Book Review- Tinkers by Paul Harding

A dying man’s last ditch effort to stitch together rapidly disintegrating fragments of his memories into one coherent whole so he could understand his life better and make sense of it all. Makes for an interesting read? Paul Harding, in his own quest towards understanding his own grandfather through the fragmented reminisces of his father, whose life mirrors that of the narrator’s father certainly thinks so. So does it matter if the book lay neglected for long before an indie publishing house took up its case. Does it matter if New York Times mentions it under ‘the one that got away’ and New Yorker includes it in a concise ‘Briefly Noted’ section. That, nevertheless did not deter the Pulitzer Committee from recognizing this work, and we say, thankfully so.

What if we could, through the tiny window of our collapsing moments, relive our entire life in torrents of long- forgotten memories? Memories such vivid and picaresque, that when weaved together they portend a collapse of the whole life we led, of the relations that we deemed important and of the myriad thoughts that catapulted our minds through the roughness. In Tinkers, a debut work that refuses to let the dictums of the fast-paced life we live today dictate terms with the narrative, that trips over memories that while forgotten once, do bring back torrential suffering and hallucination and that, through the vivid and arresting descriptions of the ice-swathed countryside of the Maine, let’s us see what the author sees, feels and hears to when he experiences them.

One of the traits that a work of literature tries to accomplish is, through its strategic placement of words and punctuations, through the careful selections of the various permutations of those words, and through the shrewd placements of those sentences in the rank monotony of a memoir, the work lets us see beyond the printed pages (or the electronic screens) and guides us carefully through the locales where they are set against, through the dining-rooms where the scenes are enacted, through the wilderness that has solitude written all over it. Harding switches the point of view as often as he ventures on elucidating the white landscapes of the ice-covered terrains. Perspectives are important, so much so the machinations of an epileptic seizure is depicted through multiple accounts. The narrative shifts abruptly from the omniscient third person to first, from past tense to present and from short concise dialogues to long winding sentences.

Tinker-to be occupied with small mechanical works. We all tinker, all perform mechanical work and all dissolve with time or just fade away. Three generations of the Crosby’s and a recurrent theme that binds them all, the truism that, in any other setting, would be deemed farcical and shallow. Every man dies alone and takes not with him an inch of the life that he led. As the moments draw to a close for each of the three Crosby’s, the nigh is not disturbed over the dins of everyday life. Lives around them seem to carry itself around as usual, and they are aware of the very humbling fact. Through the love of each of the three generations – writing, poetry and horology, comparisons are drawn with life and its quintessence solitude.

George Washington Crosby, the narrator and whose memories we dive into, scratch comprehensively and tunnel through, into the minds of his father and his grandfather ‘began to hallucinate eight days before he dies’, we read in the opening lines itself. Piqued, one continues, only to find George, lying on his dining room hospital bed, ignorant and forgetful of the people around him. He notices the carpets and the monotony of his remaining days at times, at others he simply dives into those shards of memories that had long been safely tucked away. We know he is dying and that he is hallucinating, his memories- ‘he remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control’ sets the stage for ambitious forays back and forth into the domain of time, ‘showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment’. His hallucination, ‘the roof collapsed, sending down a fresh avalanche of wood and nails, tapers and shingles and insulation’ are remarkable expostulations on the vagaries of the dying mind. Picture this- ‘the very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into the cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George’s confused obliteration.’ A fickle narrator whose memory we doubt, three generations of dying alone, the epileptic fits of the father, Howard and the dry, ‘gray’, ‘silvery’ landscape of the cove is material enough for Harding to chisel.

Howard, George’s father, an epileptic ‘tinkerer’ whose job it was to take his carriage drawn by ‘Prince Edward’, and call upon the households for ‘soaps’ and who George remembers mostly around the events of one night that preceded his discovery of his father’s “illness”. The seizures that Howard falls prey to is brought out in its magnificent details even as ‘the world around him spun’. He discovers his father’s illness, his father discovers his mother’s and leaves thereof to a life that is as free as it was chained. George tries to escape too, but fails even as his father wishes ‘secretly’ for the same. Some loose strands make for a Murakami surrealism. The burned down house with the unidentified corpse of the woman and the children are left to view alongside the desertion by the father (or the mother).

