Friday, June 5, 2009

Waiting for DropD

For the last couple of years, I have been passing through a strange kind of phenomenon. It is a phenomenon because it has become recurrent in my life and it's strange because I don't possess any grammar of it and hence I have no methodology of controlling it or understanding it. Being a person identified as the male in our society, I have tended to believe in the possibility of achieving almost everything. My urban middle-class background has conditioned me in certain methods through which I used to think that my worldview is nearly complete and autonomous. In general, I may be called a successfully stable professional and a family man enjoying the relative comforts of a material life. Within the so-called mainstream definitions of experience, I should be called a happy man. The fact of the matter is that the happiness is there performing a superficial role confirming the status of material achievements but happiness as a state of being has been missing like a file that is somewhere on the hard disk but I have forgotten the root-word which can enable me to relocate it. I don't think that I am a misfit in the system because I find myself fitted well into the system. I don't think that I want to run away from the system because I don't dislike the material comforts of my life. I don't think that I am not a free person because I enjoy a lot of autonomy in terms of professional and private relationships in both the public and the private sectors of my life. I don't think that I suffer from social alienation because I've been well-connected with both the grassroots and the elite communities of our society. I don't think that I lack any kind of connectivity with my past or my future as I still follow the rules of a joint family, religious literature and go to multiplex to watch Hollywood movies. I don't think that I'm suffering from any lack of libido because there have been sufficient number of accidents to validate the credentials of this force. I don't think that I'm suffering from the virus of the reverse morality, a kind of anti-reaction from the overdose of morality. I have experimented sufficiently in order to satisfy my wander-lust and wonder-lust. I don't think that I'm passing through a midlife crisis because by international standards, I'm way below midlife though by Indian standards, I maybe close to it but I don't find any lack of zeal for new things and new projects. To be honest, I don't find myself full of complaints against anybody at a personal level though within certain contexts, there can be and there are certain complaints against somebody as well as the system. At the general level, as far as the root of unhappiness is concerned, I don't find anybody who is making me unhappy the way I am today. The source of unhappiness is not the person.
Now the question is what makes me unhappy. Anybody who goes through the above-mentioned details of my life shall be easily saying it that I don't have any reason to be unhappy because I have sufficiently large repertory of experiences which should be a reason of happiness. If it's really that, why can't I feel it? At least, whatever subtle element happiness may have, it should be a matter of experience rather it has to be a matter of experience. If one cannot feel the happiness inside, there is no point in continuing with life itself. I'm not talking of happiness that can be measured by a certain indicator. On most of the indicators, my scale of happiness shall be near the optimum levels. As a statistical proof, I cannot be termed as an unhappy person. There can be no body in power who can authenticate the fact of my unhappiness without endangering his own position. The systems of human design cannot sympathise with me without equating their own position with mine. Even if they know that I am unhappy, they will avoid making any statement out of it because I fall into a serious category of not just an intangible factor but also rebellious-cum-anarchist who can unsettle the structures of establishment by pointing out a deep hole everytime and everywhere. The more sympathetic ones might call me a madman and hence declare me a person without any relevance. I'm not elaborating on my state of unhappiness because I want to make it a public discourse symbolising intellectual activism. Out of nearly 100 posts on my blog, the serious articles have been rarely commented upon. They might have been read but they have never come into a public discourse. So, on that front I am a pretty anonymous person who may create lot of noise and nuisance in the virtual domain but there are negligible commentators to attract me into this kind of activism.
To be precise, I don't know why I am not happy? I have tried to reason out all the possible sources but I am not able to locate the exact source. This unhappiness is not a political statement which can be recorded. To be politically precise, this is off the record. Since I don't hold anybody as the source of my unhappiness, my entire effort should be called a politically neutral venture. The only thing I can and I will is that I can allow anybody and everybody to have a peep into my inside and try to find out if I am stating my facts correctly. The only phenomenal fact is that I am not happy and all the other facts are the result of this fundamental phenomenon. The basic science of living is that one should enjoy one's life. I find myself somewhat closer to the characters of a radical film “Idiots” by Lars Von Trier. All the actors of this film are a group of young thinking individuals who are so fed up with the mainstream way of life that they try out it totally counter experiment to rebel against the system. They consciously design a system where they think the use of established common sense can be totally rejected. They imagine and concoct a community life where they start living as if they are in a school of mentally retarded people. These are the people who cannot use the faculty of reason in their daily behaviour whether it is eating, talking, interacting or sex. They try out a life totally opposed to the established methods of thinking. In the end, they find themselves incapable of rejecting reason. They thought that by going to the other extreme of the reason, they could live a decent life, the life they thought worthwhile but they are not successful in developing a natural instinct of bypassing reason however ridiculous they might find it to be. They are a group of pretty successful professionals who have experienced the incoherence of definitions of success and honour. They feel ultimately that they can befool the society but not themselves. Against any anticipation, a woman who accidentally becomes part of the group finds herself naturally driven towards the senselessness which they had found incapable of achieving. She has just lost her son. Her grief has overtaken her and she loses her control over reason. She starts falling into a behaviour which can be called madness. She's a person who is not at all aware of the nuances of this experiment. She seems to be of an average intellect. Still, she can accomplish something which all thinking giants wanted to. They shifted from addiction of reason to extreme hatred of reason but she simply dropped reason without even noticing it.
I find myself like a person who has gone through this experiment and finds himself in a permanent state of deadlock where you can't repeat an experiment. The death of experiment is such a profound shock that it becomes a case of ‘total non-possibility’. It should invite only one more experiment that is suicide. The assumption of stalemate is itself a suicide. The rest is merely a procedural formality. It will be like repeating what has already been said in “The Myth of Sisyphus” by Albert Camus. I'm not interested in addressing the problem of suicide because I don't find suicide a problem rather the assumption of stalemate is a problem. In the total contrast to the radicals of “The Idiots”, the woman by her accidental participation comes out to be the real hope of the film and the life itself. Creating a structure and then demolishing it with an anti-structure are not the acts which can ensure happiness. It's like squeezing something to its nothingness. That's why I have chosen to allow myself to flow with the state of unhappiness. At the most, I'm trying to qualify the details of a sustained feeling of being a partial entity. The partial is in a sense of a permanent loss of experiential capability. The woman who lost her son was full of grief which was very private and yet overwhelming. I have a grief but it is not overwhelming. I don't even know what it is. I can only feel it when I cry. It makes its presence felt when I want to love. It's there when my kid is lonely and he doesn't even cry but keeps mum. I can see it sometimes in the eyes of my wife who after complaining a lot still feels that her complaint has not been registered. It is there in the water starved plants of my kitchen garden which suffers under the scorching heat of the sun in my absence. It's so much out there around me that I can hardly believe its absence even if I'm not feeling it for some moments.

