‘IN’TOLERANCE

Tolerance and intolerance are two words that are, so to say, ‘in’ nowadays. It is a fad to talk about how tolerant or intolerant the government is or the authorities are. I can’t stay out of anything that calls out for an opinion, even remotely. Every conversation one has is actually made of opinions isn’t it? So here i go about tolerance versus intolerance in our country.

To begin with I think I am going to ignore the entire built up energy around this issue and start with a clean slate. Ignore all the petitions signed, all the awards returned, all the statements made and all the superstars and political parties involved. Lets just come to a human brain level - the level that I call common sense.

What is tolerance? The ability to tolerate - tolerate being the ability to allow the existence of something one disagrees with. Intolerance, naturally, means the inability to allow anything else but your own beliefs to exist. I would like to bring to your notice that these are inherent qualities of every individual. Intolerance exists in every human being. It has always been there. ALWAYS! So basically everybody is tolerant and intolerant. Presently, in our country there are two teams with two different views. Try to step out and look at both these teams without judging or becoming a part of either of them. From this perspective you see two set of people, each being tolerant towards their own team mates and intolerant towards the other team. Now what is new in that? Take any sport to understand this better. In any ethical game of football, cricket, hockey, tennis, badminton, chess etc etc. No player plays to make the other team win. And in this case it is a game of ideals and beliefs. There is no way one team will agree with the other. So obviously there is intolerance!! Intolerance on both the sides. And obviously such intolerance has always been there!!

The only difference is that the team that was silent for quite some time has become very vocal now. And well lets face the truth, their language is not very polite. It is definitely easy to be offended by many statements recently made. But the fact remains that this section of the society always existed. They were silently doing the same things that they are doing right now. It is not a question of the ruling political party at all. It is much deep. Much much deep. It is the question of what our priorities as a society are? How we treat the so called lower sections of our society? How flexible our thought is as a human being? It is a problem that can be solved only at an individual or a family level. It is a problem that can be solved when we question ourselves. Why, we as individuals feel threatened when the other one is not thinking like we do? Why can’t we allow space for another thought? Why can’t all of us try and understand both sides and then choose a path for our own selves? And when the path is chosen, why is it so important for us to go out, make reactionary comments and disturb, more than anything, our own peace of mind?

My conclusion to this debate of tolerance and intolerance is at an individual level. We as individuals need to know what we believe in and how we want to lead our lives. Nobody has a right to take this from us. It is humanly impossible for us to be tolerant towards every thought. So do not react to the other thought, choose your belief and stay in peace. Do not try to force your thought on the other team, because that will never happen. Never!! According to me the only way to finish this ‘in’tolerance talk is to be at peace with oneself and one’s beliefs and keep shut. It is evident that otherwise there is no silencing this noise. Presently it like a fat man and a thin man shouting at each other saying ‘you are fat!’ ‘no! You are thin!’ ‘no!! You are fat!!’. Well fact is a fact is a fact. No matter how many times you say it ‘you are intolerant!’ ‘no! You are intolerant!’ is just beating about the bush. Either you stop it sensibly or you just get tired of it ultimately. What’s the point?

And by the way ‘Go to Pakistan’ as an answer to ‘You are intolerant’ is like saying ‘It’s raining in Chennai’ when asked ‘What’s the time?’ - logically makes no sense. Tolerant or intolerant, one thing is a must - having a logic.

BUYING TIME

For the first time ever, I went to the market to buy a wrist watch. My sister had decided that she wants a wrist watch as her birthday present this year. Like an obedient elder sister I went with her to browse the market. Watching watches was and is something totally out of my league and so my observations might sound naive and make no sense whatsoever. But nevertheless, here is what I realized.

