A Day in the Life

play this and read; no videos, only the song

May 29: Special thanks to Mubarak Ali for his post and the images above

Woke up, got out of bed
dragged a comb across my head
found my way downstairs and drank a cup
and looking up I noticed I was late

Startled out of my sleep. Or it might be the other way round. I might have been taken aback that I am still sleeping because the clock, which looks like a smiley, says that it is 10 minutes past 10 am: within an hour I must be lecturing about the impressionist influences in Jean Renoir’s Une Partie de Campagne to people who will still be clueless and will look dazed and amused simultaneously. I have overslept because I saw the 40 minutes film once again last night and I was in tears when Sylvia Bataille turned towards me in that big close-up. I read about the film and felt that cinema was once magic and ubiquitous now, that cinema is dead. I recall I said to those dazed young people during their initiation, “for the next two years we will be living with ghosts, we will see dead men and women, ’cause 80% of the people who will surface in this small screen are dead by now…” Cinema, condemned in present continuous tense, is dead.
I can recall that when I was slowly becoming poisoned by sleep, I was writing another Love’s Ragpicker blog entry about that kiss forcibly planted on Sylvia Bataille’s lips. I have lost it. I have lost the post. I discovered that my body is aching, I can feel – in a way which is nothing but uncanny – all those electric signals in my nerve’s traffic, all those fluids percolating in my body as pain. I can feel things seeping in and out like memories and dreams. Love, condemned to die, is in present continuous tense. I was dreaming you when I was shocked to awakening. I was dreaming that you, alone in your balconey facing the streets, were mumbling, explaining what went wrong between us to the morning-air. Probably you are speaking to me, but you wouldn’t have faced me even if I stood by your side. You wouldn’t have turned towards me like Sylvia in that close-up. You looked pale and sick.
A cup of coffee arrived me and I reached for a cigarrette. In the loo I told myself: “She is better than you imagine her to be. She is fine. She is sadder than your worst fears.” Can recall last evening, when I alighted in that engined three-wheeler which we Indians call an ‘auto(rickshaw)’ there was a couple whom I thought to be you and another man because they resembled us, my arms framing your shoulders like an half of a parenthesis months ago. She is sadder than my worst fears. But she is okay, skies won’t crash if I retire from someone’s life.

Found my coat and grabbed my hat
made the bus in seconds flat
found my way upstairs and had a smoke
and somebody spoke and i went into a dream

Then a panic struck me hard. I am not important, but the office is. Everything I write about, think about, muse about is less important than what others in the office speak about. My lectures are way less important than my to-do lists, my quota of administrative jobs. The panic struck me and I mutated into my trembling being and performed my hastes. I have this irresistible drive towards the inconsequential mistaken as the ponderous. I haven’t grown up. I must reach the office because a couple of my colleagues might echo me too, how we refuse to grow, how we fail to be serious hopeless academicians and each day our stiff-upper lipped seniors frown at our frivolousness. But Lord! I feel guilty. I feel guilty about everything that is me.
I went into a reverie when I started my short journey to the university. Me static, my body moving. I am shocked out of my day-dreams now and then; these days my paranoia has got something new to cling upon: the Third-World traffic. Nothing moves in straight lines, nothing moves predictably in the streets, gears changes at a much greater rate than any First-World road, people miss being run down for inches and seconds. I recall my comment in the classroom (well, a teacher is in a position to utter profundities for 50-100 minutes each weekday) that death in a road accident is the most absurd or logical one: it is a utterly meaningless one without epic glory, it is an obvious outcome of modernity, it is logically perfect because two objects moving at a variable rate and in different vectors meet each other. I contradict myself to assurance: it is not happening every day, I have witnessed no one being run over in my life on the streets, third-world drivers are more skillful than their developed counterparts. But I recall one of my student saying something; Joppan said: “I will never cross streets with you again. You know the way you cross the streets…you’re scary!”
The closer the university comes I feel happier. A song floats into my head, or a sequence of a noir that was never shot, or a conversation I will never have. The campus is like a sanctuary. Banners and posters of the coming student-elections flutter and a smile beams in my face. These words and graffities are not connected to the real-politic, this sort of politics doesn’t influence the greater politic only reflects a bit. I watch boys and girls of…Generation Y? They look different and so unsure about their looks. I know the sartoriality and hair-styles will change overnight to be changed by the next day. But they are young and it feels good. As I was walking down the corridor of the 2nd floor I glimpsed a couple kissing fast in the stairs. I smiled again. The kiss: Sylvia Bataille and memories of evenings half-and-a-bit-more-of-a-decade back. Though somebody spoke and I went into a dream.