In one of the many grandiose scenes, reminiscent of Whitman, a whole house of one Dr. Box is described as being moved about with logs as the wheels. The seizures that Howard experiences, the intricate mechanisms of the clocks- described in bulky detail through passages from an imaginary Horologist manual on clocks, the writings of Howard with ‘Borealis’ as only common theme to distinguish them, the nod to Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the hermitical Gilbert and the Indian Sabbatis all carry little or no symbolic manifestations which are easy to miss. Reading through his interviews, Harding explains that some of the scenes depicted are of pure literary origins, haphazard assimilation of facts (Hawthorne with the wilderness), momoiristic extrapolations (the Horologist’s Rev Kenner Davenport manual on clocks) and personal tributes “How to build a nest” by Howard Anon Crosby. Some representations serve to condense the mystique- the carriage of four horses with the horsemen that comes take away the grandfather is a biblical allusion, apt with him being a minister.

Everything is made to perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so – a sense of pall and doom sets in every once in a while. As we enter the minds of George and Howard with equal abandon we are led to a microscopic view of the happenings around them. So the night when George discovers Howard’s epilepsy is the one that stays on in his mind as memories of his father whom he wanted to ‘just go away, not die but just leave’. The escape of Howard to the woods – ‘Sun catches cheap plate flaking- I am a tinker; the moon is an egg glowing in its nest of leafless trees- I am a poet; a brochure for an asylum is on the dresser- I am an epileptic, insane; the house is behind me- I am a fugitive. His despair had not come from the fact that he was a fool; he knew he was a fool. His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two- penny religious magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and see him as something better.’ It’s then, in the midst of his own unraveling that we are transported into the memories of Howard’s father. The genealogy continues.

Nearing the end, we are led to the second life of Howard where he survives and lives with another woman, again possibly an ode to his grandfather through an extrapolation. The end, incorporating a flashback within a flashback is didactic and constitute long winding sentences on theories of life and of death, of memories and of relations, of the craft of clocks and of religion.

Read it, if not for the thoughts, but for the language and the fierce description of his native Maine at West Cove. Read it to understand how narration works differently through different point of views and to realize that despite howsoever you lead your life, you die alone, in the midst of everyone, you die alone.  

 

Book Review: The Man who Broke into Auschwitz by Denis Avey

A touching tale

From the onset, the memoir looks like a grand adventure which is ironically what the author, once a British soldier set out to do. He had, in his words, “no sense of allegiance to the queen” but had “in a spirit of adventure” enrolled into the army. Much as his father, who had no obligation to do so in his age, drafted himself with an intention to look after his son. His memories of Auschwitz which is what the second half of the book is mostly about, is as vivid as a finely cast glass. His extraordinary foray across the length and breadth of Africa and Europe is sprinkled with generous anecdotes and recounting. At times, his observations, while stark and pedestrian seems apt for the life he is living. And at times, the simplicity in thoughts and idealism brings to fore the innocence of the man living in times as harsh as the holocaust. To hear him describe the camp III, is listening to horrors of the war from a third person narrative as he sees the Jews recklessly led towards death. Macht frei, german for work sets you free is brought out in all of its ironies and the subsequent attempts at finding evidence of the same is again, ironic. He lives through to tell the tale of his experience but what he goes through after having scaled the landscapes of Europe and in the safe precincts of the Great Britain is heart wrenching. Sometimes, more than the atrocities at the concentration camps. It would be interesting to listen to Ernie, now that we have the outsiders perspective. Coming on to the title, atrocious and unbelievable as it sounds, the author puts himself in the concentration camp of his free will in order to understand really what went on inside. His observations of the thousands of the “poor fellars” inside the camps, his brief conversations with the inmates is not sufficient to satisfy the curiosity. He, through his words, makes us believe that adventure was what he had always wanted his life to be, and in doing so he touched upon the basic human aspect of curiosity, empathy. All came together in his multiple attempts to scale the walls of the concentration camp and see for himself the decay and the hardships that went on inside. The times when humanity lost its meaning in entirety. It seems heroic and a striking parallel to Forest Gump can be drawn. Only, it concentrated mostly on the war and the holocaust. Sceptics abound as to the accuracy of his memories, who having lived through 60 years after the ordeal could recount each moment as if it happened only yesterday. Only when it comes to the later part of his life in London that his memory seems to give way. While that may seem to be proof of his fickle memory, and makes one doubt as to the authenticity of his story, one also feels somewhere that its often the sad times that one remembers vividly in his lifetime. The narrative sometimes narrows to the clichés, and the observations often deviate to the grandiose. Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. In effect, the prison could bound him physically but could not bound his mind to wander. Cigarettes, the instrument one often hears about when one listens to the World War II anecdotes, is also brought out as an important protagonist. One that eventually is instrumental in helping the author come out of his PTMD- post-trauma mental disorder. I picked up this book hoping to start being a regular member of the GoodReads club, starting, obviously, with finishing with the clubs April reading. That was how I came to know of the author and the book. Of the holocaust books I have read so far- Every Man Dies Alone- Hans Fallada, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay- Michael Chabon, though its not strictly a holocaust book but delves deeply into the Nazi perpetrated crimes, I found the former book by Fallada as the most moving and touching. The account of the elderly couple is stark and minimalistic in its take on the Nazi-era Germany. In contrast, this book is as much about the war from a soldier’s perspective as it is about the various concentration camps and what went on in there. Knowing that the allied powers were close at hand, Avey recognized the importance of satisfying his curiosity and despite the dangers, risked his life a second time to understand better the camp in its monstrosity. He understood the chances of any survivors in the camp were minimal, and believing in his own indestructibility, as is evident from the streaks of adventurous heroism, he set out to know. Recounting it, I believe took more of an effort than placing himself at the swords end. Read it for a grass-root account of the war and for a humbling knowledge of the goings-on.

