me, money, relations

Songs that soothe shall stay incomple for some more time, for other ideas and concerns, ostensibly of more immediate, fundamental and intimate relevance, have taken me over since. It is necessary to record them here with some clarity, for until I do so, they do not appear to be inclined to release my autonomy of thinking and sinking, if you see what I mean. There is a way of doing things and i cannot always be bypassing the straight and the narrow only because it is narrow. Typically, one has to begin with a narrative account of events that implels one to think or rethink one's ideas about life, philosophy and one's philosophy of life. Then one proceeds to flesh out such thoughts or queries so far as one has been able to understand, and articulate them, if not resolve them altogether, so that others, more comptetent perhaps, can pick up the threads someday and approach those questions from a different angle and ,inshallah, offer a more acceptable resolution. I am deeply grateful to blogspot for alloting me this space for free. Now I can not only inflict myself on others, but also hope that others will come round and pull me out of my horns of dilemma. Obviously, since they cannot pull me by the hand or by the scruff of my neck for strategic reasons, they will pull me by my legs and I am resigned to that fate. Has been working on my stretching last few months, years perhaps, real hard. Still remain in one piece, so hey folks I am game for all that. Fell free to pull me up.

When one gets down to narrating events, one runs a very genuine risk of losing oneself in the maze of events and their multiple possible interpretations so much that one often refuses to venture beyond the immediacy of a given event and medidate thoughtfully on the general significance of such events on one's understanding of people and interpersonal and even social and professionals relations. Having convinced myself that each individual is a complete entity in herself/himself, I had been for the past many years paying only inadequate attention to the collective identities of men and women. I need not be that harsh on me perhaps but broadly that does some up my personal belief over the years. That means that I have been focussing so far, disproportionately, to the individual selves of each and every human being I came across, saw, heard of, read about and so on. In turn, I got caught up in devising very 'individual' responses to each of these characters; so much so that I had probably forgotten that the world is a society made up of men and women and not a spatial expanse where essentially distinct individuals live out their physical existence. Too much of Richard Bach at teenage or two many of bollywood movies when mom was away at office, struggling to feed her two kids all alone? I don't know, I just became, over the years a self obsessed gragarious loner. I wanted everyone to meet me on my terms, convinced that I am meeting them on their terms, without ever bothering to ask them the question. I needed that shell of ceratainly to survive those years and I am very grateful to those books and movies; they nursed me when none was around, or frothcoming, or too scared or disgusted to have to spend time with an enfant terrible. I sought out comapny, not many liked my appearence or demeanour or behaviour but the books and movies never turned me away. They gave me all my dreams. In a very real sense they took over the task my father had left incomplete, those chats on the bed during half-awake nights about stars and forests and adventures and English literature and promises of hitting the road together some day. A great man who did nothing great in life except bequeathing me his dreams. Those dreams used to haunt me like millstones on my neck till very recently, and I had on sveral occassions burst out in anger and despair but he was never around for a chat. And he will never be, till I actually leave this world. Cruel, wasn't he? Till recently, I had thought and said publicly that he had been irreseponsible. Today, I say, just as publicly, that I regret having said that because that was a lie. He has passed on to me the very best he had ever had-a heart to dream big and a brother (his son, that is) who just cannot be bettered, in any way whatsoever. I intend to write a post entitled superior sibling down the line, but let me not digress any further today.

Just to bring you back to the core issue, I had been telling that I had not paid, till very recently, adequate attention to the social existence of individuals, as ,for instance, brother, son, sister, niece, school alumni and so forth. These may all appear very obvious but between them they socialize an individual in ceratain ways, frrame his/her personality in fairly identifiable patterns, as individuals who nonetheless belong to a given collectivity on a given moment. The largest (and also the loosest) such collectivity is perhaps brought into being by what is known as the time-spirit (zeitgeist?) but the relations outlined above are readymade everyday examples of the point. I had been, very crudely speaking, living in denial of these basic factors in practice, although intellectually I had all along been aware of their 'reality' only too well. I had been engaging with my problems as academic concerns; that is why they had always appeared important to others but never dear. That is a fairly good summary of my character as well. I had always appeared intelligent to people but had never had close friends really. I had wanted them on my terms, and they chose to maintain safe distance, too proud either to hurt me or to hurt themselves. But things have been brighter lately. We keep cursing each other's stupidity and false vanity at least once a week these days. Jolly good fellas all.

