This essay is not written for a reader. When people write diaries, they do not necessarily have a reader in mind. Diarying may be understood as an exercise of documenting the mundane and extraordinary in one’s life for one’s own reading, reminiscence, and reflection (in the future). I do not write a diary and hence cannot speak from authentic experience. But can we look at diarying as an act of talking to oneself? I engage in a great deal of private speech, or what is often disapprovingly referred to as ‘self talking’ when it is done in the presence of other people. Private speech has not only been a great technique of study and revision for me, but it also helps me organise my thoughts and clarify my ideas. But that is not all. Private speech, like diarying, can also be wonderfully cathartic. In this respect, the value of diarying is more immediate. One may not agree with what one wrote in moments of agitation or distress when reading it after regaining composure.

The fate of this essay has been similar. I first began writing on some of the themes discussed here about two years ago, in June 2023. After having written over 3000 words, I decided to junk the draft. Because what made a lot of sense to me while I was actually writing it seemed too incoherent, impulsive and lacking in deliberation when I read it a couple of days later. A personal essay cannot avoid being highly subjective but what I had produced contained such ideas and feelings that could have had an intuitive appeal only to me, howsoever they might have lacked in logic or fact. Such writing could have safely remained on the pages of a diary but it could not - or so I thought - be delivered to people’s mailboxes.

But the substance of what I had written about kept cropping up in my musings every now and then. I had tried, in that ill-fated essay, to talk about my ideas on ability, diligence and mediocrity. I wanted to put forth my ideas on intelligence and how it is forms a great dividing line when it comes to worldly attainments. I sought to write an elaborate defence of work-ethic over raw intellect, perhaps as a means to defend my own self-image and self-worth amidst unforgiving competition. I wanted to pour out the nebulous products of my tortured contemplations on what I like to call the tragedy of ‘ambition without ability’. These are questions of immense personal significance to me and tearing up that draft was certainly not going to banish them from my mind.

Hence, this essay - which will not be delivered to anybody’s mailbox. It will arrive unannounced and will remain here, not seeking to be read by anyone.

I cannot claim to perfectly understand intelligence, much as I obsessed over it. All I can do is to recount my engagement with this concept over all these years.

Our schooling system tends to equate academic performance with intelligence. As a kid who scored good marks in examinations, I was led into looking upon myself as an intelligent student. Given the predominantly memory-based questions that were put to us in exam, it was hard work and repeated revision that helped me do well. There were hardly any opportunities to develop one’s powers of reasoning, analysis and problem solving. But the kid who scored high was a ‘scholar’ and was made to feel extraordinary in many direct and indirect ways.

When I was about 15 or so, I began to notice that I was often unable to think on my feet and answer some of the not-so-easy-questions that were asked in class discussions. I would brood over my inability to think as effectively as some of my peers could. Whenever a classmate was able to solve a problem that eluded me, I felt a pang of inadequacy. Even today, I can grapple with complex problems only if I am given adequate time to think. I often goof up trying to deal with them then-and-there. Or, my answers in such cases tend to be unimpressive generalities crouched in sophisticated language. This is why I believe that the so called ‘higher order thinking skills’ should be tested through challenging assignments (designed to make it impossible to cut-and-paste) rather than questions in an exam that lasts for a mere 2 or 3 hours. Good analysis takes time, at least for me.

Coming face to face with the limits of my abilities gave me a new understanding of intelligence. Intelligence was now no longer merely about perfecting the textbook. It was as much about quick and ready wit, persuading someone, understanding hidden motivations, finding connections between concepts, figuring out shortcuts, applying experience to new situations and so on. Whatever little I learnt in my psychology course in 11th and 12th grade did help considerably in making sense of it all. I remember spending a great deal of time pondering over Spearman’s “two-factor” theory and grappling with the meaning of general intelligence. It was quite a revelation for me to find out that every single cognitive task involves intelligence. This seemed to make sense. Many of the brilliant classmates I had not only excelled in academics but generally did remarkably well in creative and performative tasks.

My recognition of the possibility of not being intellectually gifted required a recalibration of my identity. I was (and remain) a person with a very narrow range of interests. After I turned 13 (if I remember correctly), I stopped going out in the evenings for a game of cricket, football or even for cycling. I studied obsessively and did not develop myself in any other way. I saw myself chiefly as a ‘good student’. This kept my self esteem high, for I (like most others) tended to associate academic performance with intelligence. Now that I realised that the two things were not necessarily related, I had to find other ways of preserving my self-esteem.

One afternoon, my biology teacher in school made the following remark about me, while a bunch of us were chatting with her after finishing our practicals: “He is not intelligent. Rather, he is hardworking. I know intelligent kids. They look like they are sleeping in class but they will be the first to point out a mistake made by the teacher while lecturing. What this means is that you all can become like him if you put in the effort.” However, this teacher continued to hold me in fond regard till the end of my school life. Perhaps the explanation for the apparent dissonance between her assessment of my ability and her attitude towards me is that she valued diligence more than raw intellect - as many teachers do.

This, in short, is how I too sought to look upon myself. I began to value my work-ethic above all else. It became the most important part of my identity and the prime basis of my self-worth. Simultaneously, I developed a contempt for intellectually gifted persons whom I found to be lazy and unwilling to make sustained and systematic efforts. I also became intensely envious of such persons, for their ability to do splendidly well in exams despite having prepared only for a day or two. I still feel the handicap of being unable to pull of such feats, for it would be immensely helpful to finish the entire semester’s syllabus in two weeks leading upto the exam and spend the rest of the semester interning and learning skills. Alas, this cannot be.

While viewing myself as a meticulous and diligent worker might give my self worth something to hold on to, it is clearly not enough in the world I inhabit. This was a major point I had tried to emphasise and expand upon in that discarded essay of mine. You see, the catchphrase of the day is “smart work, not hard work.” This is the age of fast learners, not patient learners. Perhaps I should be less euphemistic and say, slow learners, for that’s what I have always been. Slow in reading, slow in writing (by hand) and slow in processing information in general. As can be gleaned from the preceding paragraph, this does have serious disadvantages.

It would, however, be very inaccurate to say that I saw myself as nothing other than a hardworking student. As I went through senior secondary school and thereafter, three years of undergraduate degree, I discovered new passions. I realised that I enjoyed research and I found out that I had something of a faculty for public speaking. Writing was something I had enjoyed and been good at right from early childhood. All of these contributed in different degrees to reshaping my self image and my sense of worth.

I was able to do fairly well in each of these pursuits. Over time, here too I developed a tendency for envy. It took me quite some time to reconcile myself with the fact that there have always been and will be people who are better writers, researchers, and speakers than me. I have marvelled at the prose of R, the poetry of G, the thoroughness of S’s legal research and the eloquence and clarity of speech that I found in many of my rather unassuming peers. It took time to shed the suffocating veil of envy and truly appreciate their art.

A recurring idea (or should I call it assumption?) that has been running through this essay thus far is the association between self worth and ‘being good at something’. My friend R once rightly admonished me for insisting on this connection. Does one have to be good at something in order to value oneself? If this assumption were to be valid, then ordinariness would be antithetical to self worth - a result that is both cruel and elitist. I remember being impressed by the principle of unconditional positive regard that I encountered in my brief study of psychology, but I am afraid I have not been able to put it into practice.

Why must we hold ordinariness in scant regard? What does it mean to distinguish oneself and why is it an end in itself?

Ordinariness has been diversely and evocatively celebrated in literature. There is certainly a silent lure to it. I would argue that this is not so much because of status quoism as because of a healthy respect for human limitations. Then again, does it not lead to complacency? I do not think the celebration of ordinariness conflicts with the need to develop, to ‘fare forward’ (towards what?). The positive recognition of ordinariness is but an acknowledgement of the humanity of those countless people who are not endowed with such abilities or provided with such opportunities as to emerge out of the ordinariness of their being. Abilities and opportunities are both factors over which one has very little control (more on this presently).

Of course, it is ordinariness upon which much of the extraordinary subsists. I cannot help recalling, in this context, Sahir Ludhianvi’s famous poem, Taj Mahal. In this nazm, Sahir speaks not only about ordinariness of the material sort: the labour of thousands of workers who toiled to raise the Taj Mahal, and who shall remain unnamed. He speaks also of romantic love between ordinary persons. It is not easy for many of us, fed as we are on commercial cinema (and ‘popular’ novels), to truly come to terms with the fact that romantic love is not, or at least ought not be, the sole preserve of good looking, multi-talented young people.

It appears that what I have in mind while using the word ordinary is only one kind of ordinariness - mediocrity. Ordinariness could also refer to the mundanity of our lives. But I suppose even those who excel in what they do cannot avoid settling into a mundane existence. ‘Mundane’ is perhaps not the only way to characterise such a life. There is comfort in patterns and rhythms. The celebration of ordinariness that I spoke of earlier involves seeking beauty and comfort within those things that we take for granted.

But how do we deal with ordinariness, when understood as mediocrity? Now it is no longer about seeking comfort in the settled rhythms of life or the simple pleasures of our surroundings. Rather, it is about reconciling ourselves with the limits of our abilities, with our inability to distinguish ourselves in ways that matter to us.

Why take such a fatalistic attitude? Is a person doomed to remain mediocre forever? A person may very well expand their capabilities over the years and end up surprising those who did not expect much from them. But at the stage of life in which I find myself now, it is difficult to not form an estimate - however inaccurate and myopic it may be - of how I and my peers would fare in the future, when judged by our present levels of intelligence, competitiveness and resourcefulness. The question I wish to brood about, therefore, is quite ridiculous: how do I deal with the possibility of ending up mediocre in the future? Only a professional brooder can formulate such problems. Do I propose an answer? No.

But what about my perceived shortcomings at present? I have recounted how I tried to come to terms with the limits of my intelligence. I have sought to overcome this limitation by banking upon diligence and persistence. It is clearly not a winning strategy, but it is the best I can do. However, coping with this inadequacy also requires some kind of intellectual reassurance.

Intelligence, as is well know, is function of an individual’s genetic endowment and environmental conditions (which includes family background, style of parenting, peer influences, schooling etc.) I take considerable comfort from the fact that nearly all these factors depend on chance. I have no control over the genes transmitted to me and nor do I have any control over the kind of intellectual stimulation I received in my formative years. General intelligence, in my opinion (as susceptible as it may be to informed criticism), is as arbitrary in its occurrence as physical attractiveness (understood in relation to the cultural context). Smart people and good looking people are both useful to society. There can be no other justification for their being feted.

The only justification that seems acceptable to me for allowing intelligent persons to enjoy better chances of material success is a utilitarian one, i.e., the social benefit that we may expect from the exercise of their intelligence. They might turn out out to be great entrepreneurs, political leaders, innovators, artists or academicians. (Or, they may very well end up as wrecks.) It feels pointless to hide the envy that permeates these paragraphs.

These views led me to embrace luck egalitarianism, championed by Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. Rawls’ famous ‘difference principle’ tries to reach the very bottom of chance-based inequality. One can, ideally, level out inequalities arising out of socio-economic circumstances of families, by providing affordable and high quality education and vocational training, amongst other things. But what about inequalities arising out of such factors that the state cannot possibly nullify through egalitarian policies? Different persons grow up in different environments, have access to different kinds and degrees of intellectual stimulation, are exposed to different kinds of social situations and to varying extents, and end up developing different kinds of personalities and levels of intelligence. No public policy can conceivably level out these differences which, by the way, do significantly affect people’s abilities to do well professionally and materially.

Yet, the inequalities arising out of such differences which cannot be levelled out are unquestionably arbitrary and hence Rawls believes that they cannot be justified. To undo the effect of such inequalities, Rawls propounds the difference principle (which is a part of his rather elaborate theory of justice). This principle requires that the social and economic system should be so organised as to give the maximum benefit to the least-advantaged members of the society. It is a principle that compels the policy maker (who chooses to follow it) to think of the worst-off in society before taking any step towards economic growth.

While the expansion of quality education, healthcare, nutrition, employment, financial services etc. are all extremely important for reducing inequalities, there will always remain some inequality which cannot be removed by these measures and which cannot always be attributed to an individual’s own lack of effort or motivation. In this respect, intelligence and personality are great dividers indeed and the arbitrariness inherent in them cannot be ignored.

Unsurprisingly, luck egalitarianism is heavily criticised. Does it not lead us to explain away an individual’s attainments by entirely attributing them to chance factors, thus depriving the individual of an incentive to expand their capabilities to pursue things that they value?

On the one hand, I feel comforted by the deterministic view of intelligence that I have tried to summarise above, and on the other hand, I cannot deny that I have an overpowering need for achievement. How do I reconcile the two?

As I have already acknowledged, capabilities can be expanded and new skills can be learnt. I suppose even the dullest of law students can, with the blessings of Dame Luck, slog their way to a respectable practice, or a decent living in general. What I ask for (from nobody in particular) are opportunities to expand my capabilities. I cannot afford certifications and diplomas that are whimsically priced. Nor can I afford to put myself through 12 hour work-days at lawyers’ offices.

Am I being unreasonable? I do not know. There might be much more to say but I mustn’t grow numb saying it. Some gloom must be kept in reserve. For all I know, a slogger works best in solitude, and a even lover of solitude cannot do without the company of his dreary meditations.

Imagine that I am an artist who has accepted a commission from a certain aristocratic lady to paint her portrait. This is a binding contract. Put the case that a day before I am scheduled to begin working on this commission, I call her up and tell her that I will henceforth do no more portraits, only comics and graphic novels. Sorry. Find some other poor laddie to do the job.

What are my lady’s options? She can sue me, of course. And what can she hope to attain by doing so? Can she ask the court to compel me to perform my promise? No, the court cannot do that because certain kinds of contracts (such as those which involve the performance of an artistic skill) cannot be enforced under Indian law. This means that in certain situations, the person who breaks a promise cannot be compelled to do what he has promised to do. Our Lady must be satisfied with milking me for monetary compensation.

But let us, for a moment, ignore the legal provisions that spared me the ordeal of painting her portrait. Put the case that the court actually compels me to go to her place every damned day till the portrait is done. The lady finally had her way, didn’t she?

But what if I end up doing a cubist rendering and put two rubik’s cubes in place of her bosom? What if I make her seem older than her grandma? What if I make her face look like she has just tasted a very sour raw mango? I can do any of this and worse, and yet the Court, in all its majesty, won’t be able to do anything about it. This is exactly why courts do not enforce contracts involving the use of artistic skills. They simply have no means to ensure that the artist does what they are expected to do.

Now, prepare yourself for the most elegant analogy ever:

The Court in the above situation parable is my will (as in, volition; I own nothing to bequeath). The artist is my hand. The portrait is my handwriting. The artist is a person in their own right having a mind of their own. So is my hand, or more accurately, my wrist and fingers.

This analogy looks like it’s lifted straight off one my law books. It is, in a way. But why such a curious choice of an analogy? After all, I have lived with a lousy handwriting for as long as I can remember. But it is only in the past few months of my life as a law student that I have felt seriously handicapped because of my scrawl.

My handwriting or writing speed never put me in any serious disadvantage in degree college, where I was able to score well and was often surprised at the fact that my professors could read what I had written.

But examinations in a law school governed by the Mumbai University are essentially a test of memory and writing speed. I am now having to write nearly twice as much as I wrote in my degree college exams, for the same number of marks. I have somehow pulled it off this semester. I was able to answer all questions in every paper although I was unable to write as much, or as neatly, as I would have liked to. But my woes aren’t at an end. Whether the examiner will be able to read my writing is a question that my mind has skilfully suppressed whenever it has arisen to the surface. It is not an exaggerated fear.

What makes it even more unnerving is that this does not seem to be a general problem among students. Most of them have a well-developed hand and are able to neatly fill a page within 5 minutes. My hand works like a rickety bicycle with a rusty chain that is badly in need of oiling. And such is the state of things even after giving myself plenty of practice in answer writing. This is what leads me to believe that my handwriting is a function of multiple factors.

When I read the notes I made over the past four months of study, I am astounded by the stark difference between the handwriting I find in them, and in my exam answer scripts. Indeed, I might have a difficult time convincing anyone that the two handwritings are of the same person. I prepared those notes while seated comfortably on my bed, writing on the wide window sill of my room which has just the elevation I find suitable for writing. I was enjoying what I was did. There was no immediate pressure to work against a deadline. Keeping all this in view, I posit a multifactor model to explain the state of my handwriting:

1. Anxiety (even a fortnight before the exam)

2. Elevation of the desk

To above, I should add:

3. Writing instrument (the wrong pen has proven costly)

4. Sheets I write on (I have noticed that even minor differences in the width of the rules have an effect on my handwriting)

I am tempted to add a fifth factor but I do not know how to nail it down. The first factor can be managed, if not eliminated. The third is within my control. The second and fourth are not. Even when all of these are more or less under my control while writing notes at home, I have observed a certain rigidity in my wrist and fingers which usually eases away after writing a few pages. Except that this ‘easing away’ doesn’t happen as effectively during exams until I have finished most of the paper. I do reach a point when I feel physically more comfortable writing but the handwriting remains as hopeless as ever. This nebulous fifth factor, the physical rigidity in my hand may have something to do with the way my brain coordinates with my nerves and muscles. It is not altogether a wild idea, for my younger sibling and my father both have difficulties with their handwriting.

The bizarre, ranty and somewhat pretentious analytical exercise carried out in the preceding paragraphs has more to do with the here and now of my handwriting. What is the history of my handwriting as a stream in the larger history of my personality?