The Virgins

It is easy (and convenient) to get sidetracked amidst the hullaboo and the dins of everyday life. Immersing yourself however, in the myriad activities (activities, not consumptions), lets you forget those unnerving thoughts. The bayonets of those tumultuous notions are kept at bay while you gorge on the bread-of-the-day. When you consume folds of paper and droves of pixels, you are wont to feel dismembered, for the variety of shops (online/offline) that sell the various wares lets loose mercuric panthers with predatory instincts. Falling prey to it is akin to placing yourself in front of a swathing canon of cataclysmic perturbatory waves. Such monstrous self-replicating waves initiate (or at least try to) tectonic shifts that, failing to materialize, as is in the majority of cases, unwounds itself, like a writhing snake shedding its skin. It is required therefore, to, sometimes, not indulge in wishful thinking and, instead, carry the torch of your banal existence with pent-up vigour and unidirectional thrust. Miss not, the emphasis on the word ‘sometimes‘ for it’s not just the destination alone that matters. The journey does too. In fact, as some will vouch, the latter takes precedence depending on from where you see it. A balance, as in all other cases, is essential. Those continuous back-and-forths between idealism and prudence, common to all of the mankind is a recurrent theme in those mass-marketed pulp books that invoke science to help human beings. It is often noted though, that, the “inimitable prestige of experience” always trumps the angst and the hardships one need go through towards attaining it. While reading Irene Nemirovsky’s “The Virgins”, through the prism of the assembled coterie of women, one is struck by the paradoxical memories of Camille and the one-dimensional story of Alberte. I wonder sometimes though, if these indeed are so different. While the windows through which I normally see, distant as it is from the subject, farcical and narcissistic as it is-the medium, I am inclined towards believing in the synergy between the two, knowing fully well that it takes effort to tie together the free-floating ends. 

Nothing Like Lear – Review

Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vaults should crack. — She’s gone for ever! —
I know when one is dead, and when one lives;
She’s dead as earth.

Lear, Scene III

Vesti la giubba, Italian for “put on the costume” has been a recurrent theme in many portrayals of tragedy. The idea of the “tragic clown” runs down since ages,the painted tears on the clown who, despite the wastefulness he finds his life to be, has to perform in front of the audience for “the show must go on”. Rajat Kapoor’s fascination with tragicomic portrayals of Shakespearean drama, carrying forward the idea from Hamlet- The Crown Prince, continues with Nothing Like Lear, a jocular and intense rendition of a heartbreaking tale that touches upon the wastefulness of life, the traumatic dawning of age, estrangement with a daughter, an omnipresent sense of failure and the foolhardiness that love bequests to man. The Shakespearean fool, a recurrent motif in all of the Bard’s plays, makes a re-entry into Kapoor’s intrigue. The idea of the jester recounting his tale of deep psychic turmoil, of love lost and of the utter uselessness of age makes for a heart wrenching characterization. Vinay Pathak, in his energetic and cutting portrayal of the clown is deeply disturbing and you get a sense of heaviness descend on you as the 80 minute monologue unfolds – despite the raw stand-up repartee, the pastiche govindaesque humor and the Italian accent.