The event yes. Let me limit myself to just one. During the last few days, I had been helping a friend of mine, a gallery owner himself, to finalize some kind of an agreement with another gallery owner elsewhere, who is not persoanally known to me but happens to be a friend of a very close friend of mine. This very close friend of mine, incidenatlly, brings all four of us together--two businessmen and an amateur hack- in the transaction concerend. This gallery owner friend of mine had been clear from the very beginning that this particular transaction, and indeed all human transcations, both personal and professional, must be based fundamentally on trust. Contract enforcement, the economics students will tell you and I lift straight from Koushik Basu, remains structurally poor in a society that cannot boast of too many of its citizens taking to trust as a virtue in itself. For the view of a former CEO of a multinational corporation on the question , see this colum by Gurcharan Das where he saketches out an interesting policy. He says when one is dealing with a starnger, the first move should be based completely on trust, to be renewed on the basis of reciprocation from the other party. This sounds good to me, but Basu makes more sense when he suggests that we try to inclucate these traits not as invidual or group characteristics but as virtues valauable in themselves. We do not have to judge ourselves or others out of the dialogue but could be talking between us all the time.

Who was it who wrote this couplet 'Guftgu zari rehae'? Faiz Ahmad faiz? Sorry it beats me at the moment but do please find out for yourself. It is important all the time that we agree to disgree, and then have a cup of coffee or a goblet of cognac together down at the coffee shop, and bid each other good night, only to wake up the next morning and enmesh each other with reason, logic, figures and abstraction. Or just plain sentiment, or affection. The dialogue must go on. The road, or the journey, often turns out to be more instructive than the destination per se. Walk along we all must, even when we are walking on tightropes.

Oh the event; so this friend of mine wanted me to respectfully word his sentiments, which I did to the best (or worst) of my capability. You would agree it is not easy to reflect trust on deeds, even on the so called trust deeds, which this one was ceratinly not. The 'task' out of the way--no, before all this actually began really-- the fellow asks me to quote a price. I said I could not quote a price not because he was a friend but because I have never done that kind of stuff before and will never do it again for anyone else as far as I can see today. We argued for about 10 minutes and I hear the fellow will pay me some money anyway and beyond a point I could just not argue with people who choose third class people to do third class jobs and then pay them for doing it so incomptenetly. Is the guy trying to convert some black money into white or what? Then so be it, for such processes provide very welcome avenues of gainful employment to poor reserch scholars turned useless hacks. So much for the event and let's now turn back to ramblings again.

I did not know this guy till a few months back but during these few months, he has chosen to trust me, thought I could be of any use some day and treated me with some dignity, respect and grace, all dispensed very cordially. It may be true that he had been investing in me perhaps and that he is a very shrewed judge of character and knew that I am soft on sentiments and emotion. I do not care two hoots really, and I wish all businessmen learn to make such shrewd investments. Long and intimate relationships are not bulit by looking to exploit the other party's weaknesses but by making him secure about his weakness, by assuring him that you do not wish to take advantage of his weakness but together you want to build a unit where each of you try to complement the other's atrengths and vigorously work towards improving your respective weaknesses. Creative synergy is what they call it in the mamagerial lingo, and I call it, and so does this businessman friend of mine, being there for each other through thick and thin. Simple stuff really; wish I paid more attention to my mother's admonitions in those early years. Now that my Mercus Aurelius (the book, that is) had been taken away from me by the quirks of fate, I must start noting down my own list of people and places to whom I owe a lot and things that I have been thinking about. Money, as I had been driving at, just cannot buy me realtions but relations did, does, and will help me survive an overdose of money or lack thereof. You won't believe at times I end up making pretty handsome amounts of money, more than some of my gainfully employed friends and collegues, as it were. Professioanalism means delivering an assignment on time and with the best quality standards, nothing more and nothing less. It does not have to tarnslate into 20 hour days and impossible targets and stressed out families and a 7 day mauritious trip in a hurry once a year like a ritual enactment of family bonding and so forth. For those who came late, profession is making a living preaching and doing exctly what you believe in. If you do not agree with me by virtue of what you think is your better sense and experience of professionalism. go check any standard english to english distionary worth its publication. I promise to tender a public apology in my next blog if you get me on the wrong foot on that count.