In kindergarten where I learnt the alphabet, a child’s worth was gauged almost entirely by how accurately and neatly they copied the letters and words from the blackboard. I was often rebuked for my shabby work, which caused my already reserved self to suffer a further deficit of confidence. In almost every year of primary and secondary school, there would be at least one teacher who would reprimand me, with varying degrees of annoyance, for poor handwriting. Some would say it gently, almost as an aside after appreciating me for my academic performance. Others would say it as if it was all that mattered. I must have done worse with Devanagari than with Roman.

The rebukes did not, on the whole, dampen my self worth. Doing well in tests, despite a bad handwriting, kept my self worth afloat. Yet, it was a persistent source of humiliation. There is no dearth of such recollections and I will omit recounting any of them. I still feel offended when someone, even in a light-hearted manner, jokes about my handwriting, though I might outwardly join in the laughter.

I was able to see those rebukes in a different light when, much later, I looked at my brother’s handwriting in his school exercise books. I understood that a shabby hand irks the reader and slows down their reading. Yet, what I want the world to understand is that people like me and my brother suffer from inherent limitations. No one writes shabbily if they are capable of writing neatly.

Common sense compels me to accept that one’s handwriting must be legible and I believe mine has been, at least for examiners. It is too late and too pointless to aim for anything greater.

This perhaps explains why, in spite of smarting with embarrassment, I never made serious efforts to improve my writing. It is curious. It is possible that my fragile ego refused to work on what it refused to acknowledge as a real problem. Whether it was indeed a real problem (rather than a passing inconvenience) is a question that I am inclined to answer in the negative, coloured as my judgement may be with that selfsame ego.

It is difficult to separate this history from the history I recounted in my very first substack essay. I was a kid that loved to write and yet wrote badly. ‘To write well’ can mean two very different things. I know of many persons who write in a beautiful hand, and yet do not possess a proficiency in their deployment of language that matches the elegance of their letters. To state the converse is more difficult. I do know of a few brilliant persons who wrote in the most spectacularly horrible handwriting. But I personally do not know of a fellow lover of language who wrote in a poor hand. I can, however, find many fine examples from literary history.

To return to the drift, I daresay my feelings of inadequacy over my handwriting were offset by the self esteem I developed over the years by being conscious of the fact that I had a faculty for language. One of the teachers who used to upbraid me for my poor handwriting was also the one who gave me early encouragement and appreciation for my ability to write.

Before the laptop came around, most of my non-academic writing was done on paper. Almost all of my poems - albeit only a handful number - are written with pencil on a notebook. I use a pencil because I tend to rewrite a lot. Why this peculiar choice of writing poems by hand? I know not the answer.

After I entered senior secondary school, handwriting ceased to matter. And luckily, mine was now more tolerable than before. It was in these two years of my school-life that I first became conscious of a definite deterioration in my handwriting at or around the time of examinations. It would pass, and I merely shrugged my shoulders.

As someone with a lousy handwriting, I lack a sense of community with other people in the wide world out there who are similarly endowed. When you have a bad writing, you are generally in a minority, at least in educational institutions. My closest friends write in hands that range from neat to elegant.

I therefore have to seek this community of fellow bad-handwriters in history and literature. Knowing that a certain historical or literary figure had a poor handwriting brings a sense of reassurance. This might be akin to the reassurance felt by a dyslexic student who reads about Edison, da Vinci or Akbar. The essence of the feeling is that one can do well in life in spite of a bad handwriting.

That is not all, however. Whenever handwriting is spoken of in literary works (or historical texts) you get a sense of what it meant to people in different milieus. People wrote for different purposes, some of which no longer require people to handwrite things at all. Other vignettes retain their relevance for the present day.

In his introduction to one of R.K. Narayan’s novels, Pico Iyer describes Narayan’s routine as “taking a long stroll through the neighbourhood every morning, writing only for an hour or two every afternoon and then handing his barely legible scrawls to a six-foot tall local giant to type up.” It was indeed reassuring to find out that a novelist whose unassuming style has enchanted readers across generations was someone who wrote in a “barely legible scrawl”.

The next quotation may be arraigned for being a cliche. I cannot, however, leave it out. It is from Gandhi’s Autobiography and is fairly well known:

I do not know whence I got the notion that good handwriting was not a necessary part of education, but I retained it until I went to England. When later, especially in South Africa, I saw the beautiful handwriting of lawyers and young men born and educated in South Africa, I was ashamed of myself and repented of my neglect. I saw that bad handwriting should be regarded as a sign of an imperfect education. I tried later to improve mine, but it was too late. I could never repair the neglect of my youth. Let every young man and woman be warned by my example, and understand that good handwriting is a necessary part of education. I am now of opinion that children should first be taught the art of drawing before learning how to write. Let the child learn his letters by observation as he does different objects, such as flowers, birds, etc., and let him learn handwriting only after he has learnt to draw objects. He will then write a beautifully formed hand.

This was a man who carried on a vast correspondence with all sorts of people from all over the country through the countless letters he wrote (and personally answered) throughout his lifetime. If we take this fact into account, his handwriting appears to have mattered little. All the same, the shame he refers to is not alien to me. Embarrassment, as I have said earlier, remains a thorn sticking out of my scrawl.

The didactic part of the passage is interesting. I do not know what is the scientific opinion among educators on suggestion made by MKG that kids should be taught drawing before they learn to write. I can say, however, that this idea found an unlikely illustration in the case of my grandfather. In his boyhood days, his teachers would often scold him for his barely legible handwriting. An incident he often laughingly recounted was when he was asked by his school teacher to label the diagram of a frog in his notebook because it was simply impossible to identify what he had drawn. After finishing school, he took up the profession of a draughtsman, an older term for someone who made drawings for construction projects. The boy whose diagram of a frog was beyond recognition was now trained systematically in drawing plans and designs of buildings - a task where inaccuracy could be as unforgiving as a lack of neatness.

Many decades later, as a retired man of leisure he used to send articles and stories to Tamil magazines (a practice he has now stopped, owing to age) which would often be published (and he would show it to everyone in the family with a childlike glee). One day, he got a call from the editor of a magazine who had phoned him simply to appreciate the beautiful handwriting of his submissions.

I have come across two interesting instances from English literature wherein a person is admonished for their handwriting. Both offer glimpses into the norms and styles prevailing in times in which the novels are set.

The first is from Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Michael Henchard asks his step-daughter Elizabeth-Jane to write something to his dictation, for he considers himself a “poor tool with a pen.” Here is Hardy’s description of her script:

She started the pen in an elephantine march across the sheet. It was a splendid round, bold hand of her own conception, a style that would have stamped a woman as Minerva’s own in more recent days. But other ideas reigned then: Henchard’s creed was that proper young girls wrote ladies’-hand—nay, he believed that bristling characters were as innate and inseparable a part of refined womanhood as sex itself. Hence when, instead of scribbling, like the Princess Ida,—

“In such a hand as when a field of corn
Bows all its ears before the roaring East,”

Elizabeth-Jane produced a line of chain-shot and sand-bags, he reddened in angry shame for her, and, peremptorily saying, “Never mind—I’ll finish it,” dismissed her there and then.

Hardy frequently makes such little comparisons between the era of the story and the contemporary era of his writing. That there were (or are?) feminine and masculine styles of handwriting is a revelation that occurred rather recently for me. The more arresting insight from this passage is that cultural ideas about what constituted ‘feminine’ handwriting could change in a matter of decades.

One should note that in the passages from Gandhi as well as Hardy, poor handwriting (or what is perceived as such) begets shame. To Gandhi, it is “a sign of an imperfect education”, whereas to Michael Henchard, it suggests that his step-daughter does not live up to the prevailing standards of (genteel) femininity. As I have conceded above, illegible handwriting is indeed a matter of concern. But if a poorly formed hand which is nevertheless legible is a cause of shame, then should something be done about it (I mean the shame, not the handwriting)? My fellow bad-handwriters, what do ye think?

The second instance I wish to present is from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The easygoing young Fred Vincy (the son of the town’s mayor) eventually comes to terms with the exigency of rising out of his profligacy and goes to his neighbour Caleb Garth for work. Caleb sincerely wishes to help Fred make his way in the world and he needs someone to assist him in clerical tasks. Before he can give him the job though, Caleb puts Fred to a test that would seem absurdly simple in today’s times: he asks Fred to copy out a few lines on a sheet of paper.

At that time the opinion existed that it was beneath a gentleman to write legibly, or with a hand in the least suitable to a clerk. Fred wrote the lines demanded in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any viscount or bishop of the day: the vowels were all alike and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes had a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to keep the line—in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to interpret when you know beforehand what the writer means.

As Caleb looked on, his visage showed a growing depression, but when Fred handed him the paper he gave something like a snarl, and rapped the paper passionately with the back of his hand. Bad work like this dispelled all Caleb’s mildness.

“The deuce!” he exclaimed, snarlingly. “To think that this is a country where a man’s education may cost hundreds and hundreds, and it turns you out this!” Then in a more pathetic tone, pushing up his spectacles and looking at the unfortunate scribe, “The Lord have mercy on us, Fred, I can’t put up with this!”

“What can I do, Mr. Garth?” said Fred, whose spirits had sunk very low, not only at the estimate of his handwriting, but at the vision of himself as liable to be ranked with office clerks.

“Do? Why, you must learn to form your letters and keep the line. What’s the use of writing at all if nobody can understand it?” asked Caleb, energetically, quite preoccupied with the bad quality of the work. “Is there so little business in the world that you must be sending puzzles over the country? But that’s the way people are brought up. I should lose no end of time with the letters some people send me, if Susan did not make them out for me. It’s disgusting.” Here Caleb tossed the paper from him.

If it was gender for Elizabeth-Jane, we find handwriting tied up with class in poor Fred’s case. Middlemarch is a novel of social and economic flux, where people adopt professions and make professional and marital choices that raise many pairs of eyebrows. The young gentleman bred in style and given the best education must learn to write ‘like a clerk’ if he is to ever make a living. Indeed, Caleb derisively dismisses Fred’s education as it has failed to teach him something so fundamental. (Here we can hear echoes of Gandhi’s words bemoaning the imperfect education that failed to form a good hand).

I am not very sure if the education system to which I was subject was designed to systematically develop a child’s handwriting. In kindergarten, we were taught the alphabet, followed by simple words. After that, it felt as if the onus fell entirely on the child to write with a well-formed hand. It would be no exaggeration for me to say that the schooling system did more to pick holes in my handwriting than to train my little self to acquire a neat hand that could last a lifetime - and to pick me up whenever I stumbled. The school was a Michael Henchard to me, whereas it should have been a Caleb Garth who, by the way, condones young Fred’s incompetence: “We must make the best of it, Fred […] Every man can learn to write. I taught myself. Go at it with a will, and sit up at night if the day-time isn’t enough. We’ll be patient, my boy…”

So, let us be fair to Caleb Garth, for Eliot presents him as the clear-headed man of sound common sense and impeccable work ethic. One certainly could not be “sending puzzles over the country” under the garb of handwritten correspondence. By analogy, I too cannot be handing in answer scripts that would require a special skill for the examiner to decipher.

There is much talk of handwriting as a fading art. ‘Tis true, and truer still for countries where digital tools are more widely used than in India where we continue to handwrite wherever it is convenient. Just a few days ago, I was purchasing books for the next semester and the bookshop fellow wrote up my bill by hand. One can expect him to have the means to dispense with handwritten bills, considering the reputation he enjoys. Yet, for some reason best known to him, he prefers to keep scribbling out bills for his customers and contributes, in his own small way, to the survival of handwriting as a cultural activity of daily life.

Bills. Margin notes that I make in some textbooks. Shopping lists made by my mother. Prescriptions written by my doctor. We are still handwriting such little things. But hardly anyone handwrites a book these days (unless you are Jeffrey Archer). Even poems are now written on note-making application in smartphones. The reasons for doing so are, of course, compelling. It takes a stubborn eccentricity like mine to insist on writing poems with a pencil on a notebook.

Being someone whose handwriting has been a source of embarrassment and vexation, is it strange that I should lament the fading away of handwriting? Well, any student of history worth their salt should. The loss of handwriting is a personal loss but at the scale of a species. It is the loss of an expression of personality. Writing (as in the use of language) is one form of such expression. Handwriting, I believe, is another. My handwriting may not be pleasing, but it is ultimately my self translated into dried ink on ruled paper.

Readers whose disciplinary background enables them to shed valuable light on what follows are welcome to do so. The traditional notion of the Indian home, as I understand it, is the central organising concept of my discussion. I have not critiqued the concept as that is beyond the scope of this essay. The reader who wishes to watch the film can do so for free on YouTube.

Domesticity is a theme that Indian cinema has never tired of dissecting. Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963), set in Calcutta of the 1950s, is a narrative of the turbulence created in the household when a young wife named Arati resolves to go to work as a saleswoman to help her family make ends meet. Ray explored the economic realities that newly independent Indians had to come to terms with, however hard their collision may be with age-old mores. But Arati represents a compromise: she draws up her ghoongat in the presence of her father-in-law whom she dutifully nurses through illness; and puts on sunglasses and lipstick before going about the city, selling her wares to the elite. The Indian home (a term I prefer over the more economic sounding ‘household’) might have been in a state of flux but, as Ray must have realised, the traditions embedded in it remained (and remain) ever too alive.

Far from the unforgiving lanes of Calcutta, a non-descript village in rural Telangana provides the setting for Shyam Benegal’s first directorial feature Ankur (1974). Although coming over a decade after Mahanagar, Ankur brings the traditional construct of an Indian home into even sharper focus. The clash between collectivist traditions and the demands/effects of city-life is not at the heart of the tale, though it does make its presence felt.

Surya (Anant Nag) is a city-educated young man who has just returned to his village after passing his exams. His father is a zamindar, commanding vast rice fields in the countryside. Surya’s wishes for studying further are summarily dismissed by his father who gets him married (to a girl who has presumably not come of age yet) and sends him away to take care of the family’s estates in another village.

When the young heir enters what would be his new home, he is accompanied by feudal high-handedness as well as urban arrogance. Somewhere near his house is a small shack made of thatch - the home of the couple who are his servants: Lakshmi (Shabana Azmi) and Kishtayya (Sadhu Meher). The camera does not give us an idea of how far the servants’ house is from that of the master. We are told, however, that they belong to the jati of potters who are kept at a reasonable distance by upper caste folk. But Surya professes a rejection of caste and orders Lakshmi to cook for him.

The mere fact of Lakshmi cooking the food eaten by the young sarkar leads villagers to speculate if cooking and cleaning are not all that Lakshmi is doing in Surya’s house. And indeed, it does not take long for cooking and cleaning to turn into sexual intimacy and co-habitation. Kishtayya, who is deaf-mute, is addicted to toddy. One day, he is caught stealing some of it from Surya’s plantations and is publicly humiliated as a punishment. That night, he goes away without leaving a trace. Lakshmi, alone, despairing the worst, and yearning to be comforted, yields to Surya’s advances.

When Surya places his hand on Lakshmi’s shoulder, not long after Kishtayya’s disappearance, her immediate reaction is one of shock, disgust and stifled anger. She hurries back to her hut. That evening, Surya goes to her hut (the only instance of his going there) and asks her to return. I find this scene particularly striking. Surya makes no confession of love or apology for his behaviour. He simply asks her with a sly look, “Kaam pe kyun nahi aayi? Chai kaun banayega? Khana kaun pakayega? Ghar ki dekhbhal karega kaun?” Lakshmi does not utter a word of reply. As Surya speaks, a coy smile slowly lights up her face - a smile expressed more by her eyes than by the curl of her lips.

In asking Lakshmi to ‘come back to work’ Surya is, in essence, asking her to come to his home. It is also coded as an invitation to enter into a sexual relationship. The intertwining of domestic chores (invariably performed by women in the film’s milieu) with a sexual relationship needs to be dwelt upon.

The Indian construct of ‘home’ is an interesting intersection of domestic responsibilities, marital union and sexual relations. The Hindi word ghar can be used to mean a ‘house’ as well as a ‘home’. The physical space, the emotional ties that bind its occupants, and the division of labour among them are all fused into one concept.

Disturbing the domestic division of labour between ‘man and wife’ was perceived by traditionalists as a challenge to the very ideal of the home. In Mahanagar, Arati realises this painfully when she has to confront the hostility of her marital family when she decides to go out for work.

An adulterer is condemned not merely for breaking the marriage but for ruining the home. ‘Ghar sambhalna’ does not merely refer to domestic management but also the more critical task of preserving one’s marriage. In Tamil, the phrase ‘chinna veedu’ is used euphemistically to refer to a man’s mistress. It can be literally translated as ‘little house’ or ‘smaller home’. So, in the Indian worldview, when a man has sexual relations with a woman (unless she happens to be a sex worker), he is seen as setting up a home with her - whether he be married to her or not. (The tendency to get rape victims married to their perpetrators may be placed in this context.)

To return to the scene described above, we can find in it an insight into the place that Lakshmi comes to occupy in Surya’s home. She is not his ‘kept woman’, or even a mistress. Both of these words are used for women who have some claim on their man. Lakshmi has none, for she remains a servant even if she shares the bed of her master. There is no elevation in her condition. Whenever she addresses him, it always as ‘sarkar’.

Lakshmi is able to see her dubious position perhaps with greater clarity than Surya. When she reminds him that he has a wife and asks him what will become of her (Lakshmi) once his wife comes to live with him, he replies quite coolly, “Nothing will happen. What difference does it make to you?” Lakshmi understands the bleak prospects of being in a sexual relationship with Surya but still chooses to live with him. It would be worthwhile to probe into the film to understand her motive(s).