8 comments:

INSOMNIAC said...

a wonderful piece of self inquiry (atma-vicara)..

Sarbjot Kaur said...

Really wonderful piece of self- expression, takes the reader very far away in the state of thinking...to explore not only the psyche of blogger, but also to one self.

Very thoughtful indeed!

AMRIT_KARAM said...

READING OF THIS PSYCOLOGICAL POST JUST MAKE ME FEEL AS I AM STATANDING ON A STAGE OF IMPASS. IT SEEMED TO ME AS SOMEONE TRIED TO LET ME SEE MY FACE IN THE MIRROR. THIS POST IS REALLY VERY REAL AND NATURAL.
BUT I HAVE NOT SEEN A SENSE OF OPTIMISM, THE HOPE, FAITH, LAUGHING ALL THOSE THINGS WHICH I HAVE LEARNT FROM YOU. LAST FEW LINES REALLY MAKE FEEL CRY.
ALL IN ALL ONE OF THE BEST POST I HAVE EVER READ, AND IT WILL DO CARVED ON A SENSITIVE READER.

mohit mittal said...

I will call it,'THE CONFESSION OF A PHILOSOPHER'.
Thought i'd something more to say...

Anonymous said...

Mmm...To be very frank i can only say that u have picked a topic which have a different meaning for different personalities....So i can only say that expression was excellent....but the Title "Waiting for Dropadi".....seems irrelevant for the expression.

Sunil Aggarwal said...

Dear Mr. Anonymous
It is nice to see you in my readers' list. First of all, the title is not Waiting for Draupadi rather it is Waiting for DropD. There is hell lot of difference between the two. Secondly, I generally write in series. This is a series where I want to write at least 20-30 articles. I hope you would read other works of mine too to get an idea of what i am attempting.
Sunil Aggarwal

Anonymous said...

Good Day! Jeanie Micco . payday loans

Anonymous said...

cash advance toronto This website is the very best I enjoyed it so much
AAA Toronto Payday Loans 1172 Bay St #101, Toronto, ON M5S 2B4 (416) 477-2817