This blog has been way too long for your consumption as well as for my production. I have made two points. Men and women are social creatures and as such respond often more positively to interpersonal, and not intellectual gestures. Intellectual gestures threten them while interpersonal gestures make them feel more secure about themselves. From that I proceeded to argue that it is more important to develop a few close realtions in life than making pots of money at the cost of acute loneliness and megalomania, although I myself love good life and know exactly what components of a good life I cannot live without. More importantly, relations do not run on sentiments alone, they call for being there for each other when the occassion demands, even though the other party might not even formally ask you to be there. That is called empathy, a virtue I had been looking to find within myself for the past many years, but only now appear to have sensed some bits of it somewhere within me, still very scattered, still very stubbornly elusive but no longer as hidebound. I have been feeling bullish on life all this morning, notwithstanding the fact that I have worked the whole night yesterday. I am feeling good about a lot of things, and generous about many more, and feel ready to let go still others. I thank you all for being around these last few days. You would never know just what a great help you all had been.

songs that soothe

Cliches sometimes drive the point home pretty effectively to a fairly large number of people who are not as bright as you are. As do paradoxes, paradoxically. Songs, really moving ones, actually move stones and tone deaf philistines like yours truly. Especially when there are moments which cannot be shared with anyone else in the universe, moments when monumental edifices fall aprt like a pack of cards. The principles and faiths with around which you you build your entire identities turn out ultimately to be fundamentally inadequate and to paraphrase Yeats, you no longer feel at ease anymore. Grounds beneath your feet shake violently and you do not quite realize whither you are headed. You lose, as it were, a sense of proportion and are at your most vulnerable, so much so that you run the risk of being buried for ever under the rubble. You must make sure that you do turn into the Rajiv Gandhian Banyan tree, one that, when it falls, also bring down a host of smaller creatures. You must, in other words, ensure that the collateral damages remain the minimum possible. That, however, is often easier said than done and mightier souls than yours truly have failed in the enterprise. It is some encouragement though that lighter souls than yours truly have emerged victorious as well. How does one do it then?

No one knows for sure how to survive an earthquake but some invariably do. There is no general method perhaps and each devises his or her own servival strategy if only because the sheer magnitude of the shock affords its victims very little chance of actually coming together and working out a common defense mechanism. Like the golden hour in an accident, the first few minutes, hours, days and months are of capital significance. Decisions demand to be made on the spot and instinct and tenacity often prove to be greater allies in this struggle that pure intellect and reasoning. Not that these things are so very different from each other after all. Long pracitices based on intellect and reasoning may in the long run turn into instinctive reactions; practice does breed mecahnisation but mechanisation need not necesarily be devoid of any reason or logic at all. It is only when we push mechanisation to its extremes that it tends to begin to give a short shrift to tender human relations and sentiments. This is akin to Tagore's dreary desert sands of dead habits evetually shallowing, irreverseibly, the clear stream of reason.

Lyrical though the sentiments may appear to the uninitiated, let's not make any song song or dance about them. Instead, let each of us play a game and try to recall a few songs the staris of which literally wake you up from a deep sleep and make you laugh or cry or perhaps laugh and cry in turn; or just make you feel great in some way or the other, cathartic perhaps but deeply moving nonetheless. There are sevaral such ditties that immediately comes to my mind. Elsewhere I have introduced myself as tone deaf and see no reason to change the description as far as my comprehension of the grammer of music goes, whether eastern classical or western, or pop or hip hop or bhatiyaali or bhawaiya or tappa or jhumur. But I normally trust my ears and go for the tonality and cadence of a particular composition, whether vocal or instrumental and I am glad to report their does occur some kind of a connect somewhere. It could be between my present state of mind and though and the sentiments expressed through the lyrics of the composition. It might as well be the general drift of the composition, reminding me of some moments of my life or my people's life, not entirely unlike what happened to the poet when he had been forced to stop on his tracks by the haunting melodies of a solitary reaper, somewhere on the hills of Scotland, and kept guessing in vein about the content or the inspiration behind the composition. Romanticism is a most noble sentiment, a very uplifting and inspring one but it does not yield most productively to reasoned analysis or crictical dissection.