Just before the scene where Lakshmi begins to respond to Surya’s advances, Benegal has placed two scenes one after the other. These illuminate, by the way of suggestion, the conflicts, frustrations and desires that are churning in Lakshmi’s mind.

In the first one, a young woman named Rajamma, is dragged and placed in the front of the village panchayat. She stands accused of deserting her husband and living with another man. Worse still, the other man is of a different caste. Both Surya and Lakshmi witness the trial. The sarpanch asks Rajamma to explain. Her answer, which comes in fragments, is deeply revealing. She claims that her husband is the cause of her inability to bear a child. The sarpanch adopts a conciliatory tone and tells her gently, “Beti, your husband’s honour is your honour. You mustn’t slander him this way. A husband is akin to God.” Rajamma boldly replies, “Even this body has been made by God. And (the body’s) hunger is not merely that of the stomach.”

The panchayat ultimately orders her to go back to her husband, despite her vehemently expressing her unwillingness to do so. The sarpanch delivers the verdict, noting that “Aurat sirf apne marad ki hi nahi, ghar ki bhi hoti hai.” She is not simply marrying a man, but is marrying into a home. Even if the husband has insufficient grounds to lay claims upon her (in this case, due to his inability to beget a child with her), there still remain the claims made by the home, family and kinfolk.

Lakshmi too is childless. In fact, the opening scene of the film depicts a religious procession in which the village women carrying ceremonial pots on their heads are heading to a shrine. Lakshmi is among them. Her only prayer to the village deity is to be blessed with a child. There is, therefore, a direct identification of Lakshmi with Rajamma.

The scene that follows immediately after the panchayat’s verdict is that of a funeral procession which passes by Lakshmi as she is walking back home. She moves away in disgust and on reaching home (i.e., Surya’s house), falls into gloom. She tells her sarkar of her resolve to go back to her husband. She evidently views Rajamma’s trial as a warning. But she has no clue about Kishtayya’s whereabouts. Surya feeds her fears by suggesting that he may never come back at all.

In her mind, we may imagine two images. One is that of the feisty Rajamma who signifies the will to satisfy her desire (for a child) - a pursuit which is likely to end in disappointment. The other is that of the funeral procession which conjures fears of Kishtayya being lost forever.

The Indian home is said to be incomplete without a child. And Lakshmi has been unable to conceive one with Kishtayya. Surya has already (tacitly) invited her to his home. The yearning for progeny appears inseparable from the dread of being left alone and by extension, the longing for a companion and comfort. So this time, when Surya places his hand on Lakshmi’s shoulder and (nervously, for this is his second attempt) promises to keep her with him “forever”, Lakshmi comes to rest her face on his shoulder. She has chosen to enter a new home, forsaking her hut. The distant sound of funeral drums outside is now replaced by the chirping of a woodpecker.

Much later, Surya finds out that Lakshmi is with child (and it is all too clear whose it is). He is horrified and pleads with her to “do something” about it. In his panic, he suggests that she leave the place and go elsewhere. “Where should I go?” asks Lakshmi with a tranquility that seems to inwardly laugh at Surya. The entire conversation is shot in the twilight and we see only the silhouettes of the two characters against the outline of trees. The time when they knew each other intimately has ended. Now, Surya wants their relations to be erased to avoid humiliation.

A little later, he confronts her again and tells her imploringly, “Magar yeh bachcha nahi hona chahiye.” She answers curtly, looking at him straight in the eye, “Par mereko bachcha hona hai” (But I want a child).

The desire for a child was partly the reason why Lakshmi entered Surya’s home. The (prospect of the) fruition of this desire becomes the cause of her leaving it. She grows weak as her pregnancy advances. Surya’s wife Saru (who has by now come to live with him) tells Lakshmi to go back to her home and “take rest”. And so, Lakshmi walks back to her thatched hut carrying her bundle of belongings. Curiously, Saru appears to be ignorant of the real cause of Lakshmi’s condition. Nor does she seem to realise that Lakshmi virtually has no other home; to send her back would be to let her starve.

Unsurprisingly, Lakshmi soon reappears at the door of her masters. She is hungry. Saru, in an act of generosity towards a servant, asks her to eat. When Saru disappears into the kitchen to fetch food, Lakshmi tries to grab a handful of rice from a sack and hide it in the pallu of her sari. But Saru catches her in the act and Surya (who is no doubt glad for this opportunity) banishes Lakshmi from the house.

The act of stealing food from a home where she has cooked and fed Surya, appeasing his mundane as well as carnal hunger, is only the last straw in a series of acts of Lakshmi that Saru perceives as a violation of her home.

After arriving at her husband’s house, Saru gets her wedding photograph with Surya hung on the wall of their bedroom. When Surya asks her at the end of the first day if she likes her new home, her answer is itself a question that has evidently been troubling her: “Yeh aurat kya yaheen rehti hai?”. Surya’s brief and breezy explanation that Lakshmi is their servant does not satisfy Saru. She shudders and recoils when Surya tries to touch her in bed that night.

Saru has heard rumours about the relations between Lakshmi and Surya. Lakshmi’s presence as a co-occupant of their home, even in her role as a servant, is repulsive to Saru. One of her first decisions as the mistress of the household is to divest Lakshmi of her duties as a cook. Of course, Lakshmi’s caste is part of the reason but cooking - that most quintessential ‘wifely’ function - must be reclaimed.

Later, when Saru finds Lakshmi tidying up the bedroom, she rebukes her sharply for doing more that what she has been ordered to do. This too is act of reclaiming the home, for the bed is that intimate site of conjugal union. We find here a subtle contestation over the domestic space between the lawful wife and the servant who has shared the bed of her master.

Surya is a second generation adulterer. His father has also had extramarital relations with Kaushalya, a woman from the same village where Surya has been sent, and even has a son by her. He has given Kaushalya a piece of land to maintain herself. Early on in the film, when Kaushalya pays a visit to Surya’s paternal home to furnish accounts to his father, Surya privately expresses his indignation to his mother. Later, he cuts off water supply to Kaushalya’s fields which have hitherto been fed by wells from Surya’s familial estate.

Kaushalya’s presence is to Surya what Lakshmi’s is to Saru. To him, Kaushalya is an interloper in his paternal home, an unwanted and ignominious extension of his family. His father has the sense of justice to ensure that the poor woman he had taken advantage of is at least well provided for - a somewhat redemptive gesture that even the villagers seem to acknowledge. Surya, however, would rather Lakshmi be effaced from his existence. This contrast perhaps indicates a loosening of the ties within the collectivistic rural community where, as the sarpanch had said, a woman belongs to the home and indeed, to all her kinfolk.

Kaushalya is doomed to live in a husband-less home. Lakshmi has spent her life with Kishtayya in a childless one. But her deep desire for a child seems insufficient to fully explain her actions in relation to Surya. Was she unmotivated by any sexual passion whatsoever?

Benegal has given more than subtle suggestions of Lakshmi having a passionate desire for Surya. We can see it, for instance, in the way she gazes at Surya’s body after waking up from his bed.

Yet, Lakshmi harbours no false hopes about a future with her employer. Moreover, her relations with Surya do not prevent her from remaining loyal to Kishtayya’s memory. In speaking to Surya about him, she treats his faults with astonishing generosity, declaring him to be a good man at heart who has had the misfortune to become addicted to toddy. When Surya obliquely hints at the possibility of Kishtayya’s impotence, Lakshmi sharply tells him never to say such a thing again.

When Kishtayya eventually comes back home, this lingering regard for him that Lakshmi has preserved in her heart all along now turns into guilt. Kishtayya, it turns out, had not deserted Lakshmi to go and live a life of recklessness. When he returns, he presents to Lakshmi with an eager, childlike smile, the money he has earned during his long absence from home. Lakshmi, racked with guilt, weeps bitterly and poor Kishtayya is thoroughly bewildered by her tears. Kishtayya, after all, never really forsook his home. Lakshmi is crushed by the realisation that it is she who has acted selfishly by forsaking it. Even if Kishtayya’s act of running away was reckless, it was done with the intention of redeeming himself.

Just then, Kishtayya notices that Lakshmi is pregnant and rejoices at his good fortune. He leads her by hand to the shrine where Lakshmi had once prayed for a child. As she watches her husband bow before the deity, she joins him and a faint smile appears on her face. It is a smile of gratitude to those inscrutable forces that have now made her home complete. It is all too ironic that this completeness is brought about by the husband’s running away in the dead of the night, and the wife’s sleeping with another man. Their home had to be unmade before it could be made whole.

Ankur is by no means singular in exploring the dynamics of the Indian home in an unconventional way. Gulzar’s Ijaazat (1987) seeks to understand the rupture that ends the marriage of Mahender and Sudha, a divorced couple who unexpectedly meet each other in a railway waiting room. Through his writing, Gulzar transforms the waiting room into a makeshift ‘home’, as Sudha and Mahender reminisce about their turbulent marriage and realise that their domestic habits haven’t quite left them yet. Kapurush (1965), another film directed by Satyajit Ray, tells the story of a home that could never come into existence because the man was too cowardly to take the plunge into matrimony with the woman who loved him. As in Ijaazat, the two protagonists have an accidental meeting years after they parted ways.

What makes Ankur unique then? I believe it is the film’s deft interweaving of caste, class and gender relations into its plot. While attempting to convey the premise of the film to a friend, I (rather vaguely) described it as “about class, caste, gender and sexuality in rural Telangana”. Now, this is not a very useful starting point for an essay. So, I had to look for an overarching theme which could unify and lend meaning to most of the scenes. The idea for this post occurred to me partly due to the fact that most of the film is shot in or around Surya’s home.

Ultimately, as a deeply affecting testament to the humanistic reach of cinema, Ankur is about human foibles and vulnerabilities. It is about the lengths to which we go to satisfy our profound desires. It is also about the ways in which we choose to deal with (or evade) the consequences.

In at least one instance, Macbeth comes across as a smarter man than me. He sees that dagger for what it is, and the drops of blood on its blade for what they really are. Then he remembers his “bloody business” and goes about it. But unfortunately for him, he does not act so businesslike just after finishing his business and starts raving instead about having to suffer lifelong insomnia for murdering “innocent sleep”.

Lady Macbeth, however, is even smarter and undoubtedly more professional. Her wisdom is too crisply served for a paraphrase: “These deeds must not be thought/ After these ways; so, it will make us mad.” Yet, the ironic stroke of Bill’s pen somehow doomed this very woman to go mad towards the end of the play. But that needn’t concern us here.

I am interested in testing my behaviour against Lady Macbeth’s warning against thinking too much about what has already been done. I see that I fail miserably in avoiding this great folly. I think far too much about the past, and how I spent those hours and days that can now be altered only in the mind’s eye to satisfy a fool’s idle fantasies.

Such ruminations are not uncommon among people. But in me they acquire the form of a compelling need to account for the past. How did I spend the time that is no more? And did I spend it usefully? These broodings occur in varying degrees and across varied circumstances.

The span of time under consideration is sometimes broad. After finishing my final year BA exams this year, I have wondered, more than once, what have I really done in the past three years? How am I a different person from what I was in 2021, just after finishing 12th grade?

I often did not find a reassuring answer. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that my course had not been challenging enough to make me feel like a graduate in the humanities. All that I had learnt, in terms of academics, seemed inconsequential at worst, or grossly inadequate at best. This was so despite the fact that I felt deeply involved in what I studied. I loved my subjects. Yet, my mind insisted on using external standards to evaluate its expansion over the past three years. I would think of the folks who would graduate from Sophia’s, St. Xavier’s, DU, Vishwabharti, Loyola, those pricey but serious private institutions, and everywhere else where they did not make things so easy for you as they did in my college.

At other times, my rumination spans over a month or two. Summer breaks fit this category. At the end of the first week of ‘freedom’, I look back and try to persuade myself that it was a week well spent. As the weeks roll by this becomes more difficult, for I settle into the routine of a break (I cannot avoid the oxymoron). Time seems to pass more effortlessly, less eventfully.

For instance, I am writing this in the month of May, on a Friday. I have reflected on the past week (starting from Sunday) quite a few times since this morning. It felt as if this week drifted away faster than the previous one, which in turn went by faster than the one before.

I try to remind myself of what I did in the first week of the month. I read a memoir by John Bayley. I completed an academic paper I was working on. Then I began writing the blog post on thrift. I got my CET results. Not a bad week after all.

I then move to the second week. I gave my laptop to the service centre for getting it fixed. I met my school teacher while on my evening walk. I met a school-friend while on my way back home after getting my laptop back. I met another friend and took a long walk with them. I finished Les Miserables. I watched Maqbool and Iris. A week well spent, I suppose.

The third week. The only thing that stands out is that I spent it reading The Discovery of India. And I watched two films by Satyajit Ray. I fell in love with the ARR’s soundtrack for Chamkila. And oh, I voted for the first time. The week went by and I shrugged.

Now I am in the fourth week. First two days spent in finishing The Discovery. The next two days I spent reading Two Men in Boat and laughed a great deal. I watched a film adaptation of The Painted Veil, a novel I had read when I was in SY. For the past two days I have been reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Besides, I began writing this post.

I feel a need to go over the month like this again and again to reassure myself that it is not disappearing in thin air. That the days are not falling off the bloody calendar.

There is yet another form my ruminations take. This has become rare in the course of the past three years but it was a source of torment for me in the last two years of school. Here the question was not of years or months or weeks or days, but hours.

In 12th grade, I used to spend nearly the entire day studying - an unhealthy habit which was encouraged by teachers preparing us for that horrendous system of board examinations. I set targets for completing a chapter or a topic within a certain number of hours. At times, those targets were unrealistic and I would end up spending more time that I had expected to. This would cause me to admonish myself. I would stare at the clock, wondering how could I have wasted so much time on a single chapter. I would try to furnish an account to myself of how the past hours were spent and ask myself whether they could have been spent more efficiently. Sometimes, I simply hid the clock while studying to prevent myself from thinking too much about it (and thereby wasting more time).

The obsession about the past I have described above stems from an overwhelming need to make one’s time ‘worthwhile’. The demands are thus: the three years of college must make me competent if not employable; the two months of a summer break must be used productively; the hours of study must be efficient. The overriding fear is that of ‘wasting time’.

While my obsession has not left me entirely, my ideas about the use of time have certainly changed. Towards the end of 12th grade I began to think more about what I rather vaguely termed “other important things” (I am so dependent on terminology). I started reading a translation of Kalidasa’s poems. I watched a few films. I took days off and tried not to touch my textbooks on such days.

During my undergraduate years I usually picked up a book while I was preparing for college exams. I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when my Semester II exams were on. During Semester IV exams I believe it was Tavleen Singh’s book on Kashmir. I read a biography of Macaulay during my Semester V exams. I read John Grisham’s The Firm while preparing for CET. Often I would end up getting absorbed in a book for longer than I had planned. This would eat up the time I would have rather used for studying and this usually meant guilt. Gradually, I stopped feeling guilty. I simply told myself: I need this.

My views on productivity also changed. I did not give up my work ethic, for it is one of the few things I prize in myself. I did give up some unhealthy notions about work (which in my case meant study). I do not need to elaborate because we all heard, a few months ago, Mr. Murty’s pitch for a 70-hour work week. That’s the sort of idealised self-mortification I grew increasingly disillusioned with.

I remember reading what the author Jenny Odell had once said to the wonderful Richa Kaul Padte in an interview. She said, and this is the only thing I remember, that sleep is productive. Until then I had often reproached myself for taking a longer siesta in the afternoon than I usually allowed myself.

Asokamitran said of the poets loitering about at Gemini Studios, “Barring the office boys and a couple of clerks, everybody else at the Studios radiated leisure, a pre-requisite for poetry.” Pico Iyer in his introduction to one of the R.K Narayan’s novels, lets us know that the latter wrote for just about “an hour or two every afternoon” and that his routine had a “flow (which was) seldom abated.” From Pico’s account, it would appear that Narayan’s writerly routine was not too different from that of Ruskin Bond - a typical day in whose life has been documented by Mayank Austen Soofi. It would be impossible to imagine the fiction of Narayan and Bond if their lives were not characterised by a leisurely routine.

Deadlines may make one more productive (I’d rather say more efficient). But leisure seems to make one more fertile for ideas. Leisure, at least as I see it, can be boiled down to one thing: an opportunity for letting one’s mind wander and seek out connections between things we know (through observation, reading, listening etc.) It then becomes possible for me to think in a leisurely manner even when I am working under a deadline. Some of my writings that I am most proud of were produced in the form of college assignments. I could get those highly gratifying ideas even while staring at deadline (from a distance, admittedly) because I took out a decent amount of time for the job, perhaps more than others would have cared to spare. This allowed me to read broadly without frantically hunting for the right kind of information that would suit the assignment’s purposes. In many cases, the foundational idea, which formed the core of my arguments in a paper, was found where I had least expected to find it.

Just as leisurely reading can happen within time constraints, so can leisurely musing. We call it reverie. There have been many instances when I got lost in thought in the middle of reading and making notes for my exams. And astonishingly, I did not feel guilty for having whiled away my time. I would pace around in my room, holding a conversation in my mind’s eye. When I emerged from this reverie, I would feel strangely energised. What happen, I think, is this. One simply becomes indifferent to the task at hand, the deadline, the slipping away of the minutes. In those minutes, one ceases to think in terms of work done per unit time. We dive instead, if only for a few long moments, into the depths of memory and desire.

