Waiting for DropD-4

A couple of months back, I was delivering a lecture on Mahabharata in an Institute of Mass Communications. A lot of questions were asked after that. One question that really turned out to be outstanding and long-lasting was, “Why lust is considered as negative only? I tried to answer that question but I feel that there is possibility of a re-look at this issue because there are still some problems hidden behind it. Without focusing on them, there is remote possibility of understanding the real crux. The very first point is why we feel the need to define something as lust and something not as lust. The second point is why there has to be a public definition of lust instead of private definition. The third point is if the definition of lust can be determined before an act or inside an act. Let's discuss all three points one by one in the context of “The Reader”.
Michael and Hanna have involved themselves into an act of “lust”. He is a 15-year-old boy and she is a 36-year-old woman. He is not even an adult and therefore the question of being consenting partners doesn't even arise. There is no sexual compatibility as far as the social definitions of permissible sex are concerned. In a mediaeval age, Hanna would have been convicted as a witch and would have been burnt alive. This time, things are not that bad and safety of the situation is that their affair remains a very private matter unknown to anybody. The best that could be safely extracted out of the situation is that this affair should have no future; it should end in a permanent manner. It should be forgotten and should leave no trace of any sort. But things don't turn out to be as per expectations. She resurfaces in his life on a much bigger canvas where he would have to retrace the innocence of a lost relationship. It's a story where both Michael and Hanna don't even bother about the question of lust rather they allow this relationship to undertake much deeper and riskier enterprise.
The first point is why we have institutionalised lust as a vice or something very negative. Do we mean to say that we are very clear about what virtue is or what purity is? Do you mean to say that we have decided the methods of transformation from an impure to pure soul? Are we really in a position to decide who is pure and who is not? Of course, this is a very serious political question and it will create a lot of problems particularly related with caste and gender. If we even ignore that, we still have a deeper social conditioning through which we have developed the formulae of purity versus impurity. Such kind of fixed equations create a kind of hegemonic structure through which the entire space is reconfigured as comprising moral space in contrast to immoral space. The moment this dichotomy is created, public pressure towards the expansion of moral space drives out the immoral space. “Only I can exist and you shall die”-this is the kind of response that becomes the commonsense of morality. What happens eventually is that the so-called immoral space is officially driven out of all the spaces of public engagement and resurfaces in the hidden forms in the so-called moral space. The enemy that we drove outside the walls of our moral city is back in every house, in every corner and in every soul. The tragedy of this phenomenon is that despite this failure of human design, people don't re-think about the notion of space. It has never been moral or immoral rather it is simply there and it will remain simply there. But we find very difficult to engage with the space as it is. It is fluid sometimes turbulent and sometimes pacific. This natural reality disturbs our comfort zone. Only a few want to remain in this uncomfortable zone of eternal chaos. In order to develop suitable definitions, we transform chaos from a natural phenomenon into a negative value. This begins our march into the static but comfortable domain of artificiality. This is also the beginning of the unnatural. Precisely at this moment, a need is felt to determine this ‘unnatural’ into something dangerous. That's where lust is defined. The existence of lust is based upon the denial of nature. All the structures based upon this denial have to ensure that lust should be banned from the system but it goes nowhere rather it stays and keeps staying very powerfully.
