The elephant in nobody's room

I must not be alone in wondering what happened to the old India. The India we have heard of in our history lessons. One with vibrant and prosperous cities. The India that Columbus decided to sail dangerous seas to find. The land of spices, science, philosophy and flourishing trade. The magical place that had an awesome reputation for itself all around the world. They say the islamic invaders from the north-west destroyed most of it. Then there was the British colonising spree that left almost nothing in its wake. We could probably research about how exactly these things happened, but, at the end of the day, we are left with not a single relatable aspect of early India. Also, we are very skeptical about the authenticity of every ancient facet brought back to life. So much so that we treat it almost like an abominable ghost. Ayurveda is such a good example. The doubts are not entirely on whether the ancient practices of Ayurveda best or match up to currently accepted medicine but rather on the credibility of the person/s who claim to have resurrected them magically from thin air. Con-men galore in the brave new India, I’m afraid. Be what it may, we can all agree on the wealth of knowledge, which must have taken hundreds, if not thousands, of years to gather, now lost to us. Yoga, however, seems to have seeped through somehow. Probably because the western world fancied an interest in it. 

The end result, thus, is that we don’t get to bask in the reflected-glory of our forefathers. We are not in a position to expect much respect anywhere in the world just based on our nationality. In reality, foreigners might find more reasons to ridicule us; courtesy, for example, our friendly neighbourhood rapists. Like it or not, we have been handed down a legacy that seems to have been handpicked to make us feel ashamed. Irresponsible government, mindless customs, casteism, racism, sexism, age-ism (bade hai tho sahi hai - if an elder said it, it must be right), homophobia, xenophobia, etc. Thankfully though, all-out war is not one of the things that we have inherited. A fairly good constitution and the privilege of democracy are other things we are rarely thankful for. The negatives often overwhelm us way too much to appreciate the potential of the positives. A little thought can lead to the realisation that these few good things we have left are all we need to seize the future. The democracy we so casually mock everyday and the peace that we take for granted are instruments so powerful that they can completely wipe-out injustice and misery from our nation. If our generation could find within ourselves one-hundredth of the patriotism that our great-grandfathers displayed through their fearless struggle for freedom; we could write a brighter new future for our successors like they did. 

The question remains as to what we actually intend to do. New doors have opened all around us. One could pick a door and never look back. Those who do not have the privilege to walk through can loathe their lives away in jealousy. One could stay and make a respectable livelihood instead, with a front-row seat to the tamasha (comedy). Or, craziest of all, gear-up, get involved and own up to the consequences. Whatever the choice may be, a strange sense of pride always lingers. I, for one, would never ever fake my country of birth.

Anger ( == | != ) bad ???

There can't be any counter argument when it comes to anger being bad; or is there?

Let’s break it down a bit, to better understand the intricacies.

Anger is as natural as joy. 

Pretty much a strange bit of chemistry and hormonal biology happening somewhere deep in the brain. 

It is hurtful.

A pleasant experience for neither the people around you nor yourself, after you’ve calmed down and discovered how unbecoming you had been.

It is harmful. 

Nothing like a little blood pressure and stress to cut you innings down, right from under your nose.

It can cause headaches, anxiety, depression, strokes, insomnia, digestive problems, etc. A definite health risk if you are generally hot-headed.

It solves nothing.

Getting angry is just a vent of frustration and not really a magical way to solve the problem at hand.

It could lead to unfavourable outcomes.

Black-eyes or broken ribs from fights, for example; in case the person/s you get mad at have an equally bad, or worse, tendency to get riled up and things get nasty. In general, people might hesitate to socialise with you, to say the least.

Weighing the pros and cons leaves us with a straight-forward conclusion. Anger is bad. Then why do even the best of us exhibit this behaviour? Why do we enjoy the hyper-glamourised, anger-driven action sequences in our movies and TV shows? Why does it seem normal when politicians get visibly angry on national television, activists shout out their anger on streets, sports persons get angry on the field, spouses get angry on their cheating partners, etc. ? Why is nobody running a campaign to eradicate anger from our everyday lives altogether? Let’s investigate.