Memory and Desire are the two chapters of John Bayley’s memoir about the last year of the life of his wife, Dame Iris Murdoch. Bayley keeps losing himself (quite like myself) in reminiscences of his childhood and youth while he spends his days caring for his wife who is “sailing into the dark” due to Alzheimer’s. Except that in Bayley’s case, it not just a tendency but a consciously cultivated habit to lose himself in reminiscence and fantasy. He says it makes his days of caregiving more bearable to him and as a consequence, to his wife.

In his Les Miserables, Victor Hugo warns us against indulging too much in reverie. He takes the example of Marius, the lovelorn young man living in humble circumstances who refuses to work his way up the economic ladder just so that he can have time to wonder at the world. At a pragmatic level, I am compelled to agree with Hugo. But I do find it strange that such a word had to come from an author who has given us digressive passages in every chapter, passages which are nothing but the literary equivalent of reverie.

Reverie necessarily involves a form of indifference. You no longer care about the passage of time. This state of mind appears be more acute in persons who are in some form of confinement. Imprisoned in the Ahmednagar Fort, Jawaharlal Nehru filled several pages in The Discovery of India with his meditations on how Time treats one in prison. Here is one such passage:

Time seems to change its nature in prison. The present hardly exists, for there is an absence of feeling and sensation which might separate it from the dead past. Even news of the active, living and dying world outside has a certain dream-like unreality, an immobility and an unchangeableness as of the past. The outer objective time ceases to be, the inner and subjective sense remains, but at a lower level, except when thought pulls it out of the present and experiences a kind of reality in the past or in the future.

It is in the past or future that the mind experiences some sense of reality when the present moment is reduced to the impotence of staring at the walls of one’s jail cell. When I am lost in my musings, it is that “outer, objective time” that “ceases to be”.

The story of Pi Patel, masterfully told by Yann Martel, is another fascinating case of time becoming irrelevant to a castaway at sea. As Pi tells us:

And I survived because I made a point of forgetting. My story started on a calendar day-July 2nd, 1977-and ended on a calendar day-February 14th, 1978-but in between there was no calendar. I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time. What I remember are events and encounters and routines, markers that emerged here and there from the ocean of time and imprinted themselves on my memory. The smell of spent hand-flare shells, and prayers at dawn, and the killing of turtles, and the biology of algae, for example. And many more. But I don't know if I can put them in order for you. My memories come in a jumble.

By not looking obsessively at clocks and calendars, (as I do, as we all do) Pi succeeds in preventing the ticking of the minute hand from driving him mad. His instrument for keeping time is his memory which records whatever is of personal significance. And that too, is not a record that is ordered by chronology but one that “comes in a jumble.” He refers, I believe, to the memories of seemingly insignificant actions, feelings and sensations that emerge spontaneously.

If I am to take stock of what I achieved in the past three years, I must not think about each year or semester chronologically. I must not think specifically about the three years at all. I must let the memories of my attainments (which may not be objectively important, as we saw in Pi’s case) flow into the stream of my actions and thoughts. And there I will find them, not in chronology but in harmony with the present and nearly indistinguishable from it. I have no need to comb the past for evidence of ‘time well spent’. Such evidence will make itself known to me when I least suspect it.

One day, “midway upon the journey of our life,” I will probably ask myself if I am happy. Then I will dismiss the question, remembering that it can be answered only near the end of one’s life. Eudaimonia is the satisfaction of a life well-lived, not a mid-term review of life. I will remember that this bit of wisdom was given to me by Aristotle, whom I had studied in FYBA philosophy.

One day they will seek to push me into matrimony. I will try to make them see the absurdity of committing to a lifelong partnership after a few months of acquaintance with a person. My words of protest would not be my own. They would have their origin in my professor of political science who never spared an opportunity to talk to us about our life after finishing college.

One day, I will commit that most grievous sin of succumbing to a prejudice against a certain group. I will then remember my friends in college, who represented every community about which I have imbibed stereotypical notions. I will reproach myself.

When find myself in such situations, I will see my three years in degree college forming their own estimate.

What I have tried to express in the preceding paragraphs was theorised in elegant prose more than a century ago by Henri Bergson. In his Creative Evolution, he posits time (conceived of as ‘duration’) as the stuff that life is made of. “Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances”, not unlike a snowball rolling down a slope. Memory is the chief vehicle of duration:

Memory, as we have tried to prove, is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared—in short, only that which can give useful work. At the most, a few superfluous recollections may succeed in smuggling themselves through the half-open door. These memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what we are dragging behind us unawares.

One has no need to comb through the yellowing registers of memory to assess how well the long-lost time was spent. That past will return to “cast light on the present situation.”

To our minds, fed on Freud and Skinner, there seems to be nothing new in what is being offered here. Same old determinism: we can never escape the past, with its experiences and conditioning. Bergson admits that our explain present state can be explained by what we were, right until a moment ago. Yet, the present moment is new, unfolding, and indeed, unforeseeable. It is the game changing X-factor of our personal trajectory. It makes it impossible to make projections about our future self.

The present moment is an “original moment”. It is a moment of creation, of vitality, because it a moment when choice is made. Choice is not automatic or habitual but requires a weighing of possibilities. Bergson believes that choice is, therefore, free and creative.

The determinist’s answer is well known to me. They will insist that even choices made in the present moment are unfree from the clutches of the past. But I find Bergson convincing enough to have a certain reverence for the creative potential of the moment.

In the passage quoted above, Bergson points to how the past trickles back to the present whenever it can make itself “useful”. But useful may not be the right word. I would prefer ‘meaningful’, for it helps explain those flashes of creative insight which a writer has from time to time. I might be reading a novel (or a textbook) when something in the text triggers a memory that is relevant to it in some very subjective way. Thus the present moment has birthed an idea for a new poem or substack essay.

There are two things I can do with this idea. One, I can act on it before the excitement borne by it fizzles out. This might require me to make space for it in my routine. The other would be to wait and let it take shape on its own, in due time. Only that this scarcely ever happens. I have recorded innumerable ideas for poems and essays which I later struck off because by then, I simply could not bring myself to write on them anymore.

To be faithful to Bergson’s concept of duration, I must recognise that any idea I have will remain with me and might reappear one day when it suits the new circumstances. But it might reappear but in a form I can no longer recognise, and which may no longer evoke in me the same feeling as it did when it was newly conceived. It will not remain the same, and nor will I.

To put off developing an idea by saying, “it will work itself out when the time is right” is to forget Bergson’s conclusion that we cannot foresee our future self. When we are warned against procrastination, the underlying idea seems not very different.

This is a platitude but I must say it: the things we are procrastinating about often have little to do with our work/academics and a lot to do with other personally meaningful activities: writing, knitting socks and gloves, learning the violin, visiting a museum and so on. Putting these off under the self-assurance of ‘all in due time’ is symptomatic of a peculiar sort of determinism that is operating in our lives. It functions in a system where our occupations (academics or vocation) determine our routines to a soul-numbing degree.

Putting off my writing would mean giving in to this regimented life. It would mean forfeiting my capacity for taking my creative impulses to their fruition. It would mean losing my capacity for silent wonder at the vitality of the moment. It would mean a creative numbness. It would mean joining Macbeth in saying: “There would have been a time for such a word.”

But alas, there would never again be a time for such a word.

“I don’t have an OTT subscription. I don’t go to eat Italian food at South Bombay restaurants. I don’t have a lot of clothes. No, I choose to spend my money on a first class railway pass instead.”

This was my idea of thrift as I once put it to a friend who raised her eyebrows and muttered laconically, “Sounds like you.”

But my abstinence from things like OTT, Italian food and good looking clothes is not something I can be proud of. I never wanted these things anyway. It is in denying myself those things which I would dearly love to have that I can truly feel the pleasures of thrift.

How is it a pleasure? It certainly has nothing to do with any spiritual pleasure of self-restraint, of kind Gandhi keeps talking about. It may be closer to (but not the same as) the self-abnegation of Hameed from Premchand’s luminously beautiful short story Idgah, which we may have encountered in our schoolbooks. What little Hameed does in the story has a material consequence: his grandmother now has a pair of tongs. In my case, the consequences are emotional. Of course, it saves money but that is not the most important reason why I do it.

I deny myself several things my peers do not hesitate to enjoy because I happen to have parents who hardly ever indulge themselves. Being raised in such a home results in a habit of looking at price tags, shrugging one’s shoulders and walking away when the product in question is not an absolute necessity. Though my parents have seen hard times, they never ceased being indulgent with me and my brother. But in the past few years, their habit of frugality has taken root in me. More importantly, I feel the pang of guilt when I do wish to indulge myself - and here comes the Gandhian element - and I feel the prick of the question, “What right do I have to buy myself this thing when my parents live so simply?”

So, when I make a choice that would save me money, I do it because of a deep-rooted awareness of the lifestyle my parents practice. It is a gesture, invisible to them, of affirming a shared but unspoken value. On the occasions when I have travelled second class in the locals, I have felt a sense of kinship - a feeling of being with one’s own people, who perhaps share one’s habits of thrift. I feel relieved of the guilt of travelling first class.

But what about the pleasure I was talking about? It seems, if I were to compel myself to look closely, of a rather perverse kind. It is a wry pleasure in taking oneself close to the fulfilment of what the superego would brand as ‘unnecessary, ergo superfluous’ - and then walking away sans gratification. It sounds almost masochistic. So let’s philosophise it…

I have often come very close to buying a book which I always wanted in a paperback (or even better, a Penguin). Studying in a college that’s close to the Fountain meant I could walk my way after college to the second hand booksellers there, with their seemingly endless piles stacked on the pavement. I inquire the price of a book that caught my attention - The Godfather, Germinal, Mulk Raj Anand. The bookseller quotes a price which the reasonable person in me accepts as reasonable (for fresh paperbacks are now scandalously costly) but the thrifty fellow would rather not. “Why bother?”

Indeed, why bother taking the trouble to ask for the price if the decision not to purchase is a fait accompli? This exercise has now entered the digital space. On Instagram you’ve got Oldbookdepot where they put up dozens of books on sale everyday, again at perfectly reasonable prices. Again, I take the trouble to faithfully scroll through their posts, look at the books, their prices. I would give the impression of a person who is keenly searching for something he wants very much. Then, with a mute solemnity, I close the application.

Herein lies the perverse pleasure of self-denying thrift. You take yourself close to gratification, knowing fully well all the while that you will not do it. Yet, I have noticed, the mind retains some sort of desperate hope: “Aditya might end up buying this copy of Middlemarch. He just might, you know.” Dangling a pathetic hope of escape and then marching the prisoner back to the cell - this affords an amusement which could even be philosophic. It illustrates a primal part of our nature that peeks out expectantly, only to be met with a sardonic refusal.

Observing this in myself with at least some measure of detachment (if at all it is possible to be detached while being a participant) is the closest I can get to the Schopenhauerian ideal of “intelligent contemplation of life.” I witness the ebbs and flows of desire as they pass and I smile at them, not mockingly but as one would smile at the foibles of a character in a story.

But no, what Schopenhauer meant was an unselfish contemplation, a state when desire has been extinguished. Tormenting myself is not unselfish: it feeds my vanity in my ability to resist temptation. In our eternal struggle for superiority, I have sought to imagine myself above my upper class peers by reminding myself of this fact: I can live modestly.

Am I proclaiming austerity as a virtue worth everyone’s emulation? Certainly not. In another life, I would have loved to be a more zindaa-dil aadmi as Khushwant Singh once described himself. My upbringing has bequeathed unto me simplicity as a value, and it is merely that I have chosen to embrace it. I do not endorse it.

Austerity has always had a lure for me. I remember having written a paper in FYBA making a comparison between the dressing styles of Augustus and Aurangzeb. I had titled it “Austere Kings". The dignified Augustan calm appealed to me much more than the more spectacula(r) tendencies of Julius Caesar.

Why do I ramble about making a nebulous point? This lofty self denial of second hand books is quite simply what my mother would call ‘window shopping’. I never understood what it really is until I found myself doing it. It is an attempt to vicariously satisfy our consumerist impulses. Hunger feeding on visions of food. It lies somewhere between fantasy and reality: you do not need to imagine the object of your desire, it’s right there but out of your reach (perhaps wilfully so).

Thrift takes other forms too. Ones that may not yield to such philosophical meanderings. There is thrift in running to catch the bus at 5.35 am to avoid spending on a rickshaw, and lying to parents about taking the rickshaw (they shake their heads at my thrifty practices while doing it themselves). There is thrift in taking the metro on my way back home even if it means reaching home a little later. There is thrift, feeble but sure, in resisting the suggestion to buy myself new clothes for Diwali, and then giving up the resistance almost prayerfully. There is thrift in asking the apparel seller to start with the least priced shirts. There is thrift even in smiling at his gentle admonishment, “Sir, aap sirf price hi kyun dekhte hain? Quality bhi toh dekhiye.”

I recognise that these practices of economy are far too common among the middle classes. For innumerable people, they are too mundane a part of life to be written about. Perhaps they figure only in sisterly exchanges of useful domestic knowledge among housewives. I can imagine my grandmother telling her neighbour about a place where tamarind is cheaper (we Tamilians buy and stash it for the whole damn year). My grandmother reminds me of another missile in the arsenal of thrift which I am quite hopeless at wielding: bargaining with vendors. I remember the consummate skill and the heavily accented Hindi with which my grandmother would bargain with roadside vendors in the great Chembur market.

My grandparents exemplify for me, that deeply humbling Indian ethos of being fondly indulgent with loved ones while themselves living frugally. Whenever we would go to stay at their home in Ghatkopar for a few days, we would be treated on our arrival with the choicest snacks that Bombay can boast of. There would be the usual remonstrances from my mother to which my grandfather would shake his head, beaming all the while. He was, and remains, a pensioner. My grandmother was the original DIY geek I knew. She would turn the most pitiful scraps into object of utility, sometimes making use of the old Usha sewing machine which she operated like the absolute ace she was. In her youth, she wanted to graduate with a chemistry major, but her old aunts managed to end her education after PUC. Not because of there wasn’t enough to spend but because she wasn’t worth spending on.

I cannot bargain like my grandmother. Nor do I have a cause (as yet) to discuss the prices of tamarind with a comrade. I do my bit in telling my friends about places where they can access pricey books and papers for free. Nah, you don’t need that hopeless thing called N-List which the government condescendingly offer students. You only need to keep up with pirate sites (I say “keep up” because they are always been hounded out by the authorities and so keep changing their domain).

As a student, I feel duty bound to defend sites such as Sci-hub and Library Genesis. This is an issue which brings out all my class consciousness in its fullest fury. I cannot accept an exorbitant price tag on knowledge. Am I depriving authors of remuneration for their hard earned efforts? For all I know, most of the authors I look for are academics who are on university payrolls. Is that not remuneration enough? Moreover, this remuneration largely comes from public money (most eminent universities are publicly funded). Making the public pay an unreasonable price for knowledge generated at their expense is nothing but kleptocratic.

In a country where college libraries are not always well stocked with (and well subscribed to) humanities and social science publications, the student may steal with a unsullied conscience, and we have as much sympathy for them as Victor Hugo does for Jean Valjean for trying to steal a loaf of bread. If the reader wishes to learn about an interesting case where a similar question was debated, then they would do well to read on the DU Photocopy Case of 2016.

Wait, how does this have any bearing upon thrift? After all, thrift is about saving money. How is a student saving money by accessing academic publications for free which they would not have paid for even if they wanted them? Thrift as I see it is about reducing the expenditure on what we need. And capacity to pay is not a measure of need (this assumption is one of the great pitfalls of free market economics). Accessing books and papers through pirate sites reduces that expenditure to zero.

If you are wont to shudder at the mention of pirate sites, perhaps you wouldn’t repulse from the term ‘public domain’. I have in mine that marvellous museum of democratised knowledge and art: Internet Archive. Here one can satiate one’s hunger for books for free of charge and of guilt - if at all using pirate copies is a cause for guilt. I mentioned in the opening paragraph of this essay that I do not have a subscription in any of the OTT platforms. I have not hitherto felt the need for one. There is a wondrous trove of old films available on Internet Archive - from Satyajit Ray to Alfred Hitchcock to Akira Kurosawa. Here one can immerse oneself in the masters’ art without paying a premium.

It cannot be denied that online repositories like Library Genesis and Internet Archive lack the more homely conveniences of a good old fashioned public library. I remember reading a feature in a Sunday edition of The Hindu which spoke the revival of public libraries and reading spaces in India. That may be the case in several cities but here in Navi Mumbai or at least in my locality - Kharghar - community libraries are practically non-existent. To be fair, I have seen a small structure in my neighbourhood which announces itself as a public library but it seems to be locked most of the time. Navi Mumbai’s first central library is currently construction at Sanpada, or so they say. I hope it does not have the luck of the Metro. Thrift Devi should see to it.

I have titled this essay by borrowing a line from Old Bill’s Hamlet. Those words are, of course, uttered by the Prince of Denmark while giving vent to his disgust at his mother’s remarriage to his uncle, not long after his father’s death. The complete line goes thus: “Thrift, Thrift Horatio! The funeral-baked meats/ Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”

In saying so, Hamlet has unwittingly brought to light what I consider two ridiculously expensive affairs in India: weddings and funeral rites. Can we extend out notion of thrift to argue against profligate spending on these occasions? Alas, no.