“That, of course, is the great secret of the successful fool – that he is no fool at all ”- Isaac Asimov

Atul Kumar as the clown. Courtesy: Zomato

Billed outright as a fool who loved excessively, the clown brings to fore various stages of his life, one filled with rejection and comprising of “nothing”, as he likes to put it himself. Through such incidents in his life, parallels are drawn with the epic Shakespearean tragedy, its part-namesake. The weeping crown whose job it is to make people laugh descends into wails, gibberish when the emotions go out of his hands. The escape to gibberish when his feelings are unable to contain themselves further penetrates the clown and as he ages, it descends to insanity and eventual withdrawal.

Vinay Pathak’s clown is energetic, improvising and indulgent. His wails are deeply disturbing, his insanity terrifying and his schizophrenia heart wrenching. As he goes on, moving back and forth between recounting his tales, regaling the crowd with deliberately slip-shod attempts at comedy and sartorial takes on the society, the irony does not seem amiss. Alternating between the clown and the wailing old-man, the tale is fraught with dangers of exaggeration, but one he manages to sound convincing. Like the King Lear, its nemesis, the play is a tragedy at its core, only, this one has a clown at the centre of it all.

I read somewhere that when Rajat Kapoor was conceptualizing the play, one which despite two months of planning and improvisation found more material to improvise impromptu, Vinay Pathak was what he had always in mind. And rightfully so I say, for the Amar Kaul we have come to love and the Bharat Bhushan we have come to respect makes for a solid stage presence. One that is soulfully stirring in its helplessness, mortifying in its insanity and verbose in its intensity.

In one line: A monologue that uses the basic (and tragic) themes of King Lear, twists it for modern sensibilities, grants on-stage liberties and delivers a deeply disturbing clown who cries throughout.

A Separation- Movie Review

In the age we live in, regional movies with limited international appeal forges ahead if, despite the contemporary barriers, it captures that basic tenet of ‘human experience’, which is universal and knows no boundaries. Such is the nature of the art, that despite our inability to imagine ourselves in their shoes, despite our disconnect with the lives they lead and despite our ignorance of the subtle vagaries that dominate the individual’s lives, their suffering and their emotions filter through the geography, and into our subconsciousness. A Separation is one such cinematic experience, universal in its appeal and regional in its setting.

The movie is about the suffering of a family with a schizophrenic parent, about a separation of two lives intertwined for the past fourteen years till frustration takes its toll, about the love for the eleven year old girl that both parents evidently possess, about a careless mistake, about anger and the memory lapse thereon, about the disconnect between the Iranian middle-class and the lower-class, the complexity of the law, the world-from-the-eyes-of the child, the duality of one’s beliefs and the ambiguity of the principles of a devout and finally about the mysteriousness of the truth. That one truth, which during most of the second half of the movie, overtakes everything else. In a way, the movie reminds you of ‘Rashomon’ with multiple accounts of the one unfortunate incident, multiple conclusions and ofcourse multiple principles. All binded together through the strong ropes of suffering.

Three characters which stand out is the father (Nader), the eleven year old daughter (Termeh) and the little girl (Somayeh). The father, because he is suffering and knows not how to express it, the daughter because she suffers and knows the solution, the little girl because she suffers while she can only understand specific things which limits her ability to comprehend the angst of people around her. Shahab Hosseini as ‘Hodjat‘ is stellar in his portrayal of the hot-tempered, lower-class, debt-ridden father while Sareh Bayat as ‘Razieh‘ is impactful as the devout with a twisted sense of morality- one that eats her up from inside due to its ambiguity.

The director Asghar Farhadi is on a quest. His quest is to understand the difference between truth and reality. Are they both the same or are they limited by the body they inhabit? The various moral tangles reflect his chase for what we should accept as truth- is it the facts that stare at us along those winding roads or are they the beliefs we entrust to people we respect and look upto. Morality and truth, their tussle with the lives of two intertwined families. Suffering and choices, their tug within each of the families and the ambiguity within each. The open-ended climax is for the readers to fill in- for the eleven year old is unable to comprehend the question, just as the little girl is unable to comprehend the situation.