Woh Manly Stuff

For all you care, you would probably agree that Mel Gibson had a jolly tough time in his search for what women want. This is a question that has been lately hogging much public space, the seriousness of the issue notwithstanding (or not standing). For instance, a section of the sunday magazine of a promiment national english daily that carries interview of major and minor celebrities always has a specific question addressed to its male interviewees-what would you do if you discovered that you have turned into a woman overnight? Let us not detain ourselves here with the details and diversities of their answers to the question. The point that must be noted ,however, is that suddenly everyone is keen to find out what women want, especially from those who are not women.
This is an important issue, a little like the bureaucrats who have never been to the villages deciding the nitty gritties of what ails Indian villages and prescribing suitable remedies. If this is indeed so, this is an innane exercise and would not take much time and space to establish its infertility. Paradoxically though the very fact that such exercies are exercising the minds of pandits and journalists and filmmakers is a powerful testimony of the productivity of their
(and our) poverty of thought and imagination. As far as can be made out, the Gibson movie, Subhash Ghai's inelegant Indian version of it and the questionnaire of the sunday magazine mentioned above can all be fairly dismissed as non-serious stuff. Herein lies the rub.

Because the whole thing is painfully true; women actually know fairly well what men want but frankly men have no clue about what women desire. Mars, venus and all that sounds impressive but offer no comprehensive solution. The quest of what women want must therefore be taken far more seriously. Is the stereotype that women run on emotions and shun logic true, for instance? Yes perhaps, but not the way we interpret. The right interpretation is yes, they have more emotional intelligence, the very thing that the management gurus rule would fuel corporate success tomorrrow. That means women know how to rally large groups around them better than men-nothing sways large gruops of people more than an emotional and emotive outburst of inspirational stuff. Men must learn to appear more vulnerable and learn to cry more eloquently, to cut a long story short. Money does not inspire those who have enough to live a good life and also those who are unlikely to accumulate enough to live a good life anytime soon. A Dream does. A dream that challenges them, no empowers them really, to run after an impossible dream. Don't forget that frail woman from Albania who landed in Calcutta half a century ago with nothing with her except compassion and built a multinational with a presence in 104 countryies in a matter of three or four decades. Compassion, and an impossible dream, then, is no less of a capital than hard cash. Women are impossible creatures-they are extremely logical and equally illogical at the same time. Deep down perhaps, they are logically illogical and talk men into believing that they are not logical.

As for long term planning and training, they are second to none. Each and every mother knows how to plan a CEO or an IIT-IIM graduate who would start making millions and billions after roughly half a century. The fathers supply the money-no even mothers do just as much-and the mothers implant the dream, grain by grain, into the heart and soul of their children and make sure that they eat, sleep and dream the dream so much that they make it come true.

Women are not handicapped, we men have doubly endowed them in trying to confine them within the domestic space. God has not been on our side either, she (and god is a woman for sure, or else she would not be so partial) has provided the capacity to give birth to babies. Frankly, women don't need men, but men are just helpless without women when it comes to making babies. Sperms may be banked, as it were, but wombs just can't, even if you rent one. Men , as far as I can make out, are faraid and supremely insecure-women have mastered the domestic and are now out to oust us from the public. We would not have minded, had we not been brought up on a false notion of cultivating pride on our capacity to earn bread for the family, and two, had we known how to run a house in the first place. Women, I admire you all and I would have to unfortunately live with the reality that I'd never be half as good as you already are. Fact is, even though we say movies like what women want are casual funny stuff, we have no other way to express our admiration for what you are. You know how awfully bad losers we men are.

Crying foul? or merely a sob story?

I have got to admit this straight away—when I feel terribly hurt, I cry. I mean tears just roll down my eyes, despite my best efforts to hold them back. I am not sure if that makes me less manly, any more than crying less or not at all makes a girl less girly. For whatever my understanding of feminism is worth, I know that such obvious association of particular behaviors to boys and girls have nothing natural about it. Nevertheless, I begin to feel apologetic and search for some suitable excuse to justify my latest outbreak of tears. What follows is admittedly an apologia, but one which also makes a feeble attempt at some self-mockery. Only some very profound dose of self deprecation can effectively deflate my gall-bladder sized ego, whines my dying-but-not-yet dead self-esteem. After all, the charmer who had reduced me to tears awhile ago began by making it clear that I was the biggest megalomaniac in the whole wide world. If you only begin to calculate the number of Is casually dotting this paragraph, you’d see the charmer was spot on.