Time is powerful I always knew, but time is also very expensive! I might sound like a miser but I think God saved me a lot of unnecessary expenditure when he gave me a metal allergy. I was a time addict. Couldn’t imagine my life without my wrist watch exactly 12 years 5 months and some-x days ago. One fine day I feel a bad rash on my wrist and observe similar rashes around my neck, ears and a hand. It didn’t take me much time to realize that suddenly, out of the blue, one fine day my skin decided that it hated metal and so wherever metal touched me, my skin showed its complete disapproval through rash attacks. Within a day I had to give up on metal. No watch, no artificial jewelry and no other metal works. So much so that I couldn’t even hold keys for too long, otherwise my palm had rashes on it. Anyway, so it has been almost 13 years, I haven’t worn a wrist watch and yesterday I realized how much money I had saved by not being that much into having time on my wrist all the time.

A very interesting observation of mine was that more the detail in the dial, the less is the price. My sister wanted a sleek looking, metal strap watch with every detail written on the dial. She was very specific that she wants numbers on the dial so that it doesn’t take time to figure out the time. I am suddenly finding this idea of buying a watch very inherently ironic. I am not sure how to put it across. Basically we were trying to buy a machine that will not take time to reveal time. The more I try to understand time the more mysterious it gets. I don’t know it’s apparent or not but I feel if ‘time’ was a person I would be in love with him. Time is the most romantic proposition of mankind.

So, coming back to the shop we were in and the point that I was making, we discovered that the price of the watch was inversely proportional to the number of numbers on the dial. If all the numbers were written, we were able to find the watches priced around 2000 Rs. - but these were not sleek and stylish and had a plastic or leather strap. Basically they were basic. The next range was around 5000 Rs. And the watches in this category either had lines for the numbers or just had four lines signifying the numbers 12, 3, 6 and 9. Not very difficult to tell the time but still not as quick a process as the ones with proper text on them. And then was the range of above 5000 Rs. Now this was intriguing! Not only did these have no numbers at all on the dial, but also there was no line or dot or notch that would atleast give you a hint of the number 12. A person like me could even wear it upside down in a hurry and spend the whole day looking at the wrong time. And it wouldn’t even be the watch’s fault. It would be the right time in the wrong direction and the wrong perception would make it the wrong time. Crazy!!!

Now, it is a coincidence I am sure, but the thought that struck me was that more the ambiguity about time, more expensive the prospect is. So basically we want to pay more for the idea of not being able to tell the time properly. You want to know the exact time? The cheapest option. You want to be exact but waste time to tell time? Pay a little more. You don’t want to know the exact time and you also want to waste time? Show me the money!!!

Come to think of it, what’s the point of having time tied to your body anyway?

 (p.s. I wish digital watch was an option on my sister's list.)

Quoting Jaipur Literature Festival 2015

How I wish I could have attended all the talks that I had encircled, underlined and/or starred. But to make that feasible I needed the superhuman power of bilocation, multilocation or at times omnipresence. I am still trying but haven’t been able to reach that stage of perfection yet. Maybe next year. As of now, my superpower of drifting away from the topic has overpowered me yet again. Thankfully I am totally dedicated to coming back to the point, that is, recording the experience of the Jaipur Literature Festival by quoting the authors, panelists or participants of some of the talks that I really enjoyed. So here I go:

Day 1 (21.01.2015)

I started the festival by attending“Gaate Jaye Banjara: Film Songs- Urdu, Hindi, Hindustani”: Javed Akhtar introduced by Priyanka Chaturvedi. Basically satisfying the love of writing and the love of good film songs via one talk. Quoting Javed Akhtar:

“The film songs today don’t include the subtle morality that the old songs included. The basic thought of life, the morals of day to day living for the common man, were propagated through film songs earlier. Songs like ‘Kisi ki muskurahton pe ho nisaar...’ talked about basic morals of life that indirectly got induced in a common mans life. The film song lyrics today create this void in the society. The indirect spreading of good thoughts, morals and philosophies of life is not happening anymore. The social morality void is also a result of the changing film songs to a certain extent.”

“Faiz and Kaifi- A Poetic Legacy”: Salima Hashmi and Shabana Azmi in conversation with Ali Husain Mir - A beautiful conversation with daughters about the poets and their fathers.

Salima Hashmi quoting Faiz Ahmed Faiz - “Always be at work. Even if you do not have any ‘work’. Create work. Never stop working.”