I saw a film today oh boy
the English Army had just won the war
a crowd of people turned away
but I just had to look
having read the book
i’d love to turn you on

I had to speak because I have seen the film and read the book. My language is floundering because I am not exactly feeling well. I am groping for words and only a Bengali feels bad if he can’t speak English like a book. I start explaining Impressionism. I show Papa Renoir’s paintings. I tell them that they the impressionists didn’t paint objects, but light. I tried to argue how it made them, though considered less intelligent and naïve than the Cubists or Surrealists, essentially modern, because painting ‘light’ means painting the fleeting, the fugitive, the contingent. It is hard to convince, the paintings look pretty and students always associate modernism with the not-so-pretty. It is easier to demonstrate that they treated all textures equally: either the skin or the sky or the grasses, because everything boils down to one thing to them: light. It is difficult to communicate that the brush strokes beyond the outlines, where the skin melts into the sky, the hair in the foliage, are radical, because after centuries of steadfast and sure perspectival paintings vision is melting and nothing would remain what it seems to be now.

But I seem to communicate for a moment that Impressionism is bound to die out because photography does it literally: capture the ephemereal impressions of light. But my students are also puzzled because they thought photography seems to be the descendant of the previous era, of perspectival painting. I tell them that Hollywood has taught us to think likewise, because it emulated the perspectival oil. The boys and the girls seem to be really confused when I say that not still photography, but moving images are the real descendant of Impressionism: because it captures light in motion, the fleeting light in flux. During my lectures my words seem to be split: there are words which address them and there are also words which they are just privy too, since I am talking with myself.

I tried to turn them on. I try my best to. These are the only minutes of my day when I am really me. The rest is a compromise called life. I can feel it: becoming myself as I go on speaking. I feel vulnerable. I am speaking aloud what I feel, what I love and hate; it is a bit like watching Hamlet during his monologues, him revealing his secrets. I feel that I am also giving myself away and I catch a feminine eye, keenly watching me. Is she hearing my speech or is she viewing me, speech embodied? I cease to be reflexive when I start to be so (it is so easy to throw me off my tracks, just the gaze…). Because I should live my moment, when I speak of these things I am the only me. And I was speaking about love. How love in this masterpiece lasts for minutes only to linger for a lifetime. It is fleeting like light. Love here is basic like pure lust, just a body melting in a body like wet paint mingling with wet paint in a Degas portrayal of a dancing diva. When I speak in the classroom, certain sentences which are so autobiographical winks and smiles at me. I overstay because I like living in my terms.

I read the news today oh boy
four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire
and though the holes were rather small
they had to count them all
now they know how many holes it takes
to fill the Albert Hall
I’d love to turn you on.

