Looking through Stolen Glasses: another self-portrait (updated)
Believe me, I am also toooo jobless at present; my colleagues will vehemently second that and apart from everything, joblessness is a state of existence, the remnant of early youth which one needs to keep alive persistently…
Okay, this is a post formally pinched from the latest tagged-posts by two vampiric ‘weird sisters’ Tani and Sohini, homo sapiens of the graceful and gorgeous kind whom you are bound to fall in love with; but always keep safe distance (like me) because they are contagious and counter-predictable! So don’t cling to them. If you do – in spite of being warned of their mood-swings – you will be condemned to be a perpetual Hutch/Vodafone doggie scuttling to-and-fro to her highness’ swings (my swings, incidentally, are equally damaging to the faithfuls but lesser clingable). Now, let me populate the form!
Life 10 years ago:
1997. Late night in the huge city, a confused young man enters the city perched in a truckload of furniture. Within half-an-hour he discovers himself – along with his family – stranded under a halogen light with everything which constitute his home sans the roof and the walls. It was a unlikely silent state of the city, dogs were just curious. After half-an-hour, an irascible landlord (along with a very ill-mannered Alsatian) opens the door of a dingy ground-floor. Considered the place worse than the pavement, but that image haunts me still: the family in the streets, recalling numerous similar images in the history of Bengal post-1947.
But those refugees were part of a community, bonded with all brothers-and-sisters sharing a common predicament. Mine was a different situation. My family was sticking out like a remnant of, excreta of history to produce that image. A family headed by a well-placed executive in a gigantic iron-and-steel plant in a township marked with the moment of its birth, the socialist-nationalist euphoria of 1950s India, suddenly in the 1990s is ‘jobless’, the father and the Eng Lit postgraduate both. Have just distress-sold a plushy apartment elsewhere. The family is in superbly crafted crisis, the younger brother is afflicted with a seemingly incurable mental ailment. Saved money is being exterminated interminably. The sudden status of being a refugee hurts the elite ego born out of that steel-township. Life 10 years ago, a contingency I will bear forever in my heart. And will carry the insistent tendency to identify with the losers of a roof above and security enveloping…the way an irreparable drug-addict among my students now is one of my favourites.
Life 5 years ago:
Desperately need a job. Decided to trash a Eng Lit academic career few years ago. Decided to continue a luxury, studying and campus-life. Sucked into the vortex of an academic discipline which I am in love with. But chances of being employed is bleak, hardly there are avenues in Film Studies in this country. A battle of nerves ensue. Initial hurdles won. Managed a Gold Medal, I seem to be ‘promising’ to Gods concerned, am offered to teach on part-time basis. And I do something counter-pragmatic: falling in love with a current student. I am warned, day in and day out. Each night, I visit the ground-floor of a hurriedly erected narrow apartment-like contraption. I find people sleeping. People who are entirely dependent on my earning for sustenance.
But still I am in love. Painted the campus redder than the red-faced authorities. Kissed when we were leaving it furlongs away the lesser crowded gates each evening. There were guards and I knew that if I am caught for ‘morally inappropriate acts’ my future will be screwed up. Life was nervously beautiful 5 years ago.
Life Tomorrow:
Tomorrow never dies…life is…tomorrow
5 Snacks I enjoy:
Confusions about me in others’ lips; anything in tangy blue; a well-twirled syllable rolling in my tongue but nobody hearing it; a hearty laugh to a joke confounding the one who uttered it that was it really so funny?; watchable infants of all species.
5 Locations I would like to run away to:
To you! To You! to you! To you! (whoareyou, BTW?)
And condemned to a Library inundated with everything and a single computer with a huge hard disk and broadband connection and no choice of optional actions but reading and writing to faces I love. A single balcony overseeing a huge lake with teeming water-life, flora and fauna, beneath me…
5 Bad Habits I have:
Inability to write an administrative letter in grammatically and semantically correct officialese; forgetting that my body and attire needs care; investing more on the ‘how-to’s’ than the job proper; ringing her back though knowing that it will lead to a worse fights and stinging tears; abandoning the project to project an ‘correct’ image to my students right on the moment when I start interacting…
5 Things I like doing:
Teaching; oh yes! The endless, interminable speech about things I love and hate from a pedestal; writing, specially for the feminine eyes (I confess, I am calligraphically promiscuous); reading, everything penned by women; installing-uninstalling; confusing people about my sexual what-abouts…
5 Things I will never wear:
Bleached and coloured hair; haughty and confident air; a strange ethnic textile called designer-ethnic-panjabees where floral-crippers protrude suddenly under the armpit and traverse the belly spouting inane bengali verses and threatening to girdle the ass and declaiming that here is a ‘cultured’ pot-bellied bengali male probably afflicted with performance anxieties; rings with redeeming diamonds; Lux Cozy undergarments above or under trousers.