The megalomaniacs are not disagreeable people at all and they are all great romantics. They love to willingly suspend their disbelief in their being of relatively little use to anyone else but themselves. I feel rather pleased to belong to this species of men and women, and hence now proceed to bless your souls with a little edification on why it is not such a bad thing to break into a sob once in a while. Crying is no silly business at all and has so much more complexity and depth—and confusion and potential for commercial profit—built into its successful performance that it provides fodder to more novelists and scriptwriters than you and I would ever be able to count in a single lifetime.

In English language alone, teardrops have given birth to more confusion than unsuspecting students can handle. Even if tears of incomprehension roll down their eyes, the smart ones are not expected to shed any tears for them. Their mothers can weep in despair, wail in anger or choose to drown their sorrow in tears. On the other hand, the neighbors may well relish such prospects but never fail to shed their crocodile tears of fake sympathy. The plight of their wards meanwhile tears the parents apart and they cry out for justice. The English teachers of the world would not of course be moved to tears at this turn of events. What the children actually need is a cry from within, they would pontificate, to tear the difficulties to shreds and master the language. The parents would also be duly advised not to behave like cry babies. Depending on which side of the fence you stand, you may choose to call it crying foul or a sob story. Or just Tear Gas.
I propose to sign off with an anecdote. Iswarchandra Visyasagr, the great Bengali educationist and social reformer of the 19th century, was also affectionately called karunasagar (Ocean of compassion). Somewhat unlike me, he too had this tendency to break into tears whenever he felt particularly moved by others’ plight. You see it takes a large and compassionate heart to be able to beak into tears and admit it in print. Second, whenever great men are in sniffles, they leave something for posterity. Vidyasagar would often donate money or some provisions to the aggrieved visitors. Yours truly just wrapped up this piece for you

Back at blabbering again

I had lost the password to my old blog eccentricscribbler quite a while ago. That is, some of you may suppose, not the most flattering comment on the strength or otherwise of my memory. I have a rather diffrent take to offer though. I am no Freud or Kakkar, but I have seen that my memory has this poetic justice kind of a mechanism that makes sure that practically everything that somehow pains me is smoothly forgotten over the medium and long term. Is it then a rather good thing that I had lost the password? By all means, my dear friends. While it is indeed true that I had posted a solitary blog (a solitary brag, to be precise), fact of the matter is that it was follwed by nothing at all. It is no surprise, then, that I lost track of the password just as my forefathers had lost their tails. Good old Charles Darween would have quitely passed off a chuckle, what say?

But then, the desire to hold my own at the cyberspace just refused to go away. After all, the miser in me is smart enough to work out that this is the only way I can ever get to impose myself on your hapless souls, without having to spend a paisa. On top of that, I get to pretend to be an intellectual and all that and pretty much get away with such claims, in these days of post-modern and post-colonial relativity theories. Make no mistake about it, I absolutely adore their theoretical premises and rather enjoy the complexitiy that such exciting new lines of thought bring to bear on some issues that had appeared ,till a few years ago, to be almost settled for good. What I sometimes suspect they lack is a sense of balance, of the kind that questions the older schools of scholarship not only on political but also on scholarly grounds. I hope to have more to say on that aspect in one of the subsequent posts. That apart, expect some freewheeling observations on the books I read and the movies I see, apart from the news and views I come across in the print and electronic media.

Anecdotes are yet another source of much satisfaction. I just love to tell and hear stories-so please send me as many as you like, along with your bouquets and brickbats. Feel free to respond the way you like. Let me wrap up with an anectdote about my father. The gentleman left us a good 20 years ago and flew all the way up to whereever he thought he would find his peace-the doctors said he had meningitis and all that. He was a smart man though and this story I heard from one of his cousins. One day, he said, my father landed up in a doctor's chamber to receive treatment for some ailment. There, he was made to wait for a rather long period of time before his turn was to come. Finally, a nurse in attendence prbably felt kind enough to approach him and enquire whether he was after all a patient. He gave a wry smile and said, " No ma'am, I am just impatient." There you go guys, till we meet agin.