The rest is just death of the day. Light fades out slowly. I have stopped feeling great after a satisfying lecture. Either take it this way: one should not feel so because it is your job to do so, you cannot deliver something lesser; or this way I consider it: what is a day worth of if I give something lesser? I am doing it for myself. Teachers are performers, scores of eyes look at them when they – as I said – embody speech. The eyes cannot be easily fooled, whatever the power-orientation is between the man who speaks and the eyes which hear. They can easily discern insincere or exhibitionist speeches. You feel vulnerable and powerful like a star. And once you feel confident as a performer you die as a star because you cannot better yourself the next day. I feel bitter when I abandon my speech and start living outside the classroom. I start feeling – as a friend quipped about my latest tagline – pissed off.
Civil society chatter in Bengal these days boil down to politics sans a political theory now and then. They talk about small holes which are never properly counted: bullet holes in unfed bodies. A year has passed since the police opened fire at village-folks because they were also pissed off. They were angry because powerful people threatened to usurp their lands to build a chemical hub or automobile factory or something less gratuitous. How many people died? Enough to fill up the Writer’s Building? I have stopped loving to piss you off dear readers.
As I sink into humiliation because of my administrative inefficiencies I recall you. I recall the night before you said quits. I was shouting you down over the phone. Because I was hurt, you were decisively taking a position against me regarding mine against the police atrocities. Yes, a couple in love broke down because they were fighting over a political issue. I know, I know it was just an excuse to fight upon something, we seldom discussed politics; I was hurt not because you were taking a reactionary stance, I know you are not so; I was hurt because you have decided to oppose everything I stand for, you have assumed my negation. I knew through the guise of politics we were talking about ourselves. I was counting my holes and were you loving to turn me on?
I was troubled when someone again brought the issue of bullets and holes and body-and-hole counts. Someone said that my blog is the most blatant instance of narcissism: I have merely used politics months ago to draw attention to my self-centered writings. I hate discussing my blog in my office. As the sun climbed down the sky I was worried that my phone might ring and I am not in a position to speak. You might phone me and ask me if I am enjoying the separation. She might phone me and ask why am I not letting her love me since I did let you throughout these years and you didn’t deserve it and she deserves it. “Why are you not allowing me/did you not allow me to take care of you?” both of you might ask and believe me, though I try to hide it from my colleagues, my students and all those beautiful eyes, I feel like screaming into most insecure tears under the sky that I don’t know, I never had the answers, I never will answer even if I come across the truth of that question. It only hurts that both of you are crying bitter in this hazy afternoon and Sylvia Bataille turned her tear-drenched face towards me last night.

I heard the news today oh boy
about a lucky man who made the grade
and though the news was rather sad
well I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph
he blew his mind out in a car
he didn’t notice that the lights had changed
a crowd of people stood and stared
they’d seen his face before
nobody was really sure
if he was from the house of lords

I’d love to turn you on…

Image Courtesy/the animated gif of Edvard Munk’s Scream: http://i207.photobucket.com/albums/bb234/vurdlak8/scream.gif

120th post and Top 20 Bloggers

Related post:
Women in Love…writing

120th post, am not counting few which I have already deleted. 120 is quite a number for me, since I think I have turned reticent these days. In my early blogging months, I often used to post in a category named Tributes, where I used to quote my favorite posts which made my day each morning when I opened my feedreader. The category bulges as the fattest in this blog with 41 posts excluding this. Someone cynic enough said it is a clever ploy of mine: quoting and linking to someone and thus channelling traffic towards my blog; but cynicism notwithstanding, I meant it. I still cherish those posts featuring others’ writings. Those are the things which I re-read, I hardly read my own writings. Therefore I list my top 20 favorite bloggers and please forgive my parochialism: the first part entirely comprises of Bengali Bloggers, Blongs! as I call them. Incidentally, except the topmost in both of the list, no gradation is attempted.