The second point is directly the result of the first one. The moment morality is codified, it becomes an instrument of law. It can be used as a mode of control. This kind of control may be direct or indirect but it produces the same result. It acts as a censor in our lives. Instead of allowing a natural order to emerge and evolve, there is constructed a wall and a barrier. Human behaviour now comes within this black and white category of rule and punishment. In total contrast to it, there is a private equation between the two individuals. It can also be called a mutual binary between the two. The ugliness of a situation gets enhanced when the public definition overpowers the domain of mutual binary. A man and a woman may want a lot from each other but the most they want is to explore the other without any inhibition. A dead-end on this front means the death of a relationship but who should have the authority of delivering this final judgement. How can someone outside determine the destiny of two persons who are deeply related? Let a question of lust be decided first by a man and a woman. Let them face each other in the presence of lust. The depth of mutual binary is such a powerful force that it can submerge a thousand definitions of lust. But generally, people are so conditioned that they don't look into the eyes of lust. Somehow, they try to avoid it. I don't mean to say that one can have an interview with lust rather it is like a shadow. If you run away from it, it will follow you but if you face it and go close to it, it will start diminishing to the point of extinction. The mockery of the situation is that most of the people are more concerned with the lust of others but not with the lust of one's own self. This kind of preoccupation takes the shape of consistent eavesdropping. They find all the methods to peep into the so-called lustful relationship of others but they remain idiotic enough not to face their own lust. The development of institution of lust is based upon a collective embrace of falsehood and fear. That is why love despite being the most desired entity, does not evolve because the first door of love and lust is the same i.e. attraction of beauty.
The third point flows out of the second one. Can the definition of lust be decided before an act or within an act? As far as the public definitions are concerned, there is only one answer that it can be decided only before the beginning of an act. This is also a kind of self-serving argument where first definition of lust is created, then authority of judgement is created and finally the methodology of judgement is decided. These kinds of control machines will only bother about sustaining their own structures of falsehood and status quo. They will never bother to allow two individuals to come out with their own definitions. But a simple question can unsettle this entire equation. How can a seed be declared unfit for growth without even giving it a chance of growth? The possibility of an ecological experience between a couple can arise only if they keep exploring the complexity of a relationship. If it is stratified, things will never grow to the extent of being rewarding and beautiful. In case of Michael and Hanna, the relationship drops all forms of falsehood, fear and artificiality. They go beyond these constructs to build a new definition and a new ecological moment for them.

