Parallel worlds

I suppose everyone has had a certain experience of life wherein the primary occurrence of the moment is so weighed down by monumental and paradigm-shifting cataclysmic import, built up over months and years to hysterical levels... that almost every other important incident that happened at the time is over-shadowed so completely that, except in the dark recesses of an old-age memory, all traces disappear leaving one feeling the loss of an intimacy never remembered but which nonetheless did occur. That is not the case with me and 'The Wire', thankfully.

Introduced to it by the same close friend who once introduced me to Facebook, it did take some time before I found the time and the inclination to download all five seasons of the show in an area of the world where I can't imagine it appealing to a wide audience that would justify the television syndication. Hence the jugaad in access, though I doubt that David Simon or Ed Burns would mind. It is a piece of online piracy that has least affected my sense of propriety, and for a show that thrives on the depiction of an almost elemental face-off between the forces of an enervated Jekyll and a resplendent Hyde in the human condition, I admit that a sense of ironic vindication does assault me when I do care to think about it.

'The Wire' is everything filmed fiction should aspire to be. It is omniscient, omnipresent and fantastically layered within the universe of tortured souls it creates, and it is a story told through the eyes of the uninitiated, wide-eyed, uncool, wannabe, opaque, sentimental, foolishly naive and dangerously earnest characters that all of us might very well have been in a parallel universe. There have been reviews of the show where the writers warn the viewer that one must be prepared to invest oneself psychologically and emotionally in the fiction, forgetting the clock and leaving one's fast-food television habits behind, but I suspect that advice appeals to a certain audience that will never understand how crucial fiction is to the lives we lead. There are other reviews I have read where the writers elevate a particular season over another and discuss the historical and enigmatic significance of a particular episode or character portrayal, but all that amounts to, I believe, is a grasping at straws in the aftermath of a forest fire. There is nothing in The Wire that is superfluous (except some of the sex scenes) and how that reality accommodates such complex explorations into the dreams and hopes of an entire city both at an individual and societal level is a mystery best savored when the rest of the world is asleep and you are alone in a dark space in absolute silence pondering the depths of human nature.

I moved countries during 'The Wire'. I left my extended family, my culture and a fair few significant graves behind in my migration from the third to the first world during the second half of the third season. I set up home all over again in a continent where the only thing standing between oblivion and despair is a plethora of walkways and children's playgrounds and the anguish of a girl not yet three at being forced to leave them when it gets too dark to be out, as I relished the fourth season. I can't wait to see the fifth.

Mea Culpa

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa... I am Guilty. Guilty of turning my back on a society that has given me life and liberty, and the aspiration to believe that I can change the circumstances of my own life, if not the lives of other people. Guilty of disregarding countless millions of poverty-stricken lives in cities, towns and villages across the country whose misery has been compounded by my geometrically progressive consumption of products and services over the three decades since I was born. Guilty of imagining a world where my daughter doesn't have to excuse herself for thoughts, feelings and/or practicing a lifestyle that are at odds with culturally accepted norms. Guilty of being ashamed of representative local municipal councils or state legislatures or national parliaments that are constituted of members who celebrate having hit the jackpot, both figuratively and literally, upon being elected. Guilty of worrying about disease when unintentionally touched or handling cash or using a public toilet or looking at the garbage piling up at the side of the road to which I have made my own personal inarguable contribution. Guilty of being continually and unconsciously class and caste conscious when dealing with everyone from teachers to public servants to blue collar workers to waiters to the domestic help at home. Guilty of believing that I could escape this life along with my family to a chimeric state of geographic and psychological well-being where equal-opportunity, fairness and dignity are not just hollow jokes being lasciviously perpetrated on you by an idol or symbol resident in a holy place whose pedantic tenets are so far removed from your experience of life that it becomes incumbent upon you to lose your faith lest you insult your own intelligence.

Once upon a time, I was a smoker

When the history of the contemporary world is studied by future wide-eyed eccentrics who for some reason choose to focus on an era when humanity's sense of itself was arguably the most conflicted, there will undoubtedly be a collective gasp of breath at the sheer indiscretion with which so many people chose to poison themselves with a small white paper tube stuffed with all manner of vegetable and chemical matter known to cause prolonged and painful deaths.
But what these poor students will never know is the fleeting sense of unalloyed abandon implicit in the act of actually putting paper to lip and drawing on a heady whiff of freedom that flew in the face of reason, individual responsibility and a sense of communion with a discredited wider world made up of bleeding heart evangelicals who nobody in their right minds would want in any way to be associated with, anyway.
I was a smoker for fifteen years, and I remember the exact ambiance when I had my first cigarette as, I suspect, I will remember the exact circumstances in which I smoked my last cigarette recently. People choose to start and stop smoking for a variety of reasons, most of which are interesting only to themselves, but the emotions surrounding the severing of ties with a hitherto lifelong and loyal companion that made relatively few demands on time, money and thought compared to a lot of other less lethal vices, are, I'm sure, common to all ex-smokers. There is first a keen sense of loss, followed by a steeling of the will, followed by a morose nostalgia for the once-intimate taste, and eventually gratification - at escaping an addiction that you once thought you would take to the grave with you.
That the time has come to ban a 7000-year old unhealthy custom is self-evident. What is not self-evident is that when that time comes there will be a sudden explosion of goodwill, health and prosperity across classes of people who have for long been so disenfranchised, disenchanted and dispirited that they once relied on a product that guaranteed one a minute of quiet self-absorbed reflection that no one could take away from them.