Melancholy is a feature (someone says a fetish) of my blog. Strangely, it percolates in this post too! This post will speak about few blogs either gone or abandoned. It saddens when a blog goes away or when someone abandons a blog to nowhere…

The Home…

 

• Mesdi’s Saturday Posts

  
  When I click the link above, I land nowhere and I am worried. Because this is the most remarkable blog maintained by a Bengali that I have ever encountered. Mesdi is a senior citizen who gracefully turned into a netizen and started writing her memoirs in a warm and intimate way. She was speaking about her childhood spent in a town situated in Northern India with a tell-tale name: MacRobert Gunj. She was writing about the pre-independence era, about World War II, Kanpur, Swaraj, marriages, school-life and Durga pujas in the 1930s. She even provided recipes of Bengali delicacies! Just imagine a trip down history via a blog, that was Mesdi’s Saturday Posts. But today, in another Saturday, the blog does not appear anymore…
  

• Radical Hypocrite

  

  Another abandoned blog. Esoteric. Bitter. Marvellous. Polemic. Political. Poetic. Brilliant. He might hate this: essentially Bengali. To his last post I commented thus: “You have departed so ceremoniously. Oh well then. Feels bitter, since I had been preparing a post on my favorite blogs and surely would have kept you at the top. Well, I will do that still. Since you started writing, I stopped writing certain kinds of posts. Because, what use of writing such things when it is being written better? Words are things we die to, have to, can’t escape not to, encounter, when we can’t find them we need to write them ourselves. You wrote and I was relieved of writing such words since I found them, exactly and better. This is pathological: writing and being read. I have a doubt that you might reappear, with another mask, but the same words. You might not, what difference would that make? I will continue…writing about loves drenched in bitter tears for little girls, because I think that is the best misunderstood and easily accessible metaphor of “a flock of shrieking, brightly coloured birds flying off overhead, darkening the sun, casting huge shadows, birds of your individual dreams dreaming about a collective, flying away”…Not convincing that? Who cares!
  I have encountered a few deaths of blogs I loved to read. RH is dead and Life’s Elsewhere writes on…what difference does it make? A good shit smiley nothin’ !”
  He mentioned my name in this post. But I don’t know him in person, that’s not a regret.

• Live like a Flame

  

  I decided that I won’t mention Blongs whom I have mentioned often in earlier posts. Well, this exception proves the rule. How can I make a list without mentioning Rimi B Chatterjee’s blog? I adore her because I always wanted to be like her: an academician who spends much of her days writing stories and engaging in heady bibliophilia. She has recently published a historical novel named City of Love and has already published one and writing another science-fiction. She can excite you about anything between covers ranging from history of books to graphic novels and can be polemic with doses of humour if anything goes socially wrong. And everyone who knows her knows what a great fighter she is because you can still encounter her smiling and excited at any moment. Expect a Matrix featuring a secret cult of quizzers when quizzing is banned in some not so distant future? Rimidi can weave a thriller out of it.

• Evergreen Leaves


He told once that he will abandon his blog. Thank god he didn’t. Still posts touching poems, humour (the ‘Gogol’ posts) and some very learned bits and pieces now and then. I once goofed up and thought that he is married and is a proud father with a girl-child! I promised him long ago that I will ‘jam’ with one of his poems. I am not able still. His poem is there, I have also produced a collage of images, but I simply cannot match his words. But I will do it. Till then, here is a bit from the poem:

Like almost every other night, I lie awake
in my slumber. My senses lusting for you.
With wizened eyes I wish to see
your slender fingers, in cruel forgetfulness,
twisting me over.
…
Pick up the limbs, please, from under the overture
in convulsions of denial, frenzy, close to your
heart of hearts — hold them.
Heavy with your tears, stuff me back
to back myself I sew my self
until, in your careless laughter,
you render me fleeting cotton again

and again.