‘A Separation’ is one of those movies you will lovingly search through your trunks and ‘archived’ scroll-throughs’ a decade down the line only to be struck by the ambiguous moral tangles all over again. It is one of those masterpieces which will be watched for a long time to come.

While Mumbai runs..

7 kind of people inhabit the amplified air-conditioned world of gym. Some peek in, wishing it all could somehow work out by itself and give it a weak shot only to find themselves drawn to the comfort of their moth-laden sofas. For matters of simplicity such species are excluded from the list. Homo sapiens of such kind need to be dwelt on in a broader canvas, which is certainly out of scope for this curriculum.

Anyhow, below is an exhaustive compendium of the species. As species evolve however the list is therefore not exactly exhaustive. Some,who chose to stay are chronicled here, while others who left, either in contempt or under debt have been left out.

1. The heavy-weights- despite the ambiguous name the kind of metropolitans who inhabit this sphere are not the ones who pull and push heavy weights. Au contraire, this category draws inspiration from those who themselves are one. They can be seen during varied hours of he day, recognised duly through the unnaturally wet gym gears they are made to wear, their appetite for longer gym hours and their inability to visibly show the effect of the gruelling routines they are pushed towards by their hapless instructors. They are by far the meanest and the most diligent of the lots yet somehow find themselves perennially on the cross roads of recovery. Looking at them is, and I am in no way being disrespectful or condemning, a comforting and uplifting experience. All stemming from the huge base effect they are made to constitute.

2. The lurkers: the most dangerous of the lot, stemming from the evident seriousness in their face and the rippling-branded-wet-skin tight tshirts they pair their ultra-shot knickers with. They are there whenever you are there, it matters not if you arrive a day, a week, a month or a year later you will find them going about their routine with utmost sincerity. The trouble is when their efforts show. The first hint of danger knocks its presence when you chance by often, the second when their glare casts you in stone, the third when they demand the machine to be vacated for their use because there is no use (according to them) to explain to you why, the final and the last hint arrives when you, having worked your ass off for more than an hour still find the lurker going about his ordeals as if he has only just started. You wonder of they ever leave the gym or what. You wonder and then decide that since you do not want the fitness level matching his, the muscles more than his, the sincerity more than his and the discipline better than his he is not in your way, nor you in his. It is easier to look at them from a distance and assume their personal life is next to zero, their professional life is not as taxing as yours, and their life in itself is not as knitted as yours.

3. The middlemen- not because they are somewhere between the two categories I enlisted above, but more due to the pseudo-knowledgeable expert advice they are so free to divest themselves off. Men of such kinds think not when they exercise. They look. They soak in their relative advantage over the less fortunate ones and miss not a chance to demonstrate their prowess. They lie in the thickest the slimiest the stupidest bracket. But one you would like to inhabit save some particular idisyncrasies and some other individual ideologies.

4. The cougars-let us now swap the genders. In uni-sex gyms, which are the most common of all, there are those ladies who, in their forties or maybe fifties have decided to give shape a shot. They are one of the most enthusiastic of all ( within their sex ofcourse), probably the weirdest of all, possibly the most careless of their lot and evidently the smallest ( in terms of count) of all. Their work hours are flexible and so are their exercising shifts. While their inability to shift within the machines is limited, which gifts them some brownie points, their immobility when it comes to the treadmill is a source of constant headache however. The gyrating posteriors and the flowing dresses notwithstanding, they take ages to complete their turn, contribute the most to the sounds of the gym ( leaving aside the amplifiers blasting Micheal Jackson or pitbull ofcourse) and extract the least from the monthly fees they dole out to the hefty gym manager. They most likely pare their hours at the gym with the dining hours post-it and emerge unscathed from the whole wetting turmoil.

5. The ogled ones- they are the prize possessions in a gym. If the managers had their way, a new scape-goat would most likely be treated with a lineup of all such dwellers rather than a demonstration of the myriad machines that dot the wooden flooring. Looking at them, apart from a visual delight is, at the same time, a source of constant befuddlement. You wonder ( though you are thankful) why such species call upon the white stinking-wet-overused-gyrating- monotonous machines. If you are a girl you imagine yourself in their position and speculate what better use ‘ you’ would have put this ‘ gym time’ to. If you are a guy, you would be in no position to even think.