Shabana Azmi quoting Kaifi Azmi - “When you want change and work for it, accept the fact that it might not happen in your lifetime. But you have to sincerely keep on working because even if you re not there, the change WILL see the light of the day.”


Day 3 (23.01.2015)

My love for traveling took me to the talk - “Wanderlust and the Art of Travel Writing”: Paul Theroux, Charles Glass, Samanth Subramanian, Akash Kapur, Sam Miller, Brigid Keenan in conversation with William Dalrymple. I thought William Dalrymple said the most beautiful thing about travel writing without even noticing that he said it! Quoting William Dalrymple:
“The thing about these books is that they are about places that were when we wrote the book; they no longer exist.”

Next I attended “Shadow Play: The Art of Biography”: Jenny Uglow, Jung Chang, Mark Gevisser, Kate Summerscale, Lucy Hughes Hallet moderated by Anita Anand. I have always been interested in knowing people and human nature. So I went to this talk because I shared the interest of the authors of getting to know somebody else. The discovery of the art of writing a biography was not the focus for me. And while the authors on the panel had different, to a point contradicting, methods of writing a biography, there were some very interesting statements made. While Jung Chang described her method by saying “As a biographer it is your job to get into the head of your subject”; Kate Summerscale confessed in beautifully framed words: “The story of them is not their story, it is my story of them.” To elaborate on this dilemma Mark Gevisser quoted a famous biographer: “There is always betrayal while writing a biography. You cannot look at a person the way he looks at or thinks of himself.”

The last talk cum performance of the day that I attended was “Kathputli: Of Puppets and Puppeteers”: Dadi Pudumjee, Puran Bhatt, Rajesh Bhat Nagori in conversation. Introduced by Sanjoy Roy. Not a particularly literary gathering, it was a talk with puppeteers and the lost or dying traditions of the Kathputli. Puran Bhatt, fit to be called a master puppeteer, a very sensitive and passionate man, talked about how the art is suffering because of loss of patronage and a decent performance platform. Dadi Pudumjee, a leading puppeteer of India and almost the torch bearer of present puppetry scene in India, said something precious during the talk, something that as a conservation architect I truly support:
“Tradition has to keep on moving. If there is no change or no scope for creativity you are just making a museum. Tradition has to evolve.”


Day 4 (24.01.2015)

One of the most awaited talks for me was about the Murty Classical Library and its inception. So the first talk I attended this day was “Why a Library of Classical Indian Literature?”: Girish Karnad, Sheldon Pollock in conversation Arshia Sattar. Without a doubt I was totally impressed by Sheldon Pollock. What a brilliant man! I ended up buying his book The Language of the Gods in the World of Men immediately. Out of the many reasons and answers he gave for the main question - ‘Why a library of classical Indian literature?’, the statement that is still making me think was “No culture is entirely competent to explain itself.” Some solid food for thought! As complex as this statement sounds, his definition for a ‘Classic’ was as straightforward as it gets. “Classical is perpetual uncontemporary. The purpose of a classic is to take you to a ground not experienced or experiencable by you.”

Drifting away from the topic of the making of the Classical Library, when asked by a member of the audience, what according to him, is the reason that in India old literature is undoubtedly phenomenal and no new work can compete it, no matter what Indian language you consider, Sheldon Pollock very simply said : “We have to accept that there has been a continuous development of underdevelopment in India for the past 300 years. Not only, many of the valuable texts have been lost and many more are on the road to extinction, but also, many Indian languages have been lost because we do not care or worry enough.” Well, yes, agreed. I agree. I totally agree. When will we start caring about our roots? When? If a majority does not care still, I think India will be a dead tree very soon. On that note, I thought the Murty Classical Library is a wonderful initiative and really hope that they continue the good work.

Moving on, away from a little revolutionary feeling inside me, I attended “The Writer and The World”: VS Naipaul in conversation with Farrukh Dhondy. The highest level of sensitivity and emotion packed in one talk. My eyes were literally damp. Especially when V.S.Naipaul thanked the audience for being so wonderful with tears rolling down his face in cascades, it was too much for me to take. Though crying was not involved in my reaction, I will not deny that I was completely emotionally exhausted. Anyway, coming back to the quoting job I have taken over myself, as an aspiring writer I totally admire his reply to the question - why he didn’t try to do something else when his initial writings were not being accepted by publishers; he said, “I had to stay with my talent! I believe if I left confidence in my talent, I would not have had confidence in me to do anything at all.”