What is the purpose of thrift? It is to live within one’s means. Live comfortably, yes, but never above the income. It permeates the economic and domestic habits of the middle class to such an extent that we see it almost as a class culture. But for most of its practitioners it is a necessary strategy to get by. The practice of thrift certainly is an illustration of discipline and indeed, ingenuity but it is not a thing that can promoted as a value on mass scale. Just as I refuse to preach austerity despite being attracted to it myself, I cannot view thrift as a social value. It is a compulsion of prudence for a certain section of the masses.

When practised where it is completely unnecessary, thrift descends into miserliness. I have seen quite a few misers around me, each one just as absurd as the other. They are all more or less well to do. That is perhaps the reason why we call them misers: they are thrifty in matters where they have no need to be so.

It appears to me that there is no use in preaching simplicity anymore. Sudha Murthy is today held in contempt by the youth, though she may have enchanted us in childhood. Austerity was stamped on socialist societies of the previous century and if one were to judge by the long queue outside the first McDonald’s that opened in Moscow in 1990, the people did not exactly enjoy it. Meanwhile, capitalism thrives by feeding on the middle class’ deep rooted instinct of thrift (think fast fashion) and then goes on to deceive that very instinct by prodding them into consumerist overshopping.

A society where simplicity is valued and thrift is a mass habit would be an idyll for me as well as for the environment. But the burden of history is too severe. We yearn for affluence and it just has to be of the material kind. The libertarian argument “I will do what I want with my money” is impossible to vanquish. We can only challenge it.

There remains one piece out of place. The first class railway pass. I renewed it the other day, spending a decent sum for a month’s worth of local train journeys. Thrift, then, is compensatory for me. Perhaps it serves to offset first class commuting. And when one has ‘saved enough’, even this self-denying pretender-Schopenhauer gives in to the justice of his soul’s longings.

I have been staring at this copy of The Argumentative Indian at the Fountain bookseller’s. I have followed my drill: I have picked up a book, asked for the price, frowned at it, continued to hold it in my hand, pretended to flip through its pages as though I were carefully weighing its worth like a seasoned collector of old books. At this point, I usually put it back and walk away. This time I must have been looking at it rather too wistfully, for the bookseller makes another offer. Chal, 200 mein le ja. He has made a concession of a full fifty INR.

I take it. And I don't think too much about it.

Kant Rediscovered reused for analogical purposes

While teaching Immanuel Kant’s deontological ethics in FYBA, our professor offered us not even a shred of biography. Not a single mention was made of Konigsberg - the city where Kant was born, and also the one where he studied, taught, wrote his monumental works, and passed into eternity. Of course, a lot of famous people’s names are tied to their home-cities, be it the Tiger of Mysore or the Bard of Avon. But Kant’s tie with his city was perhaps far more intimate than that of any other such person. Except for an interval of six years, the ‘Sage of Konigsberg’ is known to have never left his native city. And yet, it was in this cloistered world that he produced the works that caused a philosophic storm in the way the world looked at itself.

This little biographic detail is what drew me towards Kant, the man, for Kant the philosopher I was already acquainted with. But there was something else too: Kant never skipped his daily walk.

At a considerable risk of producing a far-fetched and vain comparison, I must admit that I found something rather reassuring in Kant never leaving his city. I was three months old when my family moved to Kharghar, and I have been here ever since. My travels outside Mumbai have been extremely limited (due to reasons beyond our control). Suffice it to say that I am the sage ‘stubborn recluse of Kharghar’. And yes, I too love to take long walks. It pleases me to know that a lot of writers and philosophers took long walks (Wordsworth and Thoreau are the names that occur to my mind). Now that my comparison has indeed become far too much steeped in vanity, I see no point in exercising further restraint.

Kant, Konigsberg, and the walks he took in its streets. These are inextricable parts of a whole that transcends soul and space. So it is with me, Kharghar and my walks. And that is the subject of my ramblings below.

To the Skywalk (No, I’m not being Shelley this time)

A good friend of mine recently spoke about the need to ‘go out there’ and see what the world is like. By this, of course, they meant that I should not be satisfied with mere perfection of the book and must gain insight into grassroot-realities. I cannot but agree. But the only ‘going out there’ in my life has been stepping outside the walls of my home and taking long walks dressed in semi-formals and looking like a castaway who doesn’t mind being one. Therefore, I shall speak of the only ‘out there’ that I know of.

I am rather slow when it comes to exploring the spaces around me. I often take the same route for a walk. I do change my course now and then and come upon new routes. If I prefer some to the others, it is because they are less peopled, quieter, and possess that charm of which the essence I cannot reduce to words.

A long walk to the Kharghar station from my home - which takes me about 25 minutes one way - is among the routes I take most often. Thank God for the skywalk they built (at enormous expense, no doubt). It starts near the school where I studied and takes you all the way to station. In the months of May and June, this blessed piece of pedestrian infrastructure prevents me from sweating out all my body fluids. Above all, it is peaceful without being lonely in the evenings. It happens to connect some educational institutions to the station and consequently, one can often find college-kids walking about. Like me, a lot of folks use the skywalk for what it was probably never meant for: just taking walks. Unlike me(?), most of these walkers are middle aged or elderly. Despite all this, it is never crowded.

The skywalk turns by nearly 90 degrees at the start of Pravesh Marg. That’s the name they gave to the road that ushers you into Kharghar and leads you to its most recognisable landmark - Utsav Chowk (a fountain that dried up long ago). Thereafter, the skywalk runs parallel to the road that goes to the station. This turn is a spot that overlooks a little park where you will find gulmohar trees in full blossom during the summer months. At around 6.00 the westward sun caresses the boughs and their florid blossoms with its departing rays - a sight that has never failed to enchant me. As I walk further, the farther end of the road below offers a no less delightful picture, for it is lined with gulmohars, creating a streak of vermillion painted with a bleeding finger that bled nothing but beauty.

As I walk towards the station, the neighbourhood of Belpada materialises on my right-hand side. It is the sort of place that urban planners refer to using the oxymoronic term ‘urban village’. Indeed, you can still spot a few old-style houses with sloping roofs, where a dhoti-clad man is airing himself in the verandah in the evening. But these few houses are now surrounded by multi-storeyed concrete dwarfs and concrete giants. They are the incongruous relics of what Kharghar was before chlorophyll was forsaken for concrete. [Our house-help, who hails from the Koli community, tells us that when she was a little girl, there used to be fishing ponds in or around the place where my housing society stands today.]

I go on till the façade of the station bearing the letters ‘KHARGHAR’ appears at the distance. In more than one instance, on reaching thus far, I have felt an urge to get down at the other end of the skywalk and take the next CSMT local for no particular reason. It is an urge that is difficult to subdue. But it is subdued every single time and I turn back. On my way back, I tend to avoid using the skywalk.

I climb down the spiral stairway and take the road that runs along a bunch of educational institutions. The sheer proximity of these buildings makes me wonder if those city-planners actually planned to have them all together in one block. There’s an engineering college, a medical college-hospital, NIFT (with their boldly executed graffiti on the compound wall), and finally, the ITM. This road is lined with trees on both sides and that lends to it a rare allure when the mercury drops in the evening. I should add however, as a sobering phrase, that there exists a pay-and-use Sulabh Shauchalaya at the end of this rather tranquil road, but it remarkably exudes no olfactory signs of its presence.

That little park I mentioned above is right outside the ITM campus and so you can find a bunch of college-folk loitering there. I shouldn’t say loitering, for their lives might just be as stressful as mine (I daresay even more) and they sure are entitled to the simple pleasures of open spaces. I find them in twos, threes and fours. Some twos make themselves conspicuous by choosing a relatively secluded spot.

As the evening sets in more comfortably, I see little kids running about and getting that physical exercise which walks cannot replace. Women conversing about colourful mundanities while keeping an eye on their kids. I see a bench with a sole occupant and he’s sleeping amid all the chatter.

I look on. I find myself wanting to sit in one of those benches. Yet, I keep walking, only slackening my pace a little. What stops me from stopping?

The Untrodden Kharghar

I can say with pride that I have traversed much of Kharghar’s length and breadth using a pair of feet plus a fairly dependable navigational sense. It should make me, the poorly travelled recluse, feel a rather strange pride to think that I know Kharghar like the back of my hand. But no, I cannot say that even after living here for a score years.

There is a part of Kharghar that always seemed too far away. You see, Kharghar is demarcated into sectors. The Station is where it begins (unlike many of the Greater Mumbai suburbs where the station demarcates the East and West). Sector 1 (the station and its neighbourhood) … Sector 4 (my school) … Sector 7 (my family physician) … Sector 11 (my home) … Sector 20 (my friend’s place) … and so on. As soon I think of Sectors 21 and beyond, the map in my mind’s eye starts turning hazy and eventually goes blank. To speak in more conceivable terms: there are two Kharghars in my mind, with the vast expanse of the Central Park in between. The Kharghar on the farther side of the Park remains obscure to me. It is simply too far to be reached on foot without giving myself a nasty footsore.

I have, however, once travelled to the end of Kharghar by the good old NMMT. I cannot remember how many years it has been since, but I do remember that I went with my father on a seemingly pointless excursion. We got down at what I think was the last stop. We found ourselves right outside the CISF compound and even got to witness a dignitary being escorted out with jawans raising their rifles in salute. I do not know who the dignitary was, but it was interesting to see such a sight in what always seemed like the end of the living world to me.

My mother once told me that in Kharghar, regardless of which by-lane you find yourself in, you will eventually reach the place from where you started. Partly this is a result of better city-planning. I think it is also because Kharghar is bound by the hills on the West and by the Taloje River on the East. So, that leaves us with two sides, and it merges with Taloja (the place where that jail is) on one end and with Belapur (the place where that pagoda is) on the other.

Discovering streets hitherto unknown to me is a pleasure I allow myself only occasionally, for it takes time to weave across the streets I am unfamiliar with and return home before it’s dark (I do not particularly like the outdoors after sunset). And every time I indulge in such exploratory ramblings, I experience an odd wonder at how space has been utilised by people. In the unlikeliest of places, there are residential buildings, departmental stores, brand outlets, salons, pharmacies, gyms and whatnot. In places where I scarcely suspected civilisation (for the sheepish reason that I never went that far) I find thriving neighbourhoods. It is a matter to be lauded as well as rued. Kharghar is still a relatively greener area in Navi Mumbai, and I would dearly wish it to remain so.

Kharghar is structured such that between major roads, there are narrow by-lanes where the proud vestiges of the Marathi culture still flourish (I, for one, have barely any Marathi-speaking neighbours). Here, the housing societies have the appearance of chawls (which they most certainly are not). Here, one finds row-houses and children playing cricket right in the middle of the street and pausing their game every single time a two-wheeler passes by. Here are found the sign-boards written entirely in Devanagari.

Ekla Cholo Re

It’s been long since I rejected the introvert-extrovert dichotomy but God, I do love my solitude. I do not like the streets when they are heavily peopled. I am only being myself in walking alone.

Of course, at a mundane level, this is because my companions have always found my walking speed to be rather unpalatable and I must concede that. Once I and a friend walked from my college to the CSMT, and at the end of it they said in a cheery yet hopeless tone, “I hope you learn to walk normally.” Another good friend quipped the other day that whenever she finds me walking ahead of her on the way to college, she doesn’t try to catch up with me because it is pointless. I cannot take the latter comment without feeling a wee-bit flattered. In another, more absurd and less self-deceiving universe, I would have probably competed in racewalking.

I tend to walk fast because I usually take walks as an exercise, and I feel I need to exert myself sufficiently when I am spending merely 45-minutes walking (and even less on working days). Brisk walks make up for the distance. I may have inherited the habit of walking fast from my father and also my grandfather, for they were both fast walkers in their prime. I suspect that being a nervous person has a lot to do with walking fast. Eventually, walking fast became ‘my-way-of-walking’ which I am reluctant to give up, even as I feel the need for more relaxed walks wherein I could be more mindful of my surroundings.

Does walking alone afford me plenty of opportunities to observe people? I do not know. There are people, sights and moments that lead me to dip my foot in the pool of contemplation, but as fickle the mind is, I draw my foot out and keep walking. A toddler running with its adorably haphazard gait and a grown man jogging happily behind, trying to partake in the kid’s joy of vigorous movement. A beggar woman with an infant in arms; a well-off woman looking at the worst-off pair with a pity that is not humanly possible to sustain forever. A college-aged girl firing bitter words in Marathi at a college-aged boy - a scene of premature heartbreak. An old man wearing a T-shirt waving his arms back-and-forth horizontally, drawing them to the front and swinging them back: he’s enjoying his evening exercise in a way I cannot, not with all these thoughts clouding my mind.

I am astounded at how the mind can wander if we allow it the space to do so. I let my mind go free during walks, as far as I can. I am puzzled by the fact that I can spend 45 minutes thinking about all sorts of things and yet not remember anything I thought about because all of it was fleeting and unsubstantial; nothing took root. Of course, Joyce and Woolf would have made some very substantial things (ahem ahem, paperbacks that are taught in, ahem ahem, literature courses) out of this. There have been a few instances when walks have yielded something more lasting. In the skywalk, I once passed by a particularly beautiful woman and that set my mind upon this more general question: “Is it just to love a person for their beauty?” My mind kept churning the question till I got back home, and I eventually did end up arriving at a fairly satisfactory answer. I will spare the reader the details of my meditations.

The Persistence of Memory

When locals find themselves in that bustling road which runs to the Utsav Chowk before branching out, they give their location as ‘Hiranandani’, after the most imposing housing complex in the area, which also happens to be among the oldest in Kharghar. Those folks who made the middle-of-nowhere that Powai was into someplace-important-in-the-middle-of-nowhere may have had similar designs for Kharghar. On either side of the two-way road is a wide pavement. At the edge of the pavement is an upraised bund of packed-rubble topped with flat cement slabs conjoined to make a bench that stretches almost continuously for I-don’t-know-how-far.

Flipping through some old photo albums, I come across pictures of my parents with the infant me in their arms standing on this very pavement, with the Utsav Chowk in the background. Not one soul seems to be around, and my parents confirm this.

My parents had their strolls on these pavements, sat on these benches and must have wondered at the quietude and loneliness of the place to which they had come, after having lived all their lives in the reassuring cacophony of Suburban Mumbai. But by the time I was barely ten, the administration had to install a signal system here to regulate the traffic and build a skywalk for pedestrians.

I rarely ever walk on these pavements. If at all I do, it is en route to another, more peaceful road. I do not see families sitting on the ad infinitum bench anymore, enjoying the evening. A few old men huddled together, some young people in twos, and few persons sitting all alone - these are all that I can see.

Among the many streets branching off at a right angle to this broad and busy thoroughfare is the one that leads to the school where I spent fifteen years of my life. Again, this is not a pedestrian-friendly road at all. In the past year I have trodden this road not more than twice. Once it was with a friend who was visiting and I had no better way to show him around than to take the road cutting across Belpada with its colourful houses and narrow by-lanes, eventually passing by the school gates.

The second instance was less deliberate. One evening, I felt inexplicably drawn towards my alma mater, which I remember with pride, some grudges, fondness, and disappointment - the relative proportions of which I cannot determine. I walked down the road and practically circumambulated the campus without entering it (I could not have done so, for it was 6.00 PM). I just wanted a peek at the C-shaped blue-and-white building, that cemented basketball ground, those windowpanes among which I could identify the ones attached to the classrooms where I sat in my 11th grade (the last year I attended school before that nasty bug came about).

In general, it may said very fairly that Kharghar does not have the best of roads in Navi Mumbai. Yes, there are some fine public parks that allow people to take walks. But for those who do not wish to move in a circuit enclosed by compound walls and wish to take walks as more properly understood, there is not much that Kharghar has to offer.

I have said somewhere above that the Pravesh Marg that leads you to the Utsav Chowk branches out into two roads: one leads you to Belapur, the other takes you to Taloja (well, eventually; there’s a lot of Kharghar to cover before that). These roads are not as wide, but they are certainly more peaceful for a stroll. The road to Belapur is the one I found myself, some days ago. The Metro had recently begun its service. We were spared an inauguration which would have choked the roads in the name of heralding a utility that supposedly improves connectivity.

A part of the metro line runs above this road and as I walked, I gazed for long at the ‘Utsav Chowk’ station they had built there. The last time I had been there was few months ago, and I had noticed that the work was still far from completion. In fact, it had always been hopelessly far from completion ever since I can remember. I believe my brother was two when they began the work. And the work snaked through, snails came and went away but the soul of the metro, in its immeasurable faith, stood by, waiting for the day it would be embodied by the locomotives. It finally did so. My brother was a little over 14 by then.

Walking in the Fort

The Metro is meant to take you only till Belapur. Thence, you must hop into the CSMT local and repose your faith in “the harbour line of the Suburban Service of Mumbai Division, Central Railway”. Yes, you must be told that in the long form because that captures the essence of how the harbour line works: by taking long for just about anything and anywhere.

Why must we make take the local to CSMT at this point? Is this not a long lengthy essay on Kharghar by one of its denizens? This walker commutes to the Fort six days a week. He cannot help making acquaintance with any place that he frequents by the hallowed act of walking over its streets, for such an acquaintance may lead to an intimacy that unites the wanderings of his mind with the wanderings of his feet. To put it more simply, he must seduce the space that has, in slow doses, enchanted him. Now he has two muses, two homes. He must be fair to both even as he recognises the difficulty of such an endeavour.

I was first guided around the streets of the Fort by my father, in February of the year of our Lord, 2022. College had opened its gates for students, after nearly two years of that altruistic (and coerced) house arrest. I still follow the same route while walking from the CSMT to my college. But in the intervening months, I have walked around a little more, sometimes with friends, but mostly alone.