6. The ‘lean’ers- the mirror image of the first species in this list, there name alternate between the lightweights and the ‘lean’ers. Not because they lean or anything, more because of their lean’ness’. For the dwellers of species 1 such kind evoke the same sentiments as the girls in species 5 evoke in their brethren.

7. The Us: last and certainly not the least this is the world we inhabit. Us, the fortunate ones for some and not so much for others. Us, who alternate their days, rejig their schedules, forget their instructor’s names, mark their attendance in an effort towards accountancy. Us, the ones with the perennial sense of guilt, the half- hearted efforts, the random thoughts and the ones on the periphery who, like the lurkers,lurk, only, with a different face each time and with significantly more time to dwell on the state of affairs in a gym, the kind of members and their traits, the few selected machines they are authorised to lay their hands on. Us, the ones who run. On the treadmill, away from the lurkers, away from the zealot instructor, away from their guilt, away from the cougars, towards the ogled ones, away from discipline, away from the crunches, away from the dumb- bells ( it’s not for nothing they are called dumb, afterall) and finally, away from the gym itself.

Sakaranti

Sourced from wikipedia :

Makar Sankranti, apart from a harvest festival is also regarded as the beginning of an auspicious phase in Indian culture. It is said as the ‘holy phase of transition’. It marks the end of an inauspicious phase which according to the Hindu calendar begins around mid-December. It is believed that any auspicious and sacred ritual can be sanctified in any Hindu family, this day onwards. Scientifically, this day marks the beginning of warmer and longer days compared to the nights. In other words, Sankranti marks the termination of winter season and beginning of a new harvest or spring season.

While on the path to development are we leaving behind our culture in a cess pool of negligence? Today, the day of sakaranti, as I look towards the sky from the windows of my central Mumbai apartment I cannot help but wonder the expansive blue sky above, minus the dots that once pitched that very blue expanse in a sea of swarming, laced, paper-planes. The kites or guddi or patang as we used to know it has all but vanished, save some enthusiastic souls who climb their terraces on this auspicious day and lock horns with their counterparts in a tussle to win over the skies.

I had climbed the seven stories to get some solace wherein I could read the case of one Salem Sinai, immortalised by Salman Rushdie in The Midnight’s Children only to find four expatriates from US atop the tank- terrace fighting to sail aloft the skies their rocket shaped paper toy. While they had got it all wrong tying the ‘kanni‘ only at the top leaving the kite perilously lurched at the front and unable to scour the skies, a deft manipulation ( with my expert advise ofcourse) they were able to make their way onto the expanse and into the wide blue sheet. It brought the time to a standstill for me as I was thrown back fifteen years trying ( in vain) to induce ‘dhar‘ by using rice, mashed wheat and what not onto the white threads that went in a roundabout along the four pillars that held aloft the verandah in my home.

Some children watched in awe as the kite soured the skies. The firangees were having a nice Saturday with bottles of Kingfisher immersing them in the activity of the day. Even as they shouted ‘ringardium laviosa‘, jumped about their conquest of the sky, gulped down the frothy liquid and whaled in their accomplishment I was at a loss. Around me, a 360 degree view of central Mumbai opened itself up to the Indira Gandhi domestic airport to the north, the shanties of kalina to the south, two deserted apartment high-rises on the east and a cascade of domestic life through the windows of another high rise on the west. A bunch of kids swarmed the south- east corner playing with a oft-used and long discarded football, some scampered stop the deserted water-tank playing catch-me-if-you-can, a middle aged man peered through his half- balcony, a lady dusted the wooden furnitures, another started on the long process of dinner while another sat about watching Star Plus, evident with the glossy and abrupt sequence shifts that could push a head ache in a hurry.

In short, another Saturday in the life of Mumbai complete with the to-do lists of office-goers( which included afternoon siestas for some), evening playgrounds for kids and family time for businessmen. Neither do I know if my
Mumbai ever celebrated this day neither do I care for the same. In a city which prides itself as a magnet which draws Indians from the nook and cranny of India I find it impossible to accept there are not some who haven’t ever let this day take its own special significance.

In an age where being an atheist and agnostic is high brow and intellectual, accepted and desired I do not expect religion to motivate people to let go of this one day and try and sit back under the swath of open skies. What I do not understand is, if we travel seas to immerse ourselves in the local cultures, pride ourselves as widely travelled ones and as jet setters, why in our own country do we scurry when such opportunities knock at our own doors. What is it that we, who were once, known country- dwellers are now indifferent towards the wreak that seems to be emerging in our very own backyard.