Day 5 (25.01.2015)

The last day of the festival arrived and I was exhausted. So I decided to take it easy and attend some talks that I was inquisitive about and had no idea what those territories held in store. My general selection method of the talks had been based on some familiarity. Any aspect that was familiar was on my to attend list. But the last day I decided the familiarity has to be with the unfamiliarity of the subject or the author or the genre or something else that I could think of then. So the two talks that I attended were:

“The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life”: Bettany Hughes introduced by Avantika Sujan which was the talk I had not encircled on my interest schedule, but well, ended up being exactly what I would have been interested in. A valuable discovery was that a quote that I have adored since long and truly think defines how I see life was actually something that Socrates had said. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” To elaborate on this and to explain the social situation today, Bettany Hughes exclaimed, “Often in our world it does not matter what we do, but it does matter what people say we do.”

The second talk, which surely was an unexplored territory for me, opened up a new area of thought for me. The talk was “In Exile”: Sahar Delijani, Ma Jian, Fady Joudah, Hisham Matar, Anchee Min moderated by Ramita Navai. I had never heard of either of these authors. It was the fact that all of them were living in exile and writing revolutionary stuff about their motherlands, sounded interesting and different. The conversation was emotional in a very different way as compared to the Naipaul talk of the previous day. The emotions exhibited here were of longing and in some cases hatred. Then there was that weird aspect of coexistence of fear and courage. Some of them would be persecuted if they went back but still, when away from their lands, they were not afraid of writing the reality, knowing very well that their writing can harm them in the worst possible way. Their emotional turmoil is evident when we revisit the following statements made by the authors:

Sahar Dlijani says responding to a question about her views on dictatorship and how she accepts decisions taken by such a system - “Dictatorship anyway results in self exile.”

Anchee Min, surely one of the people who have seen the ugliest face of the society, exclaimed when asked about how she managed to steer through - “I could be defeated but I could not be conquered.” Adding later on in the conversation, “Also, sometimes the social madness dehumanizes you.”

Ma Jian, the second Chinese panelist, did not speak English. He lives in exile in London for the past few years and does not interact in English. He writes his novels in Chinese and all of them are translated by his wife. I found it very interesting that he did not learn English to make his life easy in an English speaking society. But then I didn’t have to wait for long for an answer. In his words (as translated), “In exile, I am my language, and so, I am.
Exile is like being able to see a mountain even when you are away from it.”

Hisham Matar, came across as a very peacefully revolutionary personality. When asked about wanting to go back to his motherland or not, he delved deeper into the philosophy of exile and said - “We can never totally authentically return to anything. You are always moving forward.”

Carrying the philosophy forward, much like a poet, Fady Joudah said: “Exile is always an idea of return.
The true great man or woman is the one who does not belong anywhere.” He ended the talk with a thought: “Is not exile, a form of love?”
No wonder and thank god, he is a poet!!

HAVING AN OPINION

The deal about having an opinion is that you are somebody who is unable to control your mind. It is a vague kind of obsessive compulsive disorder under which you have to give a thought to each and every thing or moment that passes by or that you pass by. A highly time consuming habit that makes it very difficult for you to take out time for the actual work that you are supposed to be doing. So basically you are mentally occupied 24x7. As a result you are exhausted by the end of the day but without being really productive.

Now productivity can be very subjective. I might say that giving a deep thought to everything you come across makes you a wiser person which is productivity of the highest order. (Right?) But then you are definitely not wise if you think you are wise. What other people think doesn’t matter anyway. So it is a never ending race towards nothing.

I think having an opinion is a must. It is very important to have an original authentic thought about everything. Atleast every thought that is a precursor to your actions has to be an original thought. Otherwise what is the purpose of living if you are living based on what others think; without applying your own mind you are no better than a puppet.