Extreme anger is usually termed ‘animosity’ and that gives us a good clue as to where to start looking. In the animal kingdom, we observe anger as a tool to exhibit defensiveness and/or dominance. A Lion king gets angry and attacks any contender who lays claim to his supremacy and position in the pride. A monkey screeches in anger to scare away predators. A cobra raises its hood and hisses menacingly at you till you get the hell out of its perimeter. Do these examples lend us an insight into what’s happening to us when we snap? A little, maybe, but not much.

Getting back to civilisation, we pretty much have a good idea why we sometimes blow a fuse over simple things. Our expectations are not met and we get so disappointed that we don’t seem to get a handle on ourselves. Or, we feel our rights have been violated and it is conceptually so  unacceptable that we flip out. However, this is just another example of how certain actions/events in life don’t meet our expectations. The anger is greater when this happens where/while we least expect it. 

So, we have that figured out. 

But, this doesn’t explain why we still let the idea of ‘getting angry’ live on in our modern societies. Shouldn’t it be discarded completely by the entire population? 

Well, I believe I might have a possible answer why we continue to ‘celebrate’ (if I may say so) anger.

The key is an essential concept at the core of it, namely ‘righteousness’. It turns a detestable human reaction to a glorified one. And rightly so, if I may add. Anger, in its righteous form, is the force that has turned the gears of change across the world. It had caused revolutions and reforms that have been instrumental in ensuring a more just and fair society in the future. Whichever country we are from, there have been brave people in our history who have raged against injustice and inequality to forge new customs. They questioned the norm and were hated for it. If they didn’t have the righteous anger inside them that fuelled them on, they would have abandoned their quest and disappeared into oblivion leaving things as they were. How's that for a counter argument?!

So is anger altogether bad? Certainly not. 

The trick is to perform a ‘righteousness test’ before you decide to run with your anger. Hard to do in a split second, but with enough practice and a positive attitude, things can only get better. 

P.S.  (Personal rant)

In an Indian context, especially Tamil Nadu, we are constantly taught to kill our anger from a very early age onward. Whole generations have been turned bovine and voiceless when it comes to blatant everyday blasphemies in administration, politics, media and the private sector. Ginormous capitation fees, rampant corruption, conceited MLAs, bullying policemen, bigoted news persons, presumptuous customer-service agents, inconsiderate bosses etc. are all welcome to stay as long as they please in our state. Why? Because we are too logically sound to overlook the ill effects of anger, whether righteous or not. Basically we just want to be respectful and respectable, ‘nice’ people! 

'PET' bottle

It was sunrise. The beautiful light of dawn beamed onto the asphalt. The bridge was short and narrow. Mopeds zipped by busily. The hour made them sound magical. A calmness with intermittent soft humming noises. But it was the bottle that woke him up. The stray plastic bottle which was run over by one of the ‘zippers’. It lay awkwardly lopsided; deformed by coming under the wheel. He had been asleep on the footpath with his back resting on the sidewall of the bridge. The sun wouldn’t have woken him since he was comfortably in the shade of the half-wall. Specks of dust floated down, glittering in the first rays of the morning and settling down on his ginger hair. His eyes were on the bottle. Crackle! Another moped just went by crushing and flinging it at the same time. It landed next to his feet on the sidewalk. He stared at it for a little while and then leaned forward to pick it up. Like a curious kid he looked in through the mouth with the bottle held up close to his right eye. No water. With one quick short blow he puffed it up and made it look like a bottle again. Still crumpled, but less crumpled than before. It passed his ‘stand upright’ test which seemed to satisfy him. He placed it carefully beside him like it was his new priced possession. It might very well have been. 

Dozing back to sleep was not going to be easy as the screeching of horns grew more frequent by the minute. His eyed swung back open. Half-way this time. The hesitation to give up the idea of an extended morning nap was writ large on his face. As if unbeknownst to him, his left hand scratched his belly much like a primate’s expression of hunger. Yet he lay there, putting off the day’s scavenging by a little while longer. The way things looked, some teenager’s urge to buy the umpteenth t-shirt could easily triumph this man’s interest to find a morsel and feed himself. I’ve heard elders say that the less financially privileged you are, the more you would fight to succeed in life. Maybe I should introduce them to this guy. He seemed clearly penniless and was undoubtedly one of the laziest human beings on the planet. 

What would ideas like freedom, human rights or patriotism mean to him? 

I’m not really sure.