5 Biggest Joys at this Moment:
That I am writing; that I love teaching even the most inane students; that I don’t know the future therefore it might be brighter; that my fellow-bloggers gift me with such wonderful passages when I don’t expect them; that I have decided not to indulge in pros-and-cons procrastination about anything personal (does that mean freedom?); that I have met someone who is fading in slowly like a sunlight through amber curtains falling in closed dawn-eyelids…
5 Things I Don’t like:
A strange new India where communalism and consumerism fornicates and state-power masturbates; Aishwarya Rai (in moving images); Television; men of most sorts (particularly middle-aged or young-middle-aged); women who describe themselves as ‘attractive’ in their Orkut profiles.
Something to achieve next year (2009?):
A doctoral thesis probably [those who are chuckling…that’s rude!] and real novels being written in this blog [I cease writing about myself].
Something impacted me last year:
That political matters – like the Rizwanur Rehman episode and Nandigram – provokes a pain which has something strangely psychic within it, when I start articulating about these issues.
What I will miss about 2007:
The strange amalgamation of joy of being free and the trauma of discovering that I am not anchored; in other words, the situation when I can’t decide whether I will be a bird or a tree.
5 Things I wanna do before I die:
Arrive at the known answers of life’s questions; logically achieving the state of “I don’t really matter, I might have some value”; finish reading all those pending books (I will procure one even in my dying hour); really mastering that Guitar which I have abandoned long ago; kiss those unfamiliar lips of the face named ‘peace of mind’…
***
About the weird sisters
Well, did something mischievous yesterday and am tickled pink! Thought of reporting it here.
Think of writing the same testimonial to two different girls in Orkut. Same and sweet! Thankfully they took it in their stride (why? it was seconded by one of them when I told them I will do it; and there is a very complicated story why I decided to do so…so let’s keep it aside). Incidentally, they are the Weird Vampiric Sisters from whom I pinched the above tagged-post.
But I have a special place in my heart for them. So it was a kind of tribute, sincere to both of them. Probably some words apply to someone particular and not the other, but I wished to keep it formally like that. And they call themselves ‘twin sisters’, ‘mirror images’ and in true Bollywood filmy style one didn’t knew that the other was in vicinity. It feels good that they actually came across each other – second time unknowingly – when they were viewing the boy inside me. That post features their comments when they started talking again, not knowing that they had previously came across. Then, a particularly wonderful friendship evolved between them which is a joy to be a witness to. Now, they started discovering similarities between them and I was regularly reading their posts and knowing that it is.
Sohini is a student of mine. Incidentally, in a classic student-teacher exchange she maintains this dignity of her, she never spoke to me much (that would have been a bit painful for my neck, ’cause she is gorgeously tall and I am gorgeously short! Incidentally, she has kind of daddy in a boy who is short too and who…sometimes I think…is kinda brother of mine….long-lost). I was in a pseudonymn in orkut then. Discovered a member in a particular community page which was, well – dedicated to me, and I was not being unable to recognise who she is. I only remember a distinctive signature in her words and images. Then I strolled to her blog and her was the first one to initiate this firm impression of mine that women are better poets than men (something only blogging throws to sharp relief in the history of writing) only to be followed by numerous wonderful writers. This quiet girl has a striking cyber-persona: forthright, haughty shielding a bit of nervousness, zealously individualistic and one of those many cerebral women in my part of the globe and time who is in pains to maintain her unintrusive individuality in a society which is still patriarchal and you expect everything from a woman a priori. What I particularly was learning from of her writings was a necessarily sketchy, incomplete quality. You never feel that you have read her totally, she totally refuses to communicate in totality. And if you are the right kind of reader, you learn to be patient; if you are a right kind of viewer, you know the rest is conveyed through the images she collects from the net. And those images: I noticed how such often surreal images are something these new women are so fond of, liberating a magic, sexuality and yes, individuality which will trouble men. I know what triggers, a enticing drive to know her more and thus be in a position to control. And these women, like snakes in the winter, sheds skins so often! Those who expects consistency from them, will be irritated. Those who learn to enjoy unexpected changes, will find new delights.