I imagine, this world would have been an easier place if decisions were taken based on logic and mathematical formulas. An equation or a formula should have been there for every phenomenon of this world to exist. Mathematics never goes wrong; there are zero clashes. But now that the creator of this world was not logical enough to make a straightforward equation for every problem of this world and gave us each a mind of our own, we might as well stop being lazy and start using our own personal head (atleast about the ground rules for our own life).

Apart from all this, I feel taking time out to talk to oneself is a dying art. I strongly feel that all the mess in this world is because people do not take out time for themselves. The social degradation started when people stopped thinking about the world. Then slowly they stopped thinking about their society, then their neighborhood and then their range of care constricted only to their family. Now the time is slowly heading to a point where a person is not even thinking about himself anymore. All we are thinking about nowadays is about day to day needs or necessities or luxuries. We spend our lives planning for a smooth life and end up smoothly spending our lives.

From experience I can confidently state that it is possible to spend your life without talking to oneself. But when you start talking to oneself you discover a person you didn’t know existed. A person who has always been there and will always be there within you. He grows with you and teaches you more than anybody you meet can. Conversations make you grow. Conversations with others and your day to day experiences should lead to a conversation with yourself, that will lead you to forming an opinion which will further guide your decisions and thus you will become your own guide.

Yes there will be clashes and there will be people who disagree with your opinion. Maybe they are right and you are wrong. It is not possible for us to be right always. After all we are only human! But this should not mean that we should just save ourselves from the trouble of forming an opinion. The fear of rejection or the embarrassment of being wrong should not stop us from thinking. We only need to be flexible. Be open to the idea that you might be wrong. Have an opinion but be ready to accept a change in your opinion when time proves you wrong.

Why get hurt in the dark when you have the option of turning on the light? If time comes when a brighter light shows you the flaw in what you think you saw previously, believe in the reality you see now and change your perception that was based on what you saw in a dimmer light.

Atleast that is what my opinion is about having an opinion. I say, better have a well-filtered-thought guided life than not have a thought at all. Finding your own way is always better than letting somebody grab your hand and take you wherever they want to. Isn’t it?

INTRODUCTION

Yes, so it seems. The titles for posts of this blog are going to be as creative as this one. I can’t think of better ones when I’m opinionated. So it is basically the opinion’s fault. The opinion, that is, the white noise in my head that has grown over the past few months. Yes, it is very recent. I was such a peaceful person just months ago. But then one day this jumble of words started gathering in my head and I found I was staring at a wall for almost hours thinking and thinking and thinking. It was such a revelation!! I could think a lot and I had no clue! Then I planned to revisit my thoughts immediately. Nothing!! Nothing at all! I couldn’t remember what I was thinking about for the past one hour! That is when I realized that some crazy phenomenon was introduced in my life just like that. I was normal clear headed one moment and the next moment I was in an unknown mental space where I was a great thinker who had amnesia.

Before this thing started becoming dictatorial and I lost all capacity to do my job, which ironically is thinking itself (but not even close to the topics that are taking most of my thinking time lately), I had to find a solution to my problem. My head was becoming inversely proportional to my eyes. No there is no philosophical intention here; I mean it like a simile. I am high myopic. So that makes me capable of being able to see two worlds - with and without my glasses. Since childhood I loved looking at stuff without my glasses and imagine scenarios through the blurry mish-mash that I could see. That world is much more flexible you know, so whenever I get tired of the clear view of the ‘real’ world, I have another option of switching to the blur view of my ‘real’ eyes. Similarly when I realized that a certain kind of thought process was blurring my intended thought process, I knew what my mind was doing! It was role-playing my eyes but in a diametrically opposite manner. My ‘real’ eyes blur the ‘real’ world, but here my ‘real’ mind was the clear view, the blurring was caused by the ‘real’ world. But the solution was the same - get a clearing device. I decided I have to do away with these thoughts so that I can attend to the ‘real’ ones as soon as possible. And what better solution than to share a thought with a virtual space.

Also it feels like a thought and a virtual space are meant to be together. Afterall they are made of the same intangible material- nothing. But then that’s my opinion.

So here is to share all my nothings through a nothing.