The longest route I have taken so far was on a day when I found myself at CSMT at 7.00 am. My first lecture of 7.30 had been promptly cancelled and the information had been diligently communicated to us after I had already crossed Chembur. I had nearly an hour to while away and so I began walking without really thinking where I am headed, or even how far I intended to go. I did go quite far.

I walk down the Hazarimal Somani Marg that I take everyday (unless I’m taking the bus, of course). On my right lies the Azad Maidan, the site of public rallies which is put to this purpose without fail almost everyday - we do love our protests. On my left stands a long line of rather varied structures, starting with a school and ending with an unoccupied mansion under restoration. That’s when I reach the Chaphekar Bandhu Chowk. I walk on, and in a moment or two, the Fountain is within my sight. Old and perhaps nameless stone buildings continue to stand on my left in Gothic stillness as they have stood for generations. Some of them are too sublime to be put to mundane uses. I reach the place where, in a few hours, second-hand booksellers would unleash a deluge of volumes on the pavements and still know where exactly every title is to be found. But right now, there are only workers squatting on the pavements, sipping tea, priming their souls for another arduous day.

I reach the Fountain, where the Roman goddess of flowers and springtime stands atop her ornate pedestal (the particulars of whose design I lack the vocabulary to describe). How far can the fecundity of money in this city can be attributed to her gentle yet keen gaze, I do not know. I do know, however, that the Bombay Stock Exchange isn’t very far from here.

I walk across and start upon another road whose name I know not. I have no need to know, for the landmarks here have cast their shadow all over the concrete beneath our feet. There rise, on my left again, the Bombay High Court with its little brother, the Sessions Court, the University with that lovely clocktower, and at the end of the road we arrive at the memorial statue of a bespectacled man attired in a suit, with his right hand upraised and its index finger outstretched. The only thing missing is a book held in his left hand, and it would have completed the picture of a man who tall enough to overshadow even that judicial castle we just passed. I turn right and for once, I falter in my way.

On the face of it, there is not much to think about. The road from hereon is a straight one, more or less, and leads you to the Marine Drive. Yet, all of a sudden, the placidity of the road running along the courts and the University seems infinitely more preferable to the feverish activity and puzzling road intersections in this area. A few more paces bring me right outside that building where the favourite entertainment must be musical chairs, for that is what we have seen since 23rd November 2019. I pass by, gracing the Mantralaya with only a summary glance, no more. There are lots of interesting places around here, but they are not on the locus of my stroll. Across the road is a series of similar looking bungalows which house the Right Honourables who participate in the above mentioned game.

Soon, there are two towering structures to my left, headquarters of two very old organisations. One used to be our ‘national carrier’, and the other remains a national daily. Printing ink has clearly outlasted publicly funded aviation fuel. Again, I turn right and walk towards Churchgate, and across the road are joggers, walkers, walkers with dog(s), residents of sea-facing art-deco buildings, people with enough time for exercising in the breeze of the Arabian Sea at 8.00 am. I have walked on this road before, just once. It was while walking to the NCPA from college with a bunch of friends to attend the launch of a book written by Tharoor. Today, I walk on without taking any turn till I reach A-Road, Churchgate.

This promenade, this Marine Drive, this staple of Bombay films, this go-to of jogging rich folks and sea-gazing couples, this relentless artery of the City, this tangled braid of classes - may my aimless stroll make me a denizen here too.

Denouement

Unless I am very much mistaken, it was on day when the 7.30 philosophy class was cancelled, that I found the opportunity to take the walk retraced above. This stubborn man of Kharghar has philosophised his way to Churchgate. He has two Konigsbergs now.

It would be wrong on my part, however, to write of my walks without writing about the ones where my friends have walked with me. Every Raskolnikov needs his Razumihin. Every Hamlet, his Horatio. They must find a place in this blog. I hope I am able to do that before the memories begin to turn yellow at the edges.

The Story

Before all creation, before Time (paradox count: 1), the Divine Designer (no, that’s not your new next door boutique) also called God (like Jesus also called the Christ and Aditya also called Srini) ordained the eternal order in which all things consist. In this order, every field of inquiry has its proper place.

The foremost are the sciences. The moron who includes political science in this will not be woken up on Judgement Day and will in all likelihood miss the bus to heaven. When God said sciences, he meant the all the stuff that uses fun Greek letters, saved us during the pandemic with needles, and sent Neel to chand.

Next are the subjects that help us make money. And sometimes they make so much of it that we become poorer because some kids got naughty at Wall Street. This class of subjects includes accounting, banking, investment, insurance, financial markets, drawing graphs that can any day leap out of the spreadsheet and get at you, giving a reason for PMLA to exist, and cutting Russia out of SWIFT. Wait, did I mention economics? This poor chap has one of his legs on this boat and the other on the next one.

The next one is something of an imposter that tries to sound cool by using the name of the foremost class of disciplines but attaches the word ‘social’ for some product differentiation. This one is about studying people and the things they do using the methods of science. Think economics, sociology, psychology, linguistics and the like. Assuredly I say unto that if you include political science here, you won’t be ditched on Judgement Day. Just like them scientists, scholars over here too fool around with terms like control groups, confounding variables, regression, null hypothesis (etc., was just giving what I thought would be a representative sample. Oh yes, ‘sampling’; add that too.)

God didn’t exactly cook up each of these disciplines. He left that to humans Man. But he wanted to throw in some natural order all the same, just like he had done when he created, very emphatically, Adam and Eve and not Adam and Steve or Ada and Eve.

The reader might think that the genesis story ends here. But no. There exists a class of disciplines that God made up while He was looking out of his window on the Seventh Day after smashing even Elon Musk’s record of his work-week. Conceived as it was during the divine off-hours, as a divine pass-time, this class could never be taken seriously. It became the profligate among all disciplines. No wonder God made it the basest of them all. God was never really fond of it because it never gave straightforward-sounding answers. It bugged you with more questions instead.

What was this, anyway? Well, as God lay thinking, he thought about what he’d done in past week. He obviously couldn’t remember everything so he came down to Eden and asked the worm just about to bore into the Apple and the snake just about to tempt Eve, “Hey, d’you remember what happened on the day after I let there be light?”

Needless to say, both creatures were irked at this frivolous interference into the natural order (“He must be getting old and forgetting things”, they must have thought). Neither of them had existed on the day after light was made so they told God what they had heard from others who had heard from others who had….After he had made notes of what both creatures said, all three went their ways. Worm found a better apple but Snake had no such options.

Comparing the notes of Snake’s account of Day 2 of Creation with that of Worm, God began to notice discrepancies between them. He tried to arrive at an account that contained whatever the two sources agreed upon. This was fun and some advanced primates (sorry, I meant Eve’s descendants) would go on to call it history. But as he amused himself with this, questions began to float: if what these two jerks told me doesn’t exactly match, does it mean they both got it wrong? Does one of them have to be right? Can both be true in their own ways? God ended up inventing quite a bunch of thought games while grappling with these questions. As the day was nearing a close, He was feeling lonely after too much solitary mind-churning. In his tormented state, he felt something well up within himself and before he knew it, he had uttered words more beautiful than anything he had said for the past week - but they were, at the same time, among the saddest words he had ever spoken.

The Seventh Day ended with God resolving that he will have no more of these dreamy, slippery and useless things that had ruined his holiday. Hence, He placed this class of disciplines right at the bottom of his fav natural order of disciplines, just in case humans tried to waste too much of their time. He then went to sleep and had weird dreams.

Helping you make sense of all this

I had made two attempts to write a more straightforward post on ‘why the humanities matter?’ and in both of them I tried to use rational arguments to make my point. Both drafts “sputtered, coughed and died” before I could complete them. I knew the answer to this question in a utilitarian sense. Why we need historians today, in the age of social media, more than ever before? Why literary classics can be gainfully read by the GenZ? How anyone and everyone can use philosophy as a gentle guide for their lives? I could have written a lot along these lines but you can get pretty much the same content elsewhere using a simple Google search.

I wanted to write a defence of the humanities that was non-mainstream and non-utilitarian. It is hard to argue against the idea that the humanities are of much less use in creating jobs, making life saving medicines and reducing fossil fuel consumption although they can undoubtedly help in an indirect if not ancillary way. After having spent a little time in a public policy thinktank, I now feel it is not fair on my part to assail the government for not allocating enough money for research in the humanities. If anyone can and should promote the humanities, then it is us: individuals, associations and non-profits. To do that, it is important to understand why we must do so irrespective of the utility (as commonly understood) of the humanities.

The result of a third attempt at writing was this post. I have been reading about Voltaire and I suspect some of his spirit has infected me to try and “annihilate with laughter” the futility so often attached to the humanities. To get to the heart of the matter: God, in my story, stumbles upon the humanities after he has created almost everything else. He does so while looking back upon his creation in contemplation. He too is, in a way, trying to make sense of it all. He feels compelled to find out what exact happened on Day 2 simply because he was at the centre of all the happenings. So it is with ‘why history?’ The mere opportunity to find out how people (just like you and me) lived their lives when we were not around is a thrilling pursuit in itself. It is a quest that makes us deeply aware of our shared humanity. It takes us out of a false vacuum of the present where all that we are seems to have arisen ex nihilo, and puts in touch again with where we have come from.

In puzzling himself by asking if both the Snake and the Worm were correct in their own ways, he is wondering about the relative nature of truth and is confronting his own tendency to seek monolithic answers. He has moved away from the technicalities of what he did on Day 2 and is asking questions about the larger whole of his creation - the essence of philosophy which is called a synthesising inquiry. So it is with us. As we make progress in the technicalities of any domain, we will have questions to address about the whole. As we make strides in AI, we are asking ourselves - What is the self? Who is a person, anyway? What defines life after all?

Finally, God signs off his rest-day with what the reader might discern to be a poem. You may even be reminded of the tale of sage Valmiki, whom Indian tradition holds to be the author of the first poem. If God could not appreciate this as much as we do it is probably because he has already done it in innumerable other ways: giving birth to beauty. Aesthetic pleasure. One of the first things I do when a headache bothers me is to pull out my copy of English poems collected by Francis Turner Palgrave and immerse myself. I keep finding myself among the characters of world literature (be it Raskolnikov, Dale Harding, Henry Higgins or Coriolanus). And that is the point of literature - it is about us in a manner more intimate that anything else can achieve. Of course, the humanities extend far beyond literature into the other arts that we live for.

However, I would venture to say that all of the humanities is more intimately about us - ourselves - humans - than all other disciplines. There’s no other good reason for us to call this domain the humanities.

What I have written about God’s ‘fav natural order of disciplines’ is of course satirical. I like to think that in this order, disciplines seem to be arranged in the descending order of quantification and experimentation. At the top are the hard sciences which are all about spending lifetimes in laboratories. At the bottom, along with other subjects, is philosophy which has the human mind itself for its laboratory. My philosophy teacher would never tire of telling us that all disciplines were once part of one mother-subject: philo-sophy (literally, the love of wisdom) and then broke away one by one in an endless saga of specialisations. Today, there are intersections between disciplines that sound almost incredible. I recently heard of role of archaeo-genetics (how archaeology and DNA studies intersect) in finding out who the ancestors of us Indians really were. I imagine that there will come a time when we will have so much of such intersections that God’s fav natural order of disciplines will be fully transgressed and everything will be (dismissively?) called philosophy again.

After crawling my way to making the 12th entry under my References, I experienced a gentle rush of pleasure upon realising that I had mastered the skill of making citations using the Chicago style.

Is it not an achievement that truly merits hearty self-congratulations?

No sooner was my self-laudatory moment over when I saw that I had consistently put a comma where one had to put a period. I would, as is my wont, be happy to elaborate on harangue you on the details of my carelessness and how it came about. But on this matter I seek the sordid pleasure of letting others commit the same error as I did.

I must blame this malice, for I cannot afford to accept it as sui generis, on the creators of various citation styles. The whole lot of them. Far too many minutes of our lives -which are already (and still) nasty, brutish and short - have been gobbled up poring over condescending online guides that teach you the science of arbitrarily using punctuation marks. Bacon was spitting facts when he said, “human nature, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and regularity in things than it really finds” (qtd. in Durant 165). We seek order in our penchant for arbitrariness.

At this point a friend who is unable to resist themself would say, “Good sir, have you ever considered using a citation generator? Methinks you take too much needless trouble upon yourself and then sour our conversations with your wallowing.”

You are quite right, amicus, in your observation concerning my wallowing. But on citation generators, you are mistaken. I have used those presumptuous tools that offer to take away your burden of doing citations. They have only added to my misery.

Sometimes it is difficult to even locate the work you want to cite using the search feature offered by these citation generators. And that is not surprising because not all the works we refer to are found in high-grade journals or books published by Springer, Routledge and OUP. Second, these tools, more often than not, fail to locate crucial details like the name of the publisher and the date of publication. You are then obligated to go hunting for them, presuming of course that you are a conscientious writer and would not knowingly omit such details in the citation.

However, on the above counts I am still prepared to acknowledge the considerable utility of citation generators. The trouble is only for those of us working on less-researched areas or using sources like newspaper articles, reports (whose URL is often a pdf file) and old books. What estranged me from citation generators is the difficulties they create in citing webpages/online articles. Authors are suddenly unknown. The date is an enigma. Citing a particular chapter from an edited book using such tools is well nigh impossible. Or at least I have not yet found a way out.

Now, I have given up the use of citation generators altogether. This is not a very rational choice, I admit. They are still useful for a lot of works that I refer to. But some factors make me prefer the manual route instead.

First, as I said, not all works can be easily cited using these tools. I don’t wish to toggle between doing one citation using Scribbr and the next one on my own. It messes up the flow of my work.

Second, the tool will often demand you to enter details manually if the search feature does not work. And once you are familiar with the format of a particular style, doing this becomes a pointless exercise because the same amount of effort and time can get your citation ready without the tool.

Third, and I must confess some hypocrisy on my part here, doing citations does not always make you mad at the creators of these Styles. Here I must return to the what I mentioned in my first sentence: pleasure. Yes, as odd as it may sound, doing citations can actually be the lightest part of research work. That is, after you become familiar with these Styles. When I cite my sources under References, I feel what a director might feel when the opening credits of their film are being prepared on a computer. They have just finished making a film. And now, they are surveying the whole process through the simple act of running through a large number of names. The References, if I may be allowed to get a little dramatic, is the dénouement; it brings a satisfying sense of closure.

Then what on earth explains the angst I displayed at the opening of this post? It is chiefly directed at the pointless variations that occur across different citation styles.

Some require you to write ‘pp.’ before the page number(s), others don’t. Chicago style has this weird demand of asking the date to be enclosed in parentheses and then you put a colon before writing the page number. Do they have some enhanced sense of aesthetics which extends to the arrangement of punctuation marks? Some Styles require you to enclose the titles of the works in quotes, while others avoid it. What is more disturbing is that students often lose marks when they write the issue number of the journal article in the wrong place.

Some of these variations do have a rational basis and are meant to suit the needs of the disciplines where they are used. You can learn more about this here or here (this one is a video, dearest reader).

Do I love to do citations towards the end of my paper? Yes, they make me feel good about having read an awful lot of stuff. They serve purposes far nobler than something so narcissistic but this is how I make my peace with them. Amen (John 21:25).

For a generation that watched films on Doordarshan and listened to their songs on Vividh Bharati or Radio Ceylon, my parents were probably led into loving the songs they loved because of watching the films first where they often formed part of the narrative - a distinctive feature of mainstream Indian films.

I, on the other hand, had Spotify for listening and YouTube/Internet Archive for watching. And being strapped for time to watch full-length films, I have often savoured soundtracks before being led - seduced - into watching the films. Many of the films I adore were discovered by me this way: Roja, Nayakan, Delhi-6, Umrao Jaan, to throw some names off my head. A film that figures prominently in this list of movies-I-was-seduced-into-watching-by-their-songs is K. Balachander’s Varumayin Niram Sivappu (1980). (The reader who understands Tamil and has not watched the film is strongly encouraged to do so before reading further. You will find it with ease on YouTube.)

The title, when translated from Tamil, reads: The Colour of Poverty is Red. No, that’s a bad translation. A whole sentence. Preposterous. Red the Colour of Poverty. Now, that seems a teensy bit more tolerable.

The film is the tale of Rangan (Kamal Hasan), an MA in Philosophy, who migrates to Delhi after bitterly quarrelling with his father, and struggles to find employment only to realise that an MA is the last thing that can save him from destitution. When we first meet Rangan, he is living with a roommate (who remains curiously unnamed) in a small one-room house which looks like a shack. These two denizens of empty pockets welcome a third newcomer - Thambu is his name - to their shared room of endless hopes and schemes to scrape off a meagre existence.

Our newcomer’s first experience of solidarity in his new home is highly telling, so far as the theme of the film goes. Thambu announces that he needs to have a bath and pulls out a fresh pair of trousers for change. No sooner than he does it, Rangan emerges from the bathroom, freshly bathed and wrapped in a towel and takes the trousers, looks at them admiringly (“Aah, it is almost as if my own father took my measurements and got this tailored”) and puts them on. Thambu registers a protest of personal ownership and is silenced by a very worldly-wise sounding remark from Rangan: “If you wish to survive here, there is nothing like yours or mine.”

Thus Balachander drops his first hint as to what he is getting at. Well, one amongst the several things that he is getting at in this film.

No private ownership. This seems to be the ethos of these chronically unemployed (+ educated) young men. They share their misery and hunger. And share their prosperity, which often translates into scavenging not-so-spent cigarette-butts from the streets and smoking them by taking turns.