In Identity and Violence, Amartya Sen goes about explaining how an individual during his lifetime comes to associated with a wide array of identities, each succeeding the other as and when situation arises with some presiding like demi- gods over the other for some. While we are quick on our feet to denounce and condemn attacks at our culture, gods and traditions it would be interesting to know how many know the constitution of what they defend, how much they understand of those very ‘precious’ identities and what pains they undertake to preserve it in their own glass- houses. With that said, I would be quick to acknowledge my ignorance of the people who do care and who do give a damn.

While I am on the issue of disclosures I should also concede that I am not your front page conservatives, nor am I those page 3 connoisseurs with profiles undertaken by the likes of Mint Lounge, TOI Crest, The Caravan etc. I am your quintessential average citizen who wants to give a damn. You might want to skip the history or the ancient logic but you should be careful while phasing out the actual action. It might seem pre-historic, but it’s important because it helps you understand where you come from, helps you keep intact the nostalgia and pushes you to cherish and promote something which, an antique at present, helps you sit back and reflect, share and reminisce, understand and preserve your root.

Quick Thought

In a rapidly fossilizing government an 80 year old technocrat known more for reforms and less for politics is struggling to promote his visions. In a party that is known more for its cronyism and allegiance to a pseudo-monarchist family than its transparent process of promoting merit, this comes as little surprise. While the crown-prince acknowledges this very fact, the grand lady wields the powers-in-the-shadows deftly and sometimes, brazenly. Accountability is therefore thrown for a toss. We are left in the lurch as to whether to tarnish the image of an old, nimble and shy PM or attribute it all to SG who is above accountability. This is not to say that the government has not been trying. Rather that the docility with which it approaches each issues and policy decisions it looks more and more akin a dog with bones that it brings back to its master, wagging its tails and showing intent. Sometimes, it does make one wonder if a two-party system would have been better in India despite its myriad and gigantic populace. This also, despite one’s sharp aversion to dynastic politics and power-by-birth doctrine, makes one wishful of the virtues of one prodigal son, hoping against odds that he learns and delivers– it then matters not how and what gave him the power. At the very least, a central authority with visibly wielded powers is better than an opaque power sharing agreement, one where each decision is fraught with melodramatic emotions, stupid blackmails, irrelevant logic and a paralyzed parliament. As long as he learns, understands and corrects himself and his alma mater I vouch for the king-to-be, not because I think he deserves to be more because pragmatism and resigning to the best alternative go hand in hand. Too much of wishful thinking? That’s all that can be done isn’t it?

The Sense of an Ending- Book Review

Nostalgia is a perception and a misty one at that. You memories are essentially facts about your life you had forgotten. History is not the “lies of the victors”, it is more “the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated”- those who are sort of in a no-man’s land and in a constant tussle to lead life “peaceably”. History also, “is that certainty at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation”.

Confessions have always held a sacred place amongst the tools of an author. Across generations, from Lolita to Moll Flanders, A History of Time to Crime and Punishment this form of narration confronts the reader, nudging him to understand the narrator in ways the author has deliberately held back his pen from describing. In an open-ended book, such as The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, the very same narration strikes gold in the eyes of the receptive reader, leaving him to interpret as he may the fate and the wry thoughts of the delinquent narrator. What makes the narration all the more brute is the reliability of the narrator. If we are, by deft means of course, left in the lurch as to whether to trust the narrator or not, a new story constructs itself parallel to the original. This guides the reader as in a mystery novel, as if a puzzle lies in waiting.

The Man-Booker winner novella tells us a poignant tale of a man’s quest to retrace his life and discover amazingly new and tantalizingly destructive facts- one that is bound to shake the whole system he based his life on. In the words of Webster, the narrator- “My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being.” In some ways, the novel turns back on the notion that life, lead in full, is supposed to welcome wisdom. This novel, in a way negates that, suggesting it may further compound the questions themselves. A life which ends in questions? Is that so hard to believe?

The novel achieves the distinction of being didactic, a page-turner and at the same time, a sharp observation that casts an intensely ferocious look inside the machinations of a complacent life. The narrator provides us a disclaimer as to his inadequacy at having understood life, even his.