Waiting for DropD-3

“The Reader” is still in my mind. I had been waiting for a stage when my lust for cinema could transform itself into love for cinema. Love here means a kind of meditative relationship with the image and the theme of the film. Generally, cinema gets reduced down into a heap of incoherent images which somebody wants to unshackle but is unable to. Of late, I feel that I have learned to relax with a film, agitate with a film and live with a film. That is what I call the beginning of a relationship with cinema. When I thought of starting this series, I had in my mind this particular series of relationships with the landmark films that I have seen through and lived through. Cinema is just not a context anymore rather it is the text, the subtext, inter-text and the hypertext also. I know that this kind of visuality is not same as a phenomenon of “darshan” would be. Still, the visual discourse is the closest to the kind of experience I am looking for. “The Reader” has somewhat fallen into this personal category.
The historical context of this film is built around the tragedy of Holocaust. Hanna Schmitz has two identities in this film, a public and a private. On a private level, she is a secretive human being; she doesn't seem to have friends or family and she doesn't seem to be much concerned with the broader issues of her times. But she is a compassionate human being. She helps young Michael when he is suffering from fever. She doesn't know him but that doesn't deter her from caring him. He turns out to be an accidental partner in her lonely life. She doesn't seem to be much attached with him but still, she gets passionately involved with him. He is an intelligent student of classical languages and literature. He reads out some brilliant pieces of fiction to her. A sudden eruption of beauty and pleasure happens to create a magical equation that heals her long concealed handicap-an inability to read and write. Her desire to explore the aesthetic world is fulfilled through a chance meeting with Michael when he manifests his reading skills. He seems to have an idea of her incapacity but does not reveal it because he loves reading out to her. A bond of love and literature binds both of them into a memorable affair though the intensity of feeling is much visible in Michael than in Hanna. To her, the relationship is more like an exchange of gifts. She receives the gift of aesthetic word from him and he receives the gift of love from her. The privacy of this arrangement fits well into the solitary life of hers.
On a public level, she is a German serving as a tram conductress in the times of Hitler. She serves a system which is openly revengeful in total contrast to her private secretive and compassionate nature. She looks at the system only from the angle of duty that enables her to earn her livelihood. She's neither interested nor seems to be capable of understanding the macro-issues related with the ethics of a system. In the pursuit of this narrow single-mindedness, she happens to commit a responsibility which is not just a war crime but also a crime against humanity. After being promoted as a security guard in German army, she is given the custody of Jews for whom only death has been chosen. She keeps herself locked in the narrow confines of duty and allows all kinds of injustice and cruelty to them though she doesn't participate in any such act directly. Her public identity is that of a criminal who is accused of crime against humanity.
Michael is torn apart between these two extremes. How can he accept the simultaneity of these two opposite identities? Is it a tragedy for only Michael or even for the entire Europe? What to talk of Europe, is it not common to Indian subcontinent where genocide and ethnic cleansing have resurrected themselves on multiple occasions in different forms whether it was partition, 1984 “Blue Star” operation, Godhra/Best Bakery or hundreds of caste-based clashes and so on. The possibility of recreating this story is present in so many moments and spaces all around that it is almost closer to being a universal story. In case of Europe, it was racial hegemony that destroyed human relationships the most. In case of Indian subcontinent, there are so many forms of hegemony built around caste, religion, gender, ethnicity and habitat that even relationship is made impossible in certain contexts. If I quote Ritwik Ghatak, I would say that there are “rows and rows of fences” between the human beings. In terms of imprisonment, I feel there is no difference being an Indian or a Westerner. That is why hegemonic walls are the biggest obstacles for relationships. This film is a story of struggle against these walls, a story of transcendence and a story of purgation. It comprises three parts: the first part manifests revelation of beauty and its vanishing; the second part unravels the hidden pain and the third part shows the re-collecting of lost beauty and love.
This film also has one additional reason for me to write about it. A couple of months back, I happened to read a beautiful article on this film by a scholar, Shelly Walia in ‘The Frontline’. Under the title, “Tragedy of history”, Mr. Walia elaborated upon the theme of the film in the context of political philosophy. I could see him wading through the debates on justice to find the eternally missing meaning. He was flexible enough not to get jinxed over the static definitions of good and evil. He says in favour of Hanna Schmitz, “She has no pleasure in cruelty, but has acquired the faculty of shutting her mind to it. This is regimentation under the strict bureaucracy. She lacks the criminal mind......... the fact that Hanna Schmitz enjoys her teenage paramour reading to her from the classics and that she permits him to make love to her only after she has relished the reading shows that her reprehensible act does not come from an evil mind.” These words were hitting rightly at the philosophical puzzle that has been posed in this film. Love is a deeply private and universal enterprise. It has to find its way through the public constructions that are denial of love. Michael represents this long journey throughout. Hanna is represented as an indifferent person and Michael doubles up thinking and feeling on her behalf. After eight years of Hanna’s vanishing, he comes across her in a courtroom where she is under trial. She has been charged of being a complicit in a church fire that killed hundreds of mothers and children who were locked inside. She was security guard controlling access to the doors. She was doing her duty but in the pages of history, an act of genocide was being committed. After having such a sudden face-off with her lost love, he finds himself stretched beyond limits. Whom did he love? A criminal or a beautiful and a compassionate woman.

Waiting for DropD-2

Michael: - What is your name?
Hana: - What???
Michael: - What's your name?
Hana: - Why do you want to know?
Michael: - I’ve been here three times........??