Around 20 minutes into the film, Rangan has already made acquaintance with Devi (portrayed by Sridevi), a young woman making her living as an actress in stage-plays and leading an equally tormented existence with a father who is a compulsive gambler. Then, in a scathing scene, Rangan revisits Devi asking for a “passport-sized photograph” which he thinks he misplaced when he barged into her flat the day before (he was in hot pursuit of Devi’s father who had fleeced him of Rs.15 on a false pretext). Devi says that she just swept the floor dumped all the garbage.

But Rangan certainly cannot afford to get another copy of his photograph. He rummages through the building’s garbage bin. When Devi, who looks on, finally tells him that it is not worth the effort, he waves her off saying, “Oh, I have barely searched. If one searches deeper into the bin, one might even find Socialism.”

There is it. The film, then, is meant to be a satire on Socialist India during the rule of Indira Gandhi. Of course, Balachander isn’t the only Tamil director to take on Mrs. Gandhi’s ill-bethought populism. Cho Ramaswamy’s 1971 satire-film Muhammad Bin Tughluq delivered a particularly bold diatribe at Indira. But Balachander explores the bleakness of a stagnant socialist economy through the lives of the frustrated, starving youth. Politicians, bureaucrats and even the police never enter the frames.

In fact, the only scene that comes anywhere near politics (as generally understood) is the one where the three roommates are shouting sarcasm-laden slogans hailing the Congress Party:

“Congress (I) zindabad!”

“Congress (X) zindabad!”

“Congress (Y) zindabad!”

“Congress (Z) zindabad!”

At this point, Rangan’s unnamed roommate cries, with a zestful and seemingly hopeful voice, “Elections!”. But he receives only silence from his comrades.

But socialism cannot bear the entire blame of the piteous straits where Rangan finds himself. In his repeated failures to find employment, Rangan has to confront not only a hobbling economy but also the urge to act against his conscience. And our Bharathiyar-quoting philosophy post-graduate has a particularly tricky conscience, to say the least.

When his roommates arrange [through their (morally dubious) ingenuity] for a set of good clothes for him to attend an interview, Rangan reluctantly agrees. But at the interview, he faces questions completely irrelevant to the job profile. He says exactly this to his interviewers, on their faces. In a matter of seconds, the heated exchange becomes almost acrimonious with Rangan tearing up his degree certificates in rage, shouting “Bureaucracy, down down! Nepotism, down down! Favouritism down down! Red-tapism down down!” While Rangan may have had a point when he predicts to his friends beforehand that the interview is a mere eyewash and that the favoured candidate has already been selected, he undoubtedly ruins his chances because of his indomitably sensitive conscience and extreme outspokenness, not to speak of his temper.

There are two instances shown to us where Rangan feels compelled to quit his job and the viewer, by now familiar with his temperament, sympathises with his decisions. In the first one, he has taken up a job as a tutor to a young lady who seems sexually attracted to him and even makes physical advances. Rangan is shown to ignore her till he can endure no more and finally strikes her. In another instance, much later into the film, Rangan has found a job as a driver to a Tamil couple who are unaware that he can understand their language. The husband, a contractor, sends his wife to offer sexual favours to a company executive to win the contract. While returning home in their car, the wife narrates her success with a sigh of relief (“Oh, what a beast of a man he was”). Rangan hits the brakes with a violent suddenness and storms out of the car.

One begins to wonder if there is any job at all that is worthy of this man. Is he giving an undue place in his life to virtues that must necessarily be forsaken in some measure to live and feed oneself? Devi is more pragmatic. She holds on to her job as a theatre actress even though her employer Pratap, who writes and directs the plays, is obsessively (and possessively) attracted to her. Rangan is indignant at Pratap’s inappropriate conduct but Devi simply says:

“This is all too common in this profession.”

“Then why such a profession?”, asks an outraged Rangan.

“Don’t we need to eat?”

And Rangan realises later that virtues cannot feed him. Yet, he refuses to eat the bread of immorality. By now practically destitute, he is shown drinking water from wayside taps, pulling a rotten apple out of the mud, and ultimately fainting on the road. However, towards the end of the film, Rangan has finally secured a job that he has no qualms against: that of a barber. His father coincidentally visits the same shop where he works and in a moving scene, he explains his decision to his father. This, at last, is a profession where does not have to trade his virtue.

Here is a man who chooses starvation over anything even remotely repugnant to his ideals. His unnamed friend, who in the meantime has married a rich woman and lives an idle life of luxury now scoffs at his former comrade. How is one to make sense of his self-created ordeal?

Is Balachander romanticising the moral misfit? In Huxley’s Brave New World, we come across the character of Helmholtz Watson, a high ranking employee of the World State who feels, despite his enviable material and social circumstances, that something is amiss. He finds the kind of life the World State is making him lead is inauthentic. He forsakes his life of status and affluence and gladly accepts exile on a remote island where he can at least retain his convictions. The point is, material affluence may not be the most important end in life for every person. But we must note that Helmholtz has already tasted success before forsaking everything. Rangan has nothing to give away, except his conscience and a sense of authenticity in existence.

Balachander does give the film a positive ending with Rangan suitably employed and settled. But by leading this postgraduate to the job of a barber, the director certainly is not permitting him any great measure of redemption, like the one we find in Tolstoy’s The Story of Ivan the Fool. But this redemption is not in conflict with Rangan’s belief that “what is important is not the job you are doing but how you do it.”

But if Rangan was not so resolute, could he have been forgiven for living like ‘other people’ who regularly make moral compromises in order to go about their lives and earn their living? Compromises for which they cannot be held personally responsible and for which the society and the state are collectively to be blamed?

Well, society would not have held him responsible for moral lapses that occur everyday by almost everyone, but he would have definitely done so. And in doing so, he embraced what Sartre called “the terrifying freedom of being the ultimate source of values.”

The socialist state of which Rangan is a member as well as a product, has a different notion of freedom. Philosophically, this is positive freedom: the freedom to fulfil one’s potentialities and develop one’s personality. The socialist state arrogates to itself the power to determine what constitutes such a development. One may say that Rangan has been able to earn an MA in philosophy due to the affordable public education system that is a cornerstone of socialism.

The road to positive freedom laid by Indian socialism is, however, a tortuous one. You get your degrees and qualifications but to actualise your potential, you are called upon by the sluggish, bureaucratic economy to commit or connive at moral turpitude. It was not an empty burst of youthful frustration when Rangan denounced bureaucracy, nepotism and favouritism in that ill-fated interview. He did so with the bitter realisation that the socialist society implicitly requires you to make moral compromises in order to fulfil yourself, be it greasing someone’s palm or putting on a smiling façade of approval on what is immoral or unreasonable. Rangan, on conforming to all this, will have his positive freedom - the freedom from unemployment, despair, poverty and hunger - except that he will not have it in consonance with his own cherished values.

That is why he rejects this form of freedom. He refuses to be free at the cost of being chained by unwritten norms of moral turpitude that he can never fully accept. To him, then, being free means obedience to the dictates of his own morally ambitious conscience. Rousseau’s words would have been comforting to our hero: “For the impulse of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.” The freedom Rangan embraces is moral freedom: the freedom from the vices he deplores in his fellow citizens.

Standing between him and moral freedom is poverty. Varumai.

Poverty and its most soul-twisting manifestation: hunger. “The omnipresent and the omnipotent” is how Rangan describes hunger, perhaps suggesting through his choice of epithets that hunger can command more souls than God. He utters these words when he has hit the very nadir of his struggle to obey his conscience and overrule the demands of appetite and comfort. He has sold his most treasured possessions, his books of Bharatiyar’s poetry, for a sum of Rs. 3 so that he may purchase provisions for a couple of days. Before he can get the provisions, however, Devi returns home to find a raddiwallah carrying away the volumes that have undoubtedly had the single most important part in sculpting the unyielding character that read their words and never ceased quoting them.

The title of film paints poverty in red (sivappu). There’s a scene in the film where this demonstrated in the most poignant way. Barani, a mute painter who befriends Rangan and Devi, invites Rangan for a cup of tea at his humble studio. He splashes red paint on a fresh white canvas and gestures to Rangan, “What does this represent?”

Blood. Violence. Revolution. Regeneration. Hunger. Barani shakes his head to all these guesses made by Rangan. Poverty? Barani nods in agreement. What Barani is trying to drive home is that poverty subsumes all the previous meanings suggested by Rangan for the colour red. It is interesting to see the man who sought to find socialism in the garbage bin making an impassioned reference to revolution (puratchchi).

Red, as Rangan notes, also denotes blood and by implication, rage. Rangan may be poor but he is clad in what is projected as a redeeming masculinity. When his unnamed roommate abducts an infant for a ransom, he beats him up and kicks him out of the house like any ‘hero’ would in a hackneyed Indian drama-film. When he comes chasing Devi’s father who has fleeced him of some money, he threatens to break open the latter’s door. His outbursts of scandalised fury at the world’s waywardness are all too common.

The film takes a decisive turn (for the worse) when Devi agrees to marry her boss Pratap, a theatre-director who has an unhealthy obsession with her, after extracting from him a promise of placing Rangan in a job. When Rangan comes to know about this arrangement, he is filled with disgust. It is after this that Rangan becomes truly destitute, wandering aimlessly, subsisting on tap-water until he finally faints on the road. One wonders if this turn for the worse - and it does appear self-imposed to me - is not because of losing the woman he has fallen in love with. In conventional phallogocentric cinema, the ‘loss’ of the female lead (because of abduction, possession by some demon etc.) is what impels the hero to act, to go after the ‘villain’ in the ultimate confrontation. We find something similar unfolding here, except that instead of taking on Pratap in a duel, Rangan leaves everything, including his own life to merciless hunger. Nevertheless, the use of the ‘loss of the lady’ trope as a triggering device indicates Devi’s instrumental status and cements our man’s status as the subject.

Yet, his act of ‘withdrawing’ from life instead of getting into action to win back his love tells us something about the masculinity of a man racked with poverty and despair in far more realistic terms than the films romanticising the ‘poor’ hero who keeps beating people up. When the only person whom he held with a sense of good-regard on account of the strength of her character virtually sells herself for his material advantage, moral despair, stronger than its material counterpart “quite vanquished him: then burst his mighty heart.”

Later, by which time Rangan has found a job as a barber, Devi finds him in a public park. She is now overcome by guilt at what she (and indeed, we) had thought of as an act of self-sacrifice to help Rangan out of his dire straits. She stretches out her hand to him, her lip quivering. Pratap, whom she has agreed to marry, watches from a distance, curses her under his breath, gets into his car and drives away without her. Rangan watches him go. Only then does he return to embrace Devi. Yes, given his temperament, Rangan has a reason to be disgusted at Devi’s action even if (and perhaps more so because) it was for his sake. Yet, he chooses to wait until the other man has cleared away. I was struck by this and consider it as his refusal to accept her so long as she has outwardly pledged her affections for another man, however false such an attachment may be.

Devi herself is never totally reconciled with Rangan’s extreme convictions. “If the door is small,” she observes, “one must bend to pass through. Being adamant in walking upright would do harm to none but oneself.” And yet, she is prepared to undertake the gravest of sacrifices to ease Rangan’s misery. Like a modern-day ‘Frederick the Wise’, her compassion stems from a profound regard for this difficult fellow and a belief that he, of all people, does not deserve to suffer. The worldly-wise Devi offers us a final hint for putting Rangan into our perspective: he is a man who cannot be emulated perfectly, except to our utmost detriment. This, alas, remains unquestionable even in an otherwise sympathetic tale. What Rangan ought to inspire in us is moral courage subject to moderation. Rangan dares us to defy the crooked passages of the world, to ask, “Why is the doorway so short?”

PS. The song. The song that seduced me into watching Varumayin Niram Sivappu. It is among the most charming song-sequences in Tamil cinema, and indeed the wider world of Indian cinema. I will not enter into a pointless description of what must delight the reader sans the mediation of my words. Listen/Watch it here.

The first was R.K. Narayan’s celebrated novel The Guide, first published in 1958. I had, while in 7th grade, picked up the book from the school library but somehow did not get past a few chapters. It so happened that a copy had been purchased by a family member and was lying neglected on the bookshelf, with an inviting, almost imploring appearance and so I did the needful. The novel, as would be known to most, is the story of the ascent, fall and arguable redemption of Raju, a tour guide who falls in love with a married woman, ruins her marriage and supports her rise to fame as a classical dancer, all the while attributing her success to his genius alone. But I would argue that it is the story of the woman, Rosie, as much as it is of Raju.

The second was Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth, a film based on an episode from the director’s own life and a courageous examination of a woman’s individual existence. It is the tale of Pooja, a orphaned woman married to a man who is unfaithful to her, and her struggle to believe in her ability to live and thrive without any support from her husband or any other man. I watched the film on the suggestion of my mother although her reason for suggesting the film may have been different from the reason why it has affected me.

The novel and the film deal with a range of different themes but I was struck by one that cut across both: the idea that a woman does not need a man to ‘complete’ her. Many of us many no longer raise eyebrows at this. But it does not mean the reverse of this idea has not left us. It very much permeates households across India. A woman’s choice to remain single is at worst denied and at best censured. In my opinion, it is not social censure but self doubt that is more detrimental in holding back a woman from making this choice. Neither the novel nor the film endorses a woman’s singlehood. Both of them only try to show that it is not only possible (for the woman) but even worthy of acceptance and indeed, admiration.

Nalini (aka Rosie) from The Guide earns our admiration when she is faced with the need for money to pay Raju’s bail bond and legal expenses, and to run the household. With a sudden gush of graceful self-reliance, she manages her dance programmes by herself with no assistance from, and much to the consternation of Raju:

Everything went on to prove that she could get on excellently without me…I knew I was growing jealous of her self-reliance. But I forgot for the moment that she was doing it all for my sake…I knew, looking at the way she as going about her business, that she would manage - whether I was inside the bars or outside, whether her husband approved of it or not. Neither Marco nor I had any place in her life, which had its own sustaining vitality and which she herself had underestimated all along (Narayan 182).

Raju’s words capture with remarkable honesty the male anxiety triggered by the independence of one’s wife, though Nalini was not Raju’s legally wedded wife. Raju comes believe that he is the sole cause behind Nalini’s meteoric rise. As he recounts later, ‘…there was no limit to my self-congratulations.’ He cannot help thinking that Nalini needs his presence to perform in every recital. Pride, in his case, gives way to possessiveness. Having ‘made’ her the celebrity she has become, he asserts that he “had a monopoly over her and nobody had anything to do with her” and adds that he acquired a sense of ownership over the woman whom he once passionately loved and even fought for. It is this sentiment that is wounded when he witnesses her self reliance.

A man, more generally, is plagued by insecurity upon watching his wife become a woman of independent means. To him, her independence may be a threat to his monopoly over her. She does not need him to sustain herself. She can always turn elsewhere, a possibility that haunts his fragile virility.

But to be fair to Raju, Nalini herself did believe that if it were not for him, she would not have risen to such heights. She feels indebted to Raju and he knows it. On reaching home after her recital,

…she would throw off the restraint and formality of the hours and give me a passionate hug with ‘Even if I have seven rebirths I won’t be able to repay my debt to you.’ I swelled with pride when I heard her and accepted it all as my literal due.

It is true that Raju is the one who motivates Rosie to resume dancing. Marco, her husband repulses and scoffs at her art and forbids her from talking about it in his presence. Raju is also the one who, with his consummate skill of talking his way through, arranges for Nalini’s first performance which makes her a celebrity overnight. But it does not follow that Rosie would have never become Nalini without Raju. It may seem as though Raju’s intrusion into Rosie’s life was essential: had he never met her and Marco, she would have remained caged by her husband. But the reader can very well see, right from the day the couple arrive at Malgudi, that Rosie and Marco have a strained relationship. She is clearly not in that state of marital bliss which she would not give up. And it is highly likely that the strain in their marriage is because of Marco’s stifling of her artistic spirit. Things would have eventually reached their logical conclusion, as Raju himself realises much later: “I am now disposed to think that even Marco could not have suppressed her permanently; sometime she was bound to break out and make her way.”

Therefore, despite her own initial negation of this fact, Raju was not essential for Rosie’s success. For the pains he did take, Rosie discharges her debt to the fullest. It was a false sense of dependence on her part, if it every existed. Necessity makes her prove Raju as well as herself wrong.

Arth extends this notion of a woman’s capacity for self-reliance to self-completeness. Pooja writes to Inder, who is living with his mistress, assuring him that she would accept him with all her heart if he ever chooses to return, adding that she does not know how she will live separated from him. Here, the (imagined) dependence is not for occupational success, but for existence itself.

When Inder divorces her, under pressure from his mistress, Pooja silently signs the papers consenting to the annulment of their marriage of seven years. Ironically, this happens on her birthday, a fact Inder forgets as he tells her the date to be put below her signature.

It is Raj, a young singer who falls in love with Pooja, who assures her that ‘the removal of the name Malhotra from Pooja Malhotra will not leave her incomplete in any way, for she is complete in herself.’ He goes on to say that it was on the day she signed the divorce papers that the real Pooja took birth. He does whatever is within his means to make Pooja’s broken life more bearable and to help her take charge of it, for instance, by getting her a job which helps her sustain herself without depending on her former husband.

But Pooja decides to go even further in becoming “complete in herself”, in a way that Raj himself did not anticipate. When he expresses his love to her, she refuses to marry him. He interprets her refusal as an unjust act of self-denial on her part. He views her as being trapped by the bitterness of her past. He thinks that her disappointment with Inder has led her to believe she cannot have a loving relationship with anyone else. While this does seem to be one of the reasons for her refusal, she later confides in Raj that what actually made her choose to remain single was the desire to “live only as Pooja, separating my name from all others.”