Tani just strolled into my blog and would she mind if I speak less about her? ‘Cause then I need to repeat exactly the last paragraph without the campus details! Told you, they were mirror-images! We met particularly when both of us were in crisis and we tried to help each other at long-distance, to the extent habitations on different half of the globe allow. Well, those days had been treasured. Had to helplessly watch that she is grinding on her rather lonely path to achieve something personal and it was difficult. It was difficult for me to posit myself too: what should I do? Encourage her dreams? Or dissuade her to pragmatism? I only knew that here is a girl who is gritty enough even if her friends are not sure; she doesn’t need help. I only was a bit alarmed at her enormous mood-swings. But again, this friendship, her writings taught me a lot and to others, who do not know her, her writings might turn opaque. Well, I was lucky to know the context and it was particularly rewarding to learn particular aspects of human mind and certain aspects of mine in the process.
I haven’t talked with either of these girls in person and I never feel that it is a lack to be filled up immediately. That drive to fill up – incidentally – is absolutely male and in this blog, I am erasing and rewriting masculinity which I had enough of. This is just one of those liberating aspects of our cyber-life.
I will not caption which one is Tani or Sohini; won’t that be self-defeating for the post? The testimonial which I wrote to them sisters:
She is…how can I name someone who changes her name so often? Isn’t naming her self-defeating? She is someone who has unwittingly taught me to be humble and patient: that if you really need to admire someone truly keep a bit of distance. You don’t barge in, claim that you are an admirer and demand recognition. You stay at a distance and she might give you wonderful gifts; gifts of words and images, if you can know where to find them from her. It is a perfect gift because it is not meant for you, like flowers bloom for nobody. There might be wonderful flowers under the sun blooming for no human eyes, but for itself. She is such a flower.
There is such a peaceful bliss in letting some shapes be what they are and watching them. Watch it – it is like a snowflake which will crumple if you hold them – just watch. It will change shapes wonderfully, take unexpected forms and if you let them be what they are, you will be enrichened with a kaleidoscope. ‘Cause you will witness shapes you have never predicted; it doesn’t matter if no one watches them. A snowflake dances for nobody. She is such a snowflake.
If you let time evolve its rhythm between a beauty and its beholder, you never know, she might settle within herself after the dance like a peace-green pond beside which you might arrive oneday. You might speak out all your pent-up words to the pond and leave with this assurance that all your words will remain there, untouched, in the bed of the pond. There is such a blissful peace in keeping your words protected to the deepest pond. Assuring, even if you never speak out to her ’cause you know a place is there. She is such a pond.
When you watch a woman in love, blossoming like she does, never ask where do you fit in, figure in within the schema. Never compare yourself with the figure she is so enamoured to. A woman in love is not a meter of your ego. Just smile that another graceful image is born under the rainmoon, above the grassearth and be assured that if you are beautiful too, you might also give birth to another such beautiful image in this earth. That makes two beautiful images. The world becomes richer.
All claims of friendship becomes stained and tainted if you arrive with a contract. If you treat words of endearment like investments, you demand before you start to give. If you can give something you don’t have to someone who never wanted it you might feel richer after the exchange of that something and waiting for nothing. Its goodwill, its pure best wishes, its a gesture that you care because you don’t trespass in the name of being a meaningful presence. A pure gesture out of nothing and not demanding a promise is a piece of beauty, like this sudden ode
She is a glorious marvelous creature out there; let her be what she is…otherwise you will be disturbing me!
Who knows! Might be…she is me!
***
I was talking with someone and told her that her words remind me of something I have heard or felt before. “Deja vu“, I told her.
“How many times did you feel like this before?”, she asked. With how many woman: probably this was implied.
Skirted away the answer. Then later I pondered. Got a bit angry, I never take any woman for a ride, that’s my fatal flaw. Probably I have misunderstood her words; I needed clarification. Sent her a text message: “Do you think I flirt with women? That it is a template of same words I throw to them?”
She replied: “You are like the prince of Murasaki Shikibu’s Tales of Genji who flirted with women rather involuntarily because he felt that women were sparkling poetry”.
Thanks.
Therefore I am
