To Ocean

Many a night, I fall asleep by the shore.
Nightly ocean always so comforting.
Immensity of ocean cut down by darkness into a womb,
Pounding of waves evoking my first memory-
of a place of which I remember nothing but a rhythm-
a home throbbing with a heartbeat;
That heartbeat of my mother, that first cognition by my consciousness,
Is mimicked by nightly pulse of ocean,
Always bringing bliss, and sleep.

-Pulastya

Loss, Indian View

India loses again, badly. 4-1, and margins of losses are big too. Now the time to resort to nuances. To exploit the recesses in human brain which confuse 'complicated’ with ‘reason’. The tedium of analysis must be used and the claim of being “best”, still, must be defended. After all that’s what cricket loving people of India crave for. With sly the benchmarks of measurement should be switched lower, and such sub segmentations should be created where we still come out as best.

Although we claimed potential to be the best team in the world before the tour began, at the end of it people should be happy that at least we are the best version of ourselves. “This is best visiting Indian cricket team of past 15-20 years”, says Mr. Ravi Shastri. Suddenly, we are told to believe, it’s not about winning, ‘we fought better than our predecessors’ should be taken as winning argument and applauded. In typical Indian way he is claiming success by siting lower degree of failure: a success which doesn’t need achievement. “The best Indian pace attack ever”, says the cricketing oligarch. Cleverly hiding the fact that it is still not good enough to win a series abroad. Again, claiming success without achievement.

Mr Kohli scoring nearly 600 runs in the series is being made out as if the whole purpose of the tour was to redeem him from his past failure to an unblemished deity status. If commitment is the precursor to preparation, then it is clear where Mr. Kohli’s commitment lies. Kohli the player is more important than Kohli the captain, for Kohli the man. Challenges that Kohli the player faces are relatively easily manageable than the challenges that Kohli the captain faces, hence 600 runs in a series and yet team India loses the series 4-1. And that works fine for everyone. It is only when system fails that Gods can take place of prominence. Collective failure brings focus on individual achievements. Perhaps there is a meaning in the number of gods that we have, and why we create more every day. I’m sure Mr Kohli is happy being another one of them- a superstar of a defeated team. In some sense, our heroes are always a bit of tragic, for they display big capabilities but do not win.

Neither Mr Shastri nor Mr Kohli is a villain here. They are merely being one of us. We are complicit in the facade they are creating, the masterminds of our own delusion. This delusion is a system, where we do not define failure in terms of inadequacies, but in terms of misfortunes. We always end up glorifying the lost possibility by embellishing it by ever so big a misfortune. Our glory is always the lost one, never real, always so close yet missed by a whisker of misfortune. They are giving us a reason which they know we would give to ourselves. Something which expedites moving on.

See how Mr Shastri complains that good luck favoured English, not us:

“I wouldn’t say (we) failed badly. But we tried. We must give credit where it’s due. Virat and me were asked to pick the man of the series (for England) and we both picked Sam Curran. Look where Sam Curran has scored, and, that is where he hurt us. …at crucial stages in this series, he chipped in with runs and wickets. That was the difference between the two sides.”

(Ravi Shastri, Indian cricket team coach, on Sam Curran’s impact on the series, ET, Sept 15, 2018)  

This is a statement of cunning. Coming from “Champion of Champions”, who has a past to claim the right of wisdom in the field of cricket, and have no doubt about it, is fully conscious of it, sounds desperate too. He knows anything else will be detrimental. Its vile lies in that it reduces the difference between victory and defeat to only a single factor. And this factor, as one can see, is more or less random, fortuitous; something that can not be anticipated and planned for. A divine intervention of sorts. I mean no one could have predicted- and therefore prepared for- that God would decide to benefit England with the miracle of Sam Curran! Everything else, of course, was taken care of in the preparation! Minus Sam Curran results would have been in our favour!

However, being aware that the gentleman speaking is the coach of the team and is trying to cover up particularly his own failure in order to save his job may help one see through the beautiful argument put forward by him. But, still, it’s a smart statement. In India you can justify any  failure in the name of bad luck and bad karma. That’s how the whole business of sustained hope for victory, despite losing consistently, is maintained. When you justify every defeat as bad luck then the hope of luck turning in favour can  continuously be maintained; after all it is controlled by fate, something assumed fair and unbiased. And, as more, so called, misfortune strikes you, higher the probability that soon luck would turn favourable, that, in fact, increases the eagerness to keep playing; typical gambler’s psychology.