But, what I am pretty sure about is that they must mean less to him than that crumpled bottle that sat beside him.

iPeople

Today I met an old person. He was sixty-plus and seemed like a very amicable man. But that was until we started talking about his life. He began rambling about how he was once a respected man with unique talents and how he had degraded to becoming what he was now. Allegedly, his life was in a bad state of affairs. However, I couldn't  see why he would think that, especially since everything seemed almost perfect with him from where I was sitting. He had retired from a respectable position, had earned quite a lot, his children were well to do and well settled and his grandchildren’s faces beamed with happiness in those pictures on his wall. From what I gathered, he had every reason to be happy and proud of himself. But the melancholy on his face was unmistakable. He was not a content man and had a look on his face as though he had lost something. Though he was very polite to me, his tone of voice and mannerisms changed when he addressed his wife. It was like his head turned 30 degrees and he was a different man. All in all; at the end of the day, I was 2 hours late to a meeting with a friend.

The old man reminded me of someone I knew from college. He was a friend of mine who was caught up in a relationship that he couldn’t quite handle. Every time I met this guy he wanted to talk about nothing else but his girlfriend and the quarrels of the day. I even caught him locked in 1000-yard-stares a couple of times. I often wondered why a person would stick to such a relationship. However, this didn’t end till the day we graduated and parted ways. Come to think of it, I don’t remember him by any memory other than those chats that now seem more like marriage counselling sessions. A brief recollection and I realise that there are many such people who have shared my presence for more time than I would have liked. I could also see that they all shared some common traits and eventually I came up with a term for them - the ‘iPeople’.

‘iPeople’ are our fellow humans who are so lost in thought that they usually find it hard to allocate sufficient brain RAM to do day to day things like having a good chat with a friend without boring him/her to death, not missing “Please” and “Thank you” wherever necessary, remembering what people around them like/hate, etc. The easiest give-away is the fact that, more often than not, a conversation you have with them is just about what’s on their mind or what’s going on in their life. I think it’s safe to say that they are not actually at fault, though it might seem like it. In the case of the old man I was talking about earlier; he seemed to have taken the effort to clear enough on his mind to talk to me in an upbeat manner while he didn’t really bother to do the same with his wife. This might because he had taken her for granted or thought she loved him so much that she was okay with it; but I digress. The fact of the matter is that he was so used to being unhappy that even  his face had lost its cordiality for the brief instant he turned to speak to his wife. He then turned back to me and there, the pleasant smile was back. “Why does it have to be this way?” - I had thought to myself later, but instantly envisaged how my face would have looked one millisecond ago when I was asking myself that! I wasn’t jovial-looking, was I? Though it doesn’t mean much since I wasn’t actually talking to someone, it does provide an insight into what ‘iPeople’ go through over longer periods of time. 

Another important detail is that ‘iPeople’ are not usually ‘iPeople’ all the time. It might be a phase and the length of the phase depends entirely on two things. Firstly, the cause and complexity of the thought that seems to posses them and secondly, their capability and experience in handling the likes. It might be very difficult for an ‘iPerson’ to realise s/he has become one since s/he simply does not have the available mind resources to do so. Their brains are overloaded by processes that are “spinning” out of control - as a software engineer would put it. The sad part though is that some people are stuck in the loop forever. Especially when it comes to elderly people, very few are actually satisfied with the life they have lived and this thought preoccupies them all the time. It is in the best interest of all of us to learn to tackle this silent epidemic which is stealing really interesting and fun people from among us. It is not just eating into the time they could be spending living in the moment but also producing boring spouses, boring friends and boring coworkers world over. 

"The woman who sings"

'Incendies' 2010 - movie thoughts

As suggested by my friend, Abhishek Balaji (a walking /lib of all-things-TV, Hollywood and Bollywood; not to mention - an authority on the Marvel Universe), I have taken up the rather unsettling task of writing about the French-Canadian movie ‘Incendies’ (English:'Fires') - directed by Denis Villeneuve. Upfront, I would like to say that this movie is not for the faint hearted. If you are unsure whether you are ‘faint-hearted’ in the first place, watching this movie could help you allay your skepticism. And if you have already watched the movie; oh yeah, you know what I’m talking about! Please be advised: The following text contains *SPOILERS* - such as  plot insights, scene details, etc. but I have tried to hold back on leaking the final punch.