Raj, unlike Raju from Narayan’s novel, respects Pooja’s boundaries, the disappointment they cause him notwithstanding. What he wants above all is that Pooja find a sense of meaning (or arth, hence the title) in her life after divorce, whether or not she chooses to reciprocate his love. In striking contrast to Raju, Raj does not develop a self-laudatory attitude towards Pooja. His having given her support at a crucial time does not make him feel any claim over her, let alone any possessive kind of claim. This, to me, explains his acceptance and ultimately, his appreciation of Pooja’s decision.

Pooja is not ungrateful, as can be clearly understood from her expression of gratitude to Raj, not only for getting her a job but for urging her to rethink her direction in life. She promises to never forget him. But she tells him, with a gentle but striking candour, that marrying him would make her weak. I was reminded by this of an episode from the Champaran satyagraha led by M.K. Gandhi. C.F. Andrews, a British clergyman who had supported Gandhi’s work in South Africa offered to help him during the satyagraha in Bihar. Gandhi gently refused to accept his help. He later explained his refusal to his associates:

You think that in this unequal fight it would be helpful if we have an Englishman on our side. This shows the weakness of your heart. The cause is just and you must rely upon yourselves to win the battle.1

Pooja’s reason for remaining single is similar. Marriage, she must have thought, brings with itself a source of support which may quickly turn into habitual dependence. Pooja wishes to steer clear of such a life. She wants to be a demonstration to herself - and if possible, to the world - of her ability to live as a person complete in herself. This endeavour to live as Pooja sans a surname forms part of the meaning that Raj had asked her to seek in life. Another significant part of her life’s meaning, she hopes, would come from motherhood, albeit without marriage. Pooja adopts the daughter of her house-help who is arrested for killing her husband, a drunkard who had stolen the money she had painstakingly gathered to pay for her daughter’s admission into a decent school.

Both Pooja and Nalini are grateful to the men who entered their lives and gave a fresh lease to it. Both the men, Raju and Raj find the outcome of their efforts somewhat different from what they had expected, much more so in Raju’s case. Whereas Raju had never intended Rosie to become the self-reliant Nalini, Raj did express such a hope for Pooja.

The novel as well as the film question the essentialism that requires a woman to marry and have children, as though it were her fundamental purpose in life. Rosie takes charge over her existence by embracing the art that offers the highest meaning to her life: dance. And in this, Raju no doubt has some credit due to him. Pooja does the same by choosing to be a single mother to an adopted child, subverting the essentialism while retaining what is of value to her.

Before I made up my mind to this task, I was sceptical of the very need to translate this. It seemed as if I was translating the lyrics because of being enamoured of the vocals of Vani Jayaram. Gulzar’s words looked simple enough. But upon a closer reading, I found that it was not so. I suddenly had a lot of doubts as I dwelt upon the lines:

Websites offering the lyrics of the song differed over some words. I had to make choices here without any assurance of accuracy, for only Gulzar would know what exactly he wrote. The lines are terse. They invited the reader to discern the connections between them. The poem could not be translated without considerable additions, making some of these connections explicit. At other points, some additions were necessary to retain the mood and lyricism of the song, albeit very imperfectly. Thus, despite my best intentions, it may have become more of an interpretation-in-verse than a faithful translation. I have also avoided the refrain, except at the end, in my ‘translation’.

What on earth is a papihara? This question quickly turned into a vortex that sucked me into a taxonomic wild goose chase. The fact that papihara (or papiha) is a kind of cuckoo would have satisfied any serious lover of poetry. But sadly, it wasn’t enough for me.

What I found from my research is that the precise identity of the papiha remains unclear (which sounds very funny to me now). The search was not altogether unproductive. It did help me understand how the papiha is viewed in the Indian poetic tradition. I could narrow it down to two contenders: the Jacobin cuckoo (Clamator jacobinus) and the common hawk-cuckoo (Hierococcyx varius). The latter seems to have the greater claim to the name of papiha.

Browsing through a monograph on cuckoos by ornithologist Robert B. Payne (who cites the Indian bird expert Salim Ali’s work), I could gather that the common hawk cuckoo’s persistent call is interpreted (in Hindi) as resembling “pī kahān, pī kahān” (where is my love, where is my love)6. Standard Hindi dictionaries told me that papiha is so named precisely because of this interpretation of their call and that it is a popular bird among poets. Moreover, one of them also gave a physical description of the papiha as having yellow eyes, beak and legs, which matched the appearance of the common hawk-cuckoo.

A simple Google search gives a confident answer to our taxonomic trouble: papiha is the common hawk cuckoo. Why then did I bother myself with such a maddening pursuit of a crazy love bird (the common hawk cuckoo is, in fact, called the brain fever bird)? I did so because many dictionaries gave चातक (chataka) as a synonym of the papiha. This, I found, is a totally different species of cuckoos (called the Jacobin or the pied cuckoo) but it seems the two names have always been used synonymously in literature, without causing any harm to anyone except to detail-obsessed souls like myself who have nothing better to do with this क्षण-भर जीवन.

The papiha (or chataka, if you please) has a very interesting characterisation in poetry. It is said to drink only raindrops. It scorns the water from other sources like ponds, lakes, puddles etc. It waits patiently for the rain-clouds to arrive and when they do it is believed to open its beak with the wish that a raindrop may fall neatly into its mouth7. For this firm resolution, it has become a symbol of pride and self-respect in poetry8.

Here's how Kalidasa alludes to the bird in his famous poem Meghadutam, where the poet addresses a passing rain-cloud:

While a friendly breeze impels you gently as you loiter along, and here on your left the cātaka in its pride sings sweetly…9

Later in the poem, the poet again speaks of chatakas “skilled catching falling rain drops”10 and appeals to the cloud’s generosity in offering the chatakas “the water they crave”11.

Kalidasa and poets in general are interested in what the chataka (or papiha, if you would) can signify rather than what it is. Their concern is to weave the natural world with the human world. The papiha thus becomes a motif, a symbol of the patient, persistent yet proud lover. However, I would speculate that a persistent lover might have to shed some of their pride in the process of winning their beloved’s love. But do not take my word for it.

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I scarcely remember being goaded to write as a child. Words always seemed eager to flow out onto the paper and later, onto the Microsoft Word document. Not having enough to write was rarely my complaint. Neither was not being able to translate thoughts into words.

I do not remember when and how I ‘discovered’ that I liked to write, and that I could do it with fluency and relative ease. Some of my earliest memories of feeling a sense of accomplishment are in conjunction with writing. I was a miserable kid in kindergarten, a time when your attainments were assessed by how neatly you copied the letters of the alphabet from the blackboard. I have no memory of being appreciated for writing anything during those years. So, it must have been after I entered primary school.

Much of the writing-tasks we were asked to do in primary school (besides writing answers to review questions for lessons) was in the manner of creative writing: short compositions, not necessarily fictional. I remember one of my English teachers from primary school as being particularly keen to make us do such tasks. I believe it was from her that I began to receive recognition for what I wrote. Most of the time, it was in the form of a few passing words of praise. But it was apparently enough encouragement to keep me going.

Among my earliest non-academic written compositions were stories. I conceived of many, executed very few. Some of my friends were also complicit in these unmaterialised dreamings. I do not find it surprising that I soon grew disenchanted with the form of the short story (which is actually amusing when I recollect that I and a friend had once ‘dreamed up’ the plot of an entire novel). This disengagement was perhaps because of the time that needed to be invested in a short story for it to be worth reading. But I also gave up on my ideas too soon; concluded too quickly that they were too fanciful and that I was not equal to the occasion.

Of course, I had to write short stories as academic requirements even after I became personally estranged from them. So, I wrote one in my Class 10 Board Examination where the candidate was provided with a ‘hint’ of a most ridiculous kind and asked to expand it to a 250 word story - all amidst the stress of writing a 3-hour paper. Then in Class 11, I had to write a short story as an assignment in Mass Media Studies. This latter work is of some value to me. My assignment transgressed, to say the least, the word limit by I do not know how many times. The premise of the story was heavily based on Poe’s Ligeia, insofar as my protagonist was an upper-class Bengali (why?) opium-addict who lived under the delusion that his deceased English wife was still alive. Perhaps I failed to create the desired mood and atmosphere in the story. It must have been read by not more than 4 persons. I suspect that my teacher herself skipped those pages of my exercise book. I cannot complain but do wonder how it was graded.

To return, as I grew more distant from short stories, I found a more suitable form in poetry. My earliest compositions, the content of which I have more or less forgotten, were written under the fervent belief that a poem must have a rhyme scheme. Free verse had not infected me back then. Later, I wrote exclusively in free verse. The poems I wrote between my 4th and 9th grades were invariably contemplative rather than descriptive. It was the presumptuous amateur philosopher and not the nature-lover that spoke through my poems.

One poem whose essence I still happen to remember was written, I believe, when I was in fourth grade. The circumstances leading to it were somewhat like this: I had heard an old Tamil song which my father was listening to. I have not watched the film nor do I know the context in which this song occurs, but a line from the lyrics caught my attention and made me thoughtful: “Man beheld the bird and invented the airplane”. To my nine-year old mind, this felt like a critical insight. And my wonder found its expression in a poem which revolved, I remember vaguely, around man’s relationship with his creation. I then showed the poem to a classmate who concluded that it was lifted off the web.

Almost all the ‘prose’ I wrote in secondary school must have been in form of assignments and exercises. I must say I enjoyed writing answers to those exercises in literature, be it English or Hindi. English literature remained a subject of study till I passed out of grade 12. Mass Media Studies, a course I took in my last two years at school, also gave opportunities to write, often in ways not afforded by other subjects. It was this writing in an academic context that shaped my style and ability, for I scarcely ever found time to write prose outside academics, a fact I now regret.

I have traced, I think, the trajectory of writing during my childhood and school-years. But it does not explain why I was drawn to writing in the first place. I am the sort of person who is drawn to that which I can do well. So, in trying to explain my predilection towards writing, I must also attempt to explain (and I say this at the risk of sounding vain) the faculty of written expression which I have acquired. Part of the explanation lies, I believe, in being cultivated through reading. I might have to digress here.

I must have taken to reading at an early age. Not that I became an adept at the task very early. Indeed, I remain a slow reader till date. More accurately, I was introduced rather early to the world of books. For this I have my parents to thank. From my father I received a veritable trove of old, nearly brittle copies of Amar Chitra Katha, and a regular stream of second hand books he bought from raddiwallahs at various places. Of course, I did get fresh copies now and then (I used to be a regular reader of Anant Pai’s other publication, Tinkle) but the majority of my books back then were second hand volumes, something that is true of today as well. My mother was the one who read those old ACKs to me, when I was kindergarten. I remember lying on the bed every afternoon for the post-school siesta when she would ask me to bring an ACK comic, and would read it me and explain the story in my mother tongue.

When I began reading on my own, these comics, needless to say, were my among my primary resources. Then, there were magazines, Tinkle and Gokulam (a South Indian English publication). I do not know the present status of these magazines. I must have read them till I was about 10 or 11 years old.

There was, of course, the school library. I remember borrowing quite a few abridged versions of English classics. The Potter books, needless to say, were devoured and digested by the time I finished 7th grade. Dan Brown came along around the same time and all of his novels were consumed (because he is yet to write a sequel to Origin). Ruskin Bond and RK Narayan remained a homely, reassuring presence. I still keep returning to the sole copy of Bond’s Rusty stories I own and I cannot get enough of him. Towards the last couple of years at school, I could hardly ever finish reading the books I borrowed.

My early introduction to reading seems to form a part of the explanation I have ventured to give. I have wondered if I have, at least in some measure, inherited my literary sensibilities and the inclination to write. My paternal grandfather is the only person from my family whom I know to possess literary tendencies (and ambitions). I know not if he had them early in life or if it was a later development. I happen to share quite a few of my personal traits (many of them undesirable, I’m afraid) with my grandfather and like to think if the ability to write is also among them.

What interest me more than the causes of my literary predilection is the development of my writing style. I have very little of my past writing at my disposal right now and must rely largely on my memory.

I should begin by asking myself: what was it that made my writing stand out? I believe a consistent pattern in my writing right since the early years of school was a keenness to incorporate new words and phrases. The school system encourages this habit. Right from our English teachers to the school librarian, the advice given was the same: read, expand your vocabulary and use it in your writing. I have no qualms against expanding one’s fund of words. What bothers me is the inadequate attention paid to other aspects of style, which I shall discuss presently.

My eagerness to embellish my writing was not, however, limited to the use of new words. I did show some sensitivity to literary elegance understood more broadly. I could distinguish a mundane sentence from an elegant one. By the time I was in 7th grade, I daresay that I had picked up the rudiments of rhetorical writing. There was an attempt to argue, to develop an idea, to be discursive rather than descriptive, although I was probably not conscious of these features.

When I was in 8th grade, this desire for elegance took a rather ugly shape. I consider it undesirable in retrospect, for back then I prized this aspect of my writing. In my zeal to write in a sophisticated style, I ended up writing in convoluted, painfully long sentences. I wrote under the mistaken impression that elegance demanded such long-windedness (I am not saying that my writing today has completely recovered from that affliction but I do think it is much better.) It seems the root of the problem was vanity, a pompousness. Writing in ‘elegant’ sentences using unheard-of words, was my way of imposing my superiority over my peers, who clearly noticed my odious habit and even told me about it.

I must have proceeded with this repulsive attitude right until I reached 11th grade. This is when I came to appreciate the importance of other aspects of writing style. I saw that elegant language was more than high-sounding words. I began to prioritise the organisation of ideas over vocabulary in what I wrote. Lucidity and a logical flow of thought came to matter more to me. A year later, in 12th grade, I had to opportunity to edit the writing of some of my junior peers. I saw, to my amusement as well as disappointment, that even the brilliant ones among them had succumbed to the same folly as I had. In their zeal to use new words they often forgot to determine their suitability to the context, thus making their use superfluous. I suspect myself to have made similar errors when I was of their age.

There is one feature of my writing which survives to this day and I have never regretted it. It is the slight archaic tinge in my prose. Calling it a formalistic bend might be more accurate (albeit less magnanimous to myself). Consequently, my sentences still tend to be a little longer than what is the norm in today’s English. But now I make a conscious attempt to simplify them wherever possible. I do keep using less-used words but this by itself, I earnestly believe, cannot be a fault. As I have said, a rich fund of words is not at all a bad thing to possess so long as it is employed with due attention to context.

As I come closer to the style that is current in my writing, the harder it is for me to characterise it. When I compare my today’s writing with what I wrote, say two years ago, I cannot discern much of a difference. I daresay there may have been an ever-so-slight improvement in grammatical accuracy but even this I cannot say with certainty. I now edit my sentences more than I used to. The method of my research has certainly become more systematic but that is perhaps beside the point. Has my writing become more engaging to the reader? Alas, I have no way of finding out except by asking someone who has read what I wrote while in 12th grade and has also read my recent writing. Some reader who has been patient enough to be with me so far might turn out to be someone qualified to help me out here.

I think the reason why there seems to have been very little change is because most of my writing in the past 3 years or so has been of an academic (and hence most formal) in nature. By its very nature, formal writing follows a predictable style and tone. One cannot innovate much. Had I consistently composed prose of a more literary character, I might have been able to trace more changes. And while I can compare my poems from the past 3 years, they would not help me understand changes in my prose writing.

Something I struggle with these days is humour. It seems to have deserted me completely. I feel I was better at it in school. I do drop some humour in my writing, but I have hardly had any opportunities, since joining college, to write semi-formal pieces where humour could be safely used. Besides, I am finding that my sense of humour is too faint for my generation. Nor does it tickle them in the way they want to be. I know precious little about today’s pop culture. I do not understand most of the jokes my peers make, and they don’t seem to understand the my humour either. The humour that may still be found in my writing would therefore be of an intellectual sort. Much like inside-jokes among people who know the subject at hand. You know, the kind of humour that foreign affairs experts use.

The old-fashioned style that persists in my writing is also a major part of my self-identity. I am less likely to use “don’t”; I prefer “do not”, unless I am texting someone. I avoid slang as a rule but it is also true that I do not know much slang in the first place. Pop culture references, as I have said, are sparse at best. These features largely correspond to my personal traits. I am, by nature, sombre and grave-looking. I put on airs of self-importance (‘highbrow’ and ‘snooty pants’ are the monikers I fondly remember drawing from my friends in school). My manner is, in general, magisterial. My interests and preferences largely do not overlap with those of my peers. And my writing too carries a tone of self-assurance. It conjures the image of a philosopher talking down to the world. Often, it is related to interests not shared by others.

But writing as such is an integral part of my identity, not merely the old-fashioned aspect of it. I have viewed and introduced myself as a writer even as a child. Besides identity, it has also been a source of self-worth. At one point, I felt as I had nothing for to value myself except my writing skills. Later, my self-worth broadened but it was only recently that a friend thoughtfully pointed out that basing self worth on abilities may not be very humane to oneself, but that is fodder for another blog post. But I do think that I depend too much on my ability to write. I am limiting myself. And, perhaps, I have become complacent about my writing. So many of my peers write in a style that is much less constrained, clearer and witty than mine. Being old-fashioned might appeal to my personal tastes, but I cannot afford to write from an ivory tower and say, “Look upon my Works, ye GenZ and despair (in trying to read me)!”