“This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed”- to the credit of the author we have been presented with a disclaimer in the very first page itself!

Nevertheless, as we turn the pages, the wry, sometimes splittingly funny, sometimes brutally honest and cutting observations push us to give him a sympathetic ear and cannon-blast attention- till we come to the second part of the book where both our and the narrators’ beliefs are shook to its very foundations.

As Webster looks into his childhood days, he describes the dramatic entry of one Andrew Finn: “There had been three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn’t expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life.”

“In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives—and when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first indiscernible.”

The setting is a classic 60s England where those “book hungry, sex hungry, meritocratic and anarchic” youth indulged in understanding intellectuality, British snobbery and the idea of life and where “morbid disbelief was a natural by-product of adolescence”. Finn, the ideal intellectual with a supremely confident notion of history, life and of British mannerisms- also the leader of the pack of 4 who “each felt himself close to Andrew” and regarded his notions in high esteem.

“I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious. I really hate it.”- Finn in one of his rarest outbursts; is symbolic of the pathos of the British sense of being, one he found condemnable and one in which Tony finds solace post his “humiliating” encounter with his girlfriend Veronica’s family- the root of the novel.

His ideas and principles were a mystery to them and hence he had become de-facto the coolest person in their eyes. So much so, his death, as a suicide, had a profound effect on them- each wishing to decode his parting note and trying to understand life as it happened to them. Of them, Tony, the most observant of the lot, or so we are led to believe had a different take on life- he respected Finn but did not emulate him, unlike the others.

“So for example, What if Tony…”

As a 60 year old, while Tony recounts his largely amiable, complacent and peaceable life he receives a notice from a solicitor informing him of a will bequeathed on him by the late Mrs. Ford, mother of his ex-girlfriend of 40 years ago. A sum of 500 pounds and a mysterious package of unknown whereabouts is what is left for him. When he discovers it’s a diary of his friend Finn, he sets out on the elusive, mysterious and pounding quest to get back the diary, believing the diary would be a revelation as every diary is supposed to be. In the process however, as shreds of new evidence creak through, pushing him to shed his mind-blocks a shattering revelation about his past, one he had blocked himself out of, resurfaces. It is his piquant self, with acid in his tongue that leaves him dumbfounded and in the peril of recalibrating his entire existence.

History now becomes “the self-delusions of the defeated”.

“We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history—even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?”

The book trudges the thin line differentiating the “collective” and the “personal” history. One relying on “documentation” and the other on the imperfect assimilation of a forgetful memory and an imperfect documentation.

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”- And surely, Webster masterfully continues to construct lives in his mind as he compiles newer information.

The book, in a way is also, despite its justifications for suicide and “taking things into ones’s control”, a celebration of life. It focuses on grave existential concerns and tries, albeit in a complicated fashion to bring out the essence of life.

Sample this: “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things, rather than facing them. Time . . . give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical . . .”

Tony, in his unassuming way wanted an average, peaceable life, thinking, erroneously that he was being mature and responsible. As things go, he comes to disregard, even block things out of his way.

For me, the most rewarding aspect of the book is the astounding depths this concise masterpiece goes into trolling the inner workings of human emotions. Through brutal honesty and razor-sharp observations the machinations of the human mind, the frailties of the older age, the irresponsible youthful exuberance and “the attraction of overcoming someone’s contempt” is brought to the fore.

Carpe Diem! Cliched as it may sound the desire to live life to its fullest is given its full treatment in the book. Barnes plays to the ideology that it is better to regret something which you have done than regret something which you haven’t.

But anyways, “that’s kind of philosophically self-evident” isn’t it?

WordPress App for iPad

The more you try and find out the logic behind the myriad chain of events, the more you rationalise the process and the farther you get from the truth. What is truth anyways? Is it the knowledge that the happenings can be attributed to a particular chain of events and that for every action there is a motive and an end?

When you scour through the news and find something that you think appeals to your aesthetic taste and leaves you with a feeling that you know the ground rules, you know the motives, you are familiar with the cast, you are allergic to the director and you are supremely confident of your own powers you try and ascribe an intellectual fervour to it- which these days are not hard to come by, from people varied and sundry.

Anyhow, just testing the WordPress app for iPad. Much better than the pathetic Tumblr which, surprisingly, hasn’t taken the leap beyond the iPhone. Will be back soon!