Since the day I bought my awesome new Blu-ray player on an sweet Black Friday deal, I had started borrowing Blu-ray movie discs from the public library every week as a matter of principle. On some weekends, we, the roommates three, would watch one together. One random day; a wayward whim to pick a random movie, and our lives changed forever. 

The plot summary is really just a google away, so I’d rather stick to whats not on there. It is best, though, if you ‘enjoy’ the movie without any prior knowledge whatsoever about it. I give you these following blank lines for you to reconsider that and maybe come back to reading this after . . .

Well, here we are then. 

         

Old woman gets a heart-attack in a public swimming pool in Canada. Nothing very absurd there.. just a random happening. Or is it?. And sooner than you know it, her will needs to be read. Among other particulars, there are three letters. One for her twin kids, one to be handed to their long lost brother and one for their unknown father. The daughter bites and decides to make the journey to the Middle-East where her mother was born, so as to know who her father is and to find her missing brother. Now begin two parallel narratives: that of the mother and that of the daughter. What you see is a metaphor of what usually happens in human life. In everyone’s lives there are high points where there was a lot of action and a lot of memories are made. Usually, we spend the rest our lives reminiscing those moments. Nawal (mother)  and Jeanne (daughter) sort of represent two chapters of the same life. Nawal being the young action-packed part and Jeanne being the reminiscing part (though young and old are interchanged in the actual ages of the characters). 

Nawal has a kid with a secret lover who is killed. The kid is sent away to an orphanage and Nawal goes to school as per a deal made with her mom. Religious unrest across the land causes widespread destruction and terrorism. The kid (who’s story is gathered by Jeanne) is abducted and made into a sniper by the Islamist terrorists. Nawal comes in search of him and finds herself in a bus full of Muslim civilians which is then ambushed by Christian gunmen. This a scene where a viewer could gauge his/her mental capacity to witness extreme violence. The director plays with your emotions as he chooses the most delicate of beings (a little girl) and throws it at the face of danger. Then he toys with you by feeding your hope; making you believe that she is going to survive after all. And BAM; she’s dead! Nawal survives by showing her cross (being christian herself), but witnessing that horror changes something within her. 

Nawal 2.0 is an Islamic assassin who wants to avenge the little girl. Around this time, her sniper-kid is caught and still being young, is ‘reprogrammed’ into a pawn in the Christian camp. Notice the flip-flop of allegiances? Christian Mom goes to the Islamic side and Islamic son moves over to the Christian side. Nawal succeeds in killing the man who was ultimately responsible for the bus ambush (who was higher up in hierarchy). She gets imprisoned where she later gets known as "The woman who sings". Torture of a sexual nature (not “graphic”, thankfully) ensues. She bears twins that are secretly taken care of by one of the prison workers till her eviction. This a very humbling episode since the revelation which Jeanne undergoes is quite mind-numbing for her. All this while, the viewer had been blissfully unaware of the twins’ birth story and like for the characters themselves, it comes as a shock to know that they were born out of prison torture. But, as you will eventually see, this is just a teaser. 

Simon(Jeanne’s twin brother), now joins his sister in her quest. They navigate through terrorist groups to identify where their brother is and who their father is. As we they near the end of their investigation, the final and the most insane juggernaut of a climax hits you in the face. You might even guess it right before the confirmation arrives; and if you did, I’m pretty sure you would have had the same reaction we had while we were watching it. Multiple repetitions of “NO!!!” and “S@$*!!!” is all I can remember now; but the feeling is unforgettable. That feeling when you really really mean to say “F$*@! NO!” but can’t say it because saying the f-word only makes it worse. And so you end up saying “SH%$!!! NO!!” with twice as much emphasis than you possibly would in any other situation. When you deduce it yourself, the closest feeling I can think of is your brand new iPhone slipping off your hand over the edge from atop of a 12 storey building, and when the director reveals it, its like you hear the sound of the phone hitting the pavement. 

The rest is just a reconciliation of you with your senses and the characters with their family history. Then everything starts to make sense: “Why did the old woman get an attack in a public pool?”, “Why was this movie made?”, “Why am I here watching it?”,”Why is my popcorn all over the place?”, etc.

Thanks for reading through!