Answering facebook’s perennial query of “What’s on your mind?”
I’ve on my mind ‘The Secret of The Nagas,’ book 2 of the
Shiva Trilogy which a colleague is not giving to me as I finished his copy of book
1 ‘The Immortals of Meluha’ in 4 hours (i.e. too quickly for his comfort) while
I was in the middle of the ‘River of Smoke’ and now that I’ve cabbaged my boss’
‘Kafka on the Shore,’ I can’t wait to begin it but can’t because I’ve to start
work on a campaign which is to be delivered tomorrow.
Written at 8pm on a December evening in office. And not
updated as a status.
The day is a road which ends at the cliff of the night. From the edge of it we all take a leap and drown in its unfathomable waters, only to emerge unharmed, renewed, and ready for the next day.
Sometimes at the end of a day I sit on its edge and reminisce how my journey was. I think we all do this knowingly, unknowingly. (In matters like these, we’ve not been given much choice.) And sometimes at the end of the road we are propelled with such great momentum that our only moment of reminiscing is just before hitting the warm, inky depths of the night.
We writers are generally not blessed with such a swift end to our journeys. By our very nature, we are addicted to trying and prolonging this leap, that epiphany between jumping from the cliff and hitting the waters. Though this rarely happens, the road ends sooner than expected, the precipice beckons and we’ve but no choice to end it all, then and there.
But sometimes, by some opportunistic sleight, we do manage to pause the wheels of time. On days like these, we sit on the edge of the cliff and look back at the road, trying to derive meaning out of this needless traveling and jumping and re-emerging dripping the dreams of the night.
…
This life is also a road which ends at the cliff of death. From its edge too we take the leap and drown in its unforgiving waters, only to emerge unharmed, renewed and dripping with the karmas of our previous journey.
…
Sometimes at the end of a day like today, I just wish that when my journey finally ends, I’ll be given more than a moment of recollection, that in the moment when I look back, I’ll see a life well spent and a love well earned.
Sometimes at the edge of a day like today, I just wish her to be beside me and the day… to never end.
"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."
Sept. 19, 2010, sometime near the clock reached 1pm
A reader, reading a text is a unique phenomenon. That is, there is no other equal for this act of reading a particular piece by an individual followed by and preceded by some other text or sensory experience. For example, this morning I finished reading Orwell's masterpiece '1984'. But last evening, while I was coming to the book's end and while my mind was already abuzz with a lot of 'doublethink', I was craving to read some poetry also. While going through a number of volumes in my collection, I picked up the collected works of Kaifi Aazmi titled 'Sarmaya'. By the time I completed '1984', I also went through more than half the verses of this collection.
In other words, what I meant by my opening statement was that, I'm sure I'm the only person in the world who has read or started reading '1984' after reading the poetry of Faiz and Gulzar; and ended it while reading Kaifi sahab's poetry. And this is what makes my reading 1984 (or any other text) a truly unique phenomenon.
Same is the case with any reader who picks up a book, following and preceding any experience that only s/he could have had. So any poem, novel, play, essay does not remain what was written by the author. Every reader brings a part of him or her to the table. What was written by the author continuously changes shape, color, texture, and intensity as per that individual reader's past and future experiences.
Reading Kaifi Aazmi with 1984 was rare even by these unique standards. While on one hand, Orwell denounces any type of oligarchy, whether socialist, nazi, or western-capitalist, Aazmi on the other hand is an avowed socialist. More than half of his book is filled with verses of/about revolution, of failures of the then current political order and of dreams of a common brotherhood.
I, on my part didn't read much of the revolutionary verses. It is his other work, about the position of man in this hierarchical society, about Hindu-Muslim unity, and a few poems with a touch of romance was what I liked more. Kaifi the poet is disillusioned, but still hopeful of a revolution, of a better, equal world. Though I stopped myself at his disillusioned best.
Orwell, the author gives a warning, a forever timely one, that the world at any moment could slip into the hands of those few who might have more power, more control over humanity than it has ever been attempted before. He is the voice of the 'negative utopia', wherein the very revolution that the poet Kaifi dreams of, has dehumanized, debased, degenerated the common men and women it was supposed to raise to a better level.
Reading these two together I realized that they both are talking about the same subject, though one has dreams of a better world 'before' his revolution; the other has nightmares of a worsened world 'after' that revolution. The sad part is, that the people on whose behalf they dream or the people they want to warn, those people will always remain in the same state of affairs, whichever side the coin falls.
"कोई तो सूद चुकाए, कोई तो जिम्मा ले
उस इन्किलाब का आज तक उधार सा है"
"At least somebody step forward and pay the interest of the revolution that is still unpaid for"
i'm a writer of memory. i write from what i have seen or feel i have seen. howsoever i try, i can never write from imagination and i admire and am jealous of those who can. but even imagination is memory na? you never imagine what you've never felt before.
at around 3 in the office, i remembered how i've not written anything for me for some days now.
tomorrow starts a three-day weekend but i most probably will be in the office. have loads of work at hand and some very interesting projects that i really want to do. so, i'm looking forward to it... to writing for career, fun, office etc. but simultaneously, have been missing writing for myself, for pain, for life.
lately i've been complaining to myself why i don't get to actually writing down what comes to my mind. and as my volume is quite high, many of those around me get to hear these complaints quite clearly. then early morning today, i got some time alone to gather my thoughts and wrote in my diary. now i want to share it with you.
"am sitting in my room, alone in the house. it is quite. i've opened this journal after a long time. (well, now it's more of a scrap book and less of a journal.) i don't know why i don't write when it pains me so much not to write. thoughts, words, images start forming within my mind the moment i get up. sometimes even before that. perhaps it's plain laziness, a disease that has afflicted me all my life. and when you live with something for so long, you start loving it. now i hush me up by putting laziness on a pedestal and sacrificing many idle moments on her altar. moments, minutes, times that could have been better utilized. but i guess, to be guilty is to be human. maybe the only difference between man and animal is the total absence of guilt in the latter's concious.
perhaps i don't write because of this guilt. maybe its not laziness, but this fear of unraveling myself in front of me. unraveling not in the sense of removing clothes and being ashamed of the sorry state of this physical body, unraveling in the sense of peeling layer after layer of the pretences i've build upon my mental existence.
to write this journal is to know myself, to feel guilty of things i should be doing and am not doing, to feel ashamed at my robot like existence where am human only in the biped, city-living, internet-using, animal-of-a-herd sense. to write is to be the exact opposite of this animal, and still i shy away from it.
maybe, i don't write 'cos i'm lazy, maybe i don't want to come across the human within me."
tell me, dear reader freind, do you also feel the same?