For quite some time, this film “The Reader” has been engaging me into a prolonged relationship. Before I say anything about the film, I would stop for a while and look at above-mentioned dialogues that are exchanged between two lovers who are total strangers to each other. To be precise, it is the beginning of sexual affair between the two. They happen to meet accidentally and get involved. The very first face-off happens with the breach of secrecy and subsequently, this breach gets prolonged. As they settle into this breach (by then, which doesn't remain a breach any more), they come to discover the relevance of questions which are formal and only introductory. In this case, the formal question is an indicator of lack of real question because they're looking for another context of breach of secrecy. This film is a quest for another breach which takes away their entire lives. To be simpler, it was a story of an affair getting translated into a spiritual pain for entire life. Watching this film was quite an experience catalytic enough to remind me of the unhappiness unveiled but uncoded inside me. I lost my nerves and cried like a baby. I almost laughed at myself, pitied myself and hit myself.
The sense of being a partial entity is a permanent mischief against me being played by a force unknown. Whatever and however I try to achieve a sense of completeness, I fail to embrace the other as mine. I have heard that there is lot of love and friendship. I don't deny that these two gifts of life have not happened to me. The more they have happened, the more they have heightened the sense of my incompleteness. As Love happens to me, I feel the need to assimilate it but I cannot. It comes like a breeze, touches, enlivens and transforms me into permanent waiting being. The brilliance of this magic remains for some moments and then leaves me in the lurch. I have been enjoying a magnificent gift of friends and lovers. They have turned into the stars of my galaxy punctuated by darkness all around. I can see the star but I cannot see the path. Hope is there but the danger is ever more. The moment I start treading the track, the problems of path overpower my vision and trap me into a state of near blindness. When I was young, the sheer romance of relationships was a big force that pushed me into lots of experimentation but I'm not young any more. The calculative mind of maturity has given me the capacity to identify too many holes. I hate that so much that I can't avoid it. They can take a hell out of my potential and I find myself helpless.
After putting the first article of this series on my blog, some friends responded. As it was expected, everybody responded differently. Some were concerned, some were appreciative and some were finding it interesting but one response from an old friend was noteworthy. Her response was full of concern on one side and full of rebuke on the other side. She is a special kind of person to me. In terms of one definition about her is that she is a power woman. She's a hard nut to crack. Whenever she calls, she's harsh to the extent of even insulting. She doesn't listen rather she only orders. Her arguments are very essentialist in nature and she doesn't care about any democratic spirit. But in terms of the other definition about her, she is an extremely caring young mother. She will understand what you're thinking without you even uttering a word. She will plan every possible detail of human comfort for you. Her eyes, her lips and her deep voice will take care of all the human needs you can imagine even. Between these two definitions, she has always switched back and forth so many times and at such a fast pace that it become so difficult to recognise which definition of hers is the true one. To be precise, I would have expected her to read my words and stay silent but I knew that would have been really difficult for her.
The fact of matter is that I'm only reporting from the innermost platform of my being. This world of communication is operating on the principle of one-way affair. I know that I'm being heard but I am not asking questions and I'm not interested in raising debates. I assume myself like millions of YouTube videos which are simply there. They may be controversial but not a big number of people have seen them in order to make a public nuisance out of it. To define it in a professional manner, I would call myself as a private reporter hired by my own self to collect the images of my being and communicate it to the world outside. I'm ready to fund this reporter for all the years to come because I feel this kind of journalism is seriously missing. I know Orkut, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace but they cannot be more than the headlines of what I am, what I am going through and what I'm expecting tomorrow. I believe in telling a story not just in detail but I also believing telling it again and again. That's why I have to be non-commercial and non-popular person. I have to be in a serious minority to the extent of being alone. Perhaps, that's what we are.
I'm only standing for a totally forgotten stream of journalism that may be called self-reporting. It can be equated with busting secrecy. The hidden is so safely protected that it doesn't like the idea of being reported. What to talk of liking, it feels threatened from the reporter. It stands to lose the privileges that have come along with the status of being hidden. It may be religious, it may be sublime, it may be tempting or it may be hegemonic. The moment reporting begins, the status starts evaporating and along with it, also evaporates the paraphernalia of a status. That is why reporting can be a risky activity. I have chosen to ignore all the others because I cannot proclaim to know anything about them but I can definitely try the same about myself. Self reporting can be dangerous to me but I think that the moment first trace of secrecy is reported, I find that below there, the second trace of secrecy lies hidden. The latter becomes more important over the prior thusby supporting my task. It also complicates my task too. The real intention is reporting in detail which means busting secrecy bit by bit, piece by piece. The beauty of project is that I want to bust secrecy but it gets reincarnated after every successful operation. When I say I am unhappy, I have an unending urgency to decode this unhappiness. The moment I understand it, I find it an inadequate answer. I have to understand; so I have to restart.

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.