The scrawl mnemonic

I must confess that when I began this blog I imagined that it would be an outlet to the frustrations of having to make myself understandable to people I met and knew through everyday life - who did not share my passion for academic and exculpatory idiomatic usage of language as a proven means to make the hours go by more easily. I did maintain a diary for years before, and I still sometimes make notes with pen and paper when I am reading something that catches the eye, unless, that is, I am feeling terribly lazy at the time. But stream-of-consciousness was the guiding principle and even finds mention in this blog's description that I have adamantly refused to change, cringe-worthy though it reads every time I happen to glance at the right column through a perusal.
But the means to put ideas - converted to barely communicable thoughts - filtered by the constant terror of being found out as basely ignorant - to the final result that one sees on the page, hasn't really changed through the years. I start out with a feeling that I need to say something and a bare concept of what I intend to say and then bring together the means by which the transposition takes place. So the concept of voice-driven writing that seems to be the next inexorable step in the writer's evolution toward being a content-creator, is grounds for umbrage to what seems an engineered debacle in the offing directed wholly at me.
It has taken me years to develop a speaking style that is in direct contradiction to the way I write, and the dissimilarity extends even to the communication of interests, hobbies, pleasures and needs that I make based on the platform in question. People who know me primarily as a speaking person have quite a different idea about me from those who have never met me but read what I write and put out there for consumption. Those unlucky few who have had the misfortune of knowing both sides of the spectrum that my articulation affords, come away shaking their heads at a confusing encounter with bare-faced dishonesty, none the wiser for it.
But an amalgamation of the two, the mosh pit of the worst kind, a single kind of expression that never allows you to take back or pause mid-way through a description, and change, add, multiply and always, always subtract from the convoluted smorgasbord that your mind makes you believe is a cultivated line of thought is ... is... is... subversiveness of the vilest kind.
My deepest respect to the views of Plato, Mark Twain, Henry James and Dostoevsky, not to mention dear blind Milton, but I'm with Heidegger on this one. After all, who would I be without my furiously fingered doppelgänger?

Siege mentality

It took me months to get through Open City and every moment spent on each delectable page slowly encouraged what very nearly can be described as hero-worship of the author... until that very fact began to worry me.

I must go back a little in time to the first discovery - to the viral Joseph Kony video and Cole's comments made first on Twitter which were then reported widely to much guilt-driven angst in the western media. The comments, when I first read them, immediately awoke a long suppressed urge to shout out from the rooftops - in exasperation at my shame at not giving vent to a similar outpouring of outrage, in general condescension at the white-man's-burden-redux circa 2012, and in unabashed glee at an encounter (at long-last) with the latent courage that every person living in the Third World learns at their mother's knee to suppress when dealing with western reportage of areas of the world that closely, remarkably, reflect their own conditions of life.
Run, I did, after a quick search for works by the author, to Open City, and with each turn of a page, my unease at a nagging horrible doubt grew - that the reason I was enjoying myself so much was only because I knew the race and antecedents of the author beforehand and was placing that knowledge in context with the subject material of the novel. That doubt thankfully died when I reached the part when Julius accompanies his girlfriend Nadége to a potential-immigrant detention center on the outskirts of New York and begins to describe her walk across the grounds and how it was the first time he was noticing her deformity. After that revelation, it was easier to settle down to the tempo of the book, and take in the remarkable self-absorption of Julius - in a portrayal of a singular life that I do not doubt the city of  New York can afford the well-to-do immigrant.
There were, of course, occasions when I wondered when, in relation to the timeline of the book, Julius was accessing his historical facts about the various places he wandered about in. And the references to the classical music which washed over me without leaving much of an imprint. But Cole's distinctive stamp is marked on the descriptions of the art in the novel, and Julius' interactions with the character, Farouk, that gives expression to a certain nuance in subjectivity that seems dangerously absent in the discussions we have these days about fundamentalism and our reactions to cultural encounters that are not bound by regional and national identity. It must also be said that Julius' feelings about the event of 9/11 (again, in relation to his discussions with Farouk) seems out-of-character, but only in terms of the character being drawn for us in the first-person by Julius himself. It leaves the door open to a question that, outside the U.S. and the Western world, very many reviewers would be perfectly within their rights to ask - about how a person like Julius whose obvious distance from cultural aspects that affect his own identity would come to feel so strongly about the violence visited on a few thousand people who are not related to him in any way, in a city that he would only later make his own.

I read the last few pages with the dread that the looming sight of the bottom of a glass of finely matured whisky or wine must arouse in a connoisseur.

A room with a view

It's important that I put this post in context before I begin articulating my reactions to the matter at hand i.e. a subjective reading of Katherine Boo's, 'Behind the Beautiful Forevers' that I completed the day-before-yesterday.
1. I am one of those who might have probably paraded a visage of cultivated distaste on looking out through an upper-level window from one of the star hotels around Annawadi to catch a glimpse of slum, spoiling the vista-view.
2. I am one of those who would not have had the time or inclination through my years of living in Mumbai to venture beyond the familiar boundaries of the Western Express highway to investigate a locality built around a sewage lake.
3. I did drive through the city on the day after the 26/11 attacks on my way to the international airport, and only registered the eerie calm that Mumbai seemed to be enveloped in without ever thinking about what the individuals that constitute its approximately 20.5 million population were thinking.

I am a product of my upbringing, my religion, my culture and my geography. What all those factors instilled in me at a very early age was a very real fear of the 'other' that followed me around wherever I happened to go and right into middle age. The 'other', in my case, isn't an easy encapsulation of persons in any way removed from the physicality, the plan of language and the access to material goods and services of those who were constantly around me. The definition of the 'other' in the class I belonged to constituted all those who spent all day, every day, performing tasks that my peers deemed extraneous to their perceived roles as those with a 'future'.

Parallels can be drawn between that 'sense of a future' from the treacherously oblivious childhood of mine, to the sagas of Asha and Zehrunisia and all that they do in their disparate ways to raise themselves and their families above the circumstances they find their lives caught in. But the main reason the lines will never intersect is that the access to that future is not obstructed by the humdrum and unpleasantness of daily living that we, the overlords of the overcity, have never bothered ourselves with. We have access to leisure, the time to think about things and the ability and resources to dream about what can be.
One of the main highlights of Katherine Boo's celebrated book is the portrayal of that disparity - the reality behind the dirty saris, the sweaty smelly bodies, the marked cynical lines on faces. There is no hiding from it, no literary relief as in most other portrayals of the city - of descriptions of Bollywood, forays into manic entrepreneurship or the romantic depictions of the main players in the game of corruption that runs through the city like a swollen river that bursts its banks at regular intervals. No wonder that the character most easily read in the book for me, despite my natural resistance to it, was Manju - the doyenne of a relatively privileged sangfroid that I could subliminally relate to.

Through the reading, I questioned, I found myself answered (especially on the vexing issue of why overt violence does not break out from beyond the slums more regularly), and I cringed and cringed and cringed at my complicity. A brave, brave, brave book by any standard.