• The City in July

  
  This blog has a heading: fetish poetry blog. The blogger is one of my students whom I have still not taught (confusing contradiction that? Well, actually it is not; but can’t explain that now). She sometimes comments here as a ‘QuiteLittleShyThing’ and writes poetry which has the kick of a lethal narcotic. Steeped in urban melancholia, her poems has the ability to do something so hard as such: arouse me through words and imageries. Just read her poems and you will get it: love as loss but not lack, the city in blinding doglove heat, memories etched in the body, almost salty smell of sweat left and the body gone and emotions which give a damn to sentiments. What Radical Hypocrite’s prose is to my prose, her poetry is so to everything I attempt. Reading these spiral poems I feel like stopping writing altogether; because what I am slogging at is already done by her, and better! Just read this ‘Extract’:

  I would like you to die this
  moment, before the glares and sneers
  and prejudices can find you and
  drag you out to the dawn, seething;
  before their greedy fangs dig blood
  on the flesh of your back; I would like you
  to die and become a sacred memory,
  a phantom fragrance, a summer night
  dream I can hide in the darkest
  spires of my eyes… I would
  like you to die in my arms – still
  warm, unscathed, pure.
  …

• Rantings Of A Gagged Journalist

  

  Arjunda is someone I befriended during those turbulent political months of my blog. His writing persona is a kind of Lear: mad, raving, ranting. An ex-journalist who is incorrigibly Marxist and driven by a poisonous anger at everything unjust, he strongly resented my stance regarding Nandigram. I stopped writing anything political at that moment, and also because Radical Hypocrite had arrived… Somehow, Arjunda also stopped writing. Again, there is something essentially Bengali in his rants: always political, very masculine and someone who will never give up dreaming of an apocalypse against capitalism. Arjunda is a remnant of the Bengal 1965-1975; that’s why I adored him though I sometimes didn’t agree with him. But confusions, contradictions and ruthless questioning is always the better and healthier way out than consensus which breeds complacence, something which is happening in Bengali intelligentsia these days…

• Netty Gritty

  

  Hopelessly Hopeful! The only blogger with whom I share a bigger fraction of my web-persona (something which I never reveal here): my fascinations regarding Internet, Web2, Web apps and Digital Art. Her posts are always littered with smileys as she exudes the childlike wonder and glee of discovering shells in the beaches of cyberspace. She almost abandoned blogging when internet connections collapsed in her surroundings. But Netty being gritty, she resurfaced recently, and one can vouch that we will be battling again in the race of having the largest number of accounts in the web owned by any Bengali. She is an artist, but I am still waiting to see her gallery in the web. WordPress is offering 3 GB free dear Netty, what are you waiting for? A smiley to you:

• Rizwanur.com

  Brothers in arms. People with whom I haven’t talked for months because I find it mildly criminal to infuse pessimism in people who continue to fight for a cause. This website surfaced after the ghastly death of Rizwanur Rehman with a vow to generate public opinion till the case is solved and along with my blog and Rimi B Chatterjee’s invited scathing hate-mails and comments. It’s not surprising to witness the irregular posts these months as authorities keep us waiting for a proper justice.

• Development Dialogues

  Shouldn’t I be proud of my students? At least a couple of them is keeping this blog alive and kicking. It describes itself as “This is a blog about the government of West Bengal’s implementation of land acquisition policies keeping in mind the recent happenings in Singur, Nandigram, Haripur, Rajarhat and other places”. Dibyajyoti and Madhura remains politically steadfast, setting a strong rebuttal against the middle-aged opinion that people in their 20s are self-occupied and blissfully unaware of the world outside their metropolis.

• Novel and Modernity

  “The blog for the ‘Novel and Modernity’ course being taught by Professor Supriya Chaudhuri…at the Department of English, Jadavpur University”. If you think that it is only an academic blog then you are wrong. As far the legend goes, during a semester Supriyadi had to travel abroad when she was to take a course on ‘Novel and Modernity’. So she de-territorialised the classroom! The posts are lectures and every student had to comment for their evaluations. What turned out was exciting. Can anyone think of Bengalis without novels (though unfortunately they are better in poetry) or Bongs without ‘modernity’, something we dabbled well with and probably royally goofed up? Therefore this blog; expect Borges, Flaubert, Marquez, Camus, Murakami along with postmodernism and football. (BTW, you know these names; don’t you?)