every song sounds like the last.

The Cow Paradigm

"Cow [sic.] is a useful animal. It has four legs, one tail. It gives us milk..."

Sound familiar? This is the beginning of the standard essay entitled "Cow [sic.]", which every school student, I think, in India has written at some point in English, Hindi or some other language. The archetypal Cow was a saviour of sorts for me when I was a child. Of course, the whole theory was never really tested, but then we were taught to think first, then act. Thought experiments are important in my home. The Cow Paradigm is a fanciful name given to this theory of Appa's that everything can be boiled down to this one Cow Essay. Pick a word, any word. [Here's what my roommate came up with; this is a real-time experiment] Say the word "lamp": Allora,

The lamp in our room has not been turned on because it has a 50 Watt bulb which can light up a 10 and a half foot by 9 foot room up like an oven on a cold day, and like a blast furnace on a day which averaged 40 degrees C in the shade (of the room!). What I wouldn't give to have no clothes on when I am outside in the sun; like the cows that sit in puddles all day, naked, listless. The Cow is a useful animal...[ad nauseum]

And this, mon ami, is pure poetry compared to the crass ones we made up as kids! You don't believe me? Don't think it's a Universal? It's just the kind of thing the Diabolicals would love! But do try it, I'm just too bored to type one more now; I've done this with too many people too many times!

Catch-22 and The Emperor's New Clothes

I wrote a 'paper' on Catch-22 just over a month ago. It won a (negligible) prize at this Paper Presentation contest we had at college during Litmus, the English Department fest.

Now here's the deal:

a. I wrote this for a lark
b. I had not been able to finish Catch-22 ever before, having started to read it at least thrice. It was a challenge.
c. I wanted to see just how much I can use my faffing skills, to pusk faffdom to its utmost limit: that was the goal.

Apparently I achieved it too.

The only one who seemed to see through me was SC.

SC was congratulating all the 'winners' after the results came out, but she didn't say a word to me. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, now, but I think she didn't know what to make of my 'paper'. To acknowledge that it was just a hoax would have been out of the question, right? I mean the Establishment can't do that, can it? But then it was obviously (well, to me, at least!) not a serious academic effort. I should have thought it was obvious to everyone else too. Anyway, you never know with SC.

It struck me that there were enough phonies^ in that room to say, "Jolly good, old chap, impeccacable delivery, it was rather intriguing the way you grappled with these ideas". Well not exactly that, but that drift.

For god's sake, my 'paper' was called

Yossarian and Murphy: The Greatest Conspiracy (Theorists) of our Time Or Which came first? The Conspiracy or the Theorists?

I would have had a good laugh, given the presenter a friendly pat on the back, and said a person who tries to pass this off as a Paper should try for the Ignobel instead.

It's quite scary how far the ole faffin' can take you. Remember Stephen Glass? Oh boy.

//This post has been written in a rather perfunctory manner due to constant net connectivity problems and the fact that this machine keeps rebooting of its own accord, this rudely breaks the train of thought; perhaps I shall edit it later, but I doubt it. In any case, as I told a friend, I have just shelved this piece away for future amusement value and plan never to write like this again. *fingers crossed behind back*//

//Oh, I remembered now what I was going to say. Baba once wrote an article to the Lucknow city supplement of either Hindustan Times or The Times of India, I forget which. It was titled "My Girlfriend is a Handbag". No kidding. It was to see if they would actually run something which sounded so patently stupid. Guess what? They did! And with a picture of a handbag and everything. All it said was that guys think their girlfriends are just fancy accessories to show off, nothing more subversive than that! but isn't it incredible what rot people will print?

This whole thing reminds me of that episode in the Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night

//

^ Yes, yes, Caulfield's got a Holden me!

Janpath opens out at Godin!

My Quest for the Elusive Curio is under way. Meanwhile, I spy a softie guy just outside Regal. 5 bucks. It says 'Strawberry' and 'Vanilla'. So I ask for one, saying 'vanilla'. The guy takes out a cone and has it poised under the orifice (why that word, blech!), then suddenly says, "Madam, Vanilla Strawberry mixed hai, chalega?" To which I nod. It tastes only of ice anyway, so I don't mind. I nearly run into a bunch of very Italian(bodylanguage)-sounding although I am too short and too preoccupied to notice their faces. Accha, then am walkingwalkingwalking and spot an SBI atm, the numbers of which you can really never have enough of. And when I stop there I realise I am at Godin! I go in, with trepidation and look around (read "I yearn for you tragically".)There is one firang there having a sitar looked at by two people. Then there is a (very Bengali) Gentleman at the counter. I ask, rueing it even as I do, "Do you mind if I try out some of the pianos?" The Gentleman looks at me with a mixture of pity, disdain and pure astonishment (now this is some look!) and says something to the effect of "Yes! As a matter of fact, I do!" (which should be accompanied by a large dose of le aire d'indignation*) But of course, I don't remmber verbatim, as I was distracted by that expression. Priceless. And shame, the feeling of feeling two foot small. Anyway, it was a No. Then I tried saying my school was interested in ordering a piano, etc. etc. Spiel. He said if I waited fifteen minutes I could speak to the Manager. I slunk off. Meanwhile, I exit and see some two un.kal jis walking down, and engaged in some apparently highly riveting discussion. I ask, "Excuse me, Scindia House ke liye kidhar se jaana hai?" (And make mental note that 'kidhar' is a Bombay word, not a Delhi word. Khair,) One asks, "Bus se jaana hai ki paidal?" Funny question. As it happens, I have to go there on foot and catch a bus at Scindia House. I explain this confusedly. "Kyun?" (Kyun, what? I wonder. It seems show the same on face, since reply comes,) "Kaunsi bus pakadni hai?" "M-13." "Accha, accha, tab theek hai." The other one takes charge. Busily says I can go from (and points back to where would retrace my steps. The route I would have taken too). But then adds that it is better to go from (and points to straight ahead, into what dawns on me, is Janpath's right angled offshoot: it's back end). Says I will run into charsis on the other route. (Inexplicably, I smile to myself at his squirmishness when he lets that slip). Then he paraphrases with difficulty, substituting some words equivalent to 'bad men'. I go down Janpath. Do not make a pitstop this time at one of my favourite places in the city, that little cubbyhole book-shack which is sometimes camouflaged by clothes. ( Had asked the old guy there last time where the books all came from; he was vague. Continue to find weird stuff there. And histories in the fly-leafs **. I like him. ) As it were, the Quest for the Elusive Curio is still on. (* no, this is NOT real French, for godssake! ** yaar, sometimes '-leaves' is just plain WRONG) // This Godin page i've linked to just makes me feel strange. Elitists! I exclaim. But I also stand in reverence. And understand why Appa didn't let me even ask last time we were there. Yes, sometimes parents do know. I also make mental note to find excuse to go to GeGe's place soon, and play her piano.