Mr Shastri is a street smart cricketer and the kind of justification he is using is from these streets only. Here, on these streets, success always arrives as a stroke of luck. It is to no one’s credit in terms of planning, effort, and focus. His justification is derived from an argument originally concocted to defend failure, for it makes it easy to justify failure without accountability or guilt to the individual. And on these streets justification of failure is much more in demand than the recipe for success. Here success, as it is known, is not based on a method but is simply a rare absence of failure, a good luck.

We, Indian cricket team, were just unlucky that is all. Mr. Shastri is simply selling what is consumed here. Acceptance of failure without letting go of hope. Also, without any onus for future improvements; after all Sam Curran was a miracle, not a mere another cricketer- and dealing with miracles is not part of his job contract.  

-Pulastya

Individualisation of Sports

No one panders to the baser instincts of masses more than the media. Pimping at that level is necessary for the commercial success it seeks.

In the wake of on going Asian Games where few of our athletes are winning medals, media is in full swing in publicising their success. In a country starved for sporting success commensurate to its size this obviously makes great sales pitch for selling newspapers and prime-time news. However, what is surprising is the emphasis being given to socio-economic background of these athletes in the coverage, which is invariably of poverty and struggle. Poverty is particularly presented in gory details. “Daughter of a rickshaw puller”, “son of a daily wage labourer”, “father selling land to support training”, and other such headlines full of qualifying phrases of poverty and struggle are dominant in the mass media. On one hand it would seem fair that media is highlighting the plight of sportsmen in order to bring attention to the apathy of a society which has consistently failed in coming to aid of its sportsmen; but the gory details of poverty put on display smack of something else as well: an attempt to completely individualise the achievement. 

Sports are a form of controlled warfare, without death and blood. Most embodiments of virtues of a warrior such as health, discipline, spirit to rise against odd, cohesiveness, heroism, conscience , inventiveness and vigor are also displayed in the sporting arena or field. So like war, sports also have been very close to society’s heart as a stage of displaying its superiority. Sports, like war, become a test and testimony of limits of hardihood of virtuous men and, by implication, the society. Success in the sporting arena is taken as the surrogate of a society’s ability to produce and rear men of these virtues. Hence sporting success appeals to innate sense of superiority and general competitive passion of a society (country!) as a whole, and is manifested in patriotic pride and collective ambition. 

And, there also appears to be a clearly visible connection between the strength (economic or otherwise) of a society and its sporting success. Cohesive and well developed societies have a system (of early selection, grooming, easy access to scientific coaching and equipments, financial support to athletes in their budding years etc.) in place which makes sporting success regular and wide spread. Man are proud to belong to such a uplifting society and credit it for their success. 

However, laggard societies tend to portray success as an individual effort. It is their way of covering up their incapacity to build collective means of achieving and leaving it to individuals to find their own ways and means to it. However, when those scraps of achievement through individual effort do come, society is happy to appropriate them in its name (no wonder we celebrate even the success of foreign citizens of Indian origin!), as if just by belonging, even in most tenuous way, one has drawn from it. In such societies there is always a sense of disgruntlement in members, and individuals express it by their subtle attempt to delink their achievements from collective; it is also a good means of saving the achiever from the shame of belonging to a moribund collective. In a way, it is saying that men are good, system is bad, and their achievement is despite the system. 

We are perhaps one such society. Sporting success here is still rare and highly individual effort based. There are many sportsmen in our country who have more value individually than the term ‘Indian sportsman” denotes. 

Sitting in our homes and acutely aware of shortage of success, we support our moral as a member of the collective by clinging to few success stories of individuals and identifying with them. The highlighting of stories of struggle and poverty of these athletes is a way of individualising their success. Bringing forth the point that they alone have paid the price for their success through their inordinate struggle to succeed; society has played no role in it. 

It is substitution of lost hope of achievement as a collective with the hope arising from individualised effort based success. 

Need for sustained source of hope is one of the baser human instincts. And, this is what media is trying to pander to by those headlines above: we may be nothing as a society but as individuals we still have hope. A kind of reverting back to the primitive, where nothing is required to be shown in the name of collective institutionalised support: every man for himself.!

It is not difficult to see that in laggard societies the attrition of individuals from society, specially of the able individuals, picks up speed; in view of that, this act of mass media to go whole-hog for absolute individualisation of the sporting achievements of our athlete is insidious in some sense. 

-Pulastya

The Mythology of Complimenting

“You look like Leena Chandavarkar”, she said to her. It was one woman complimenting the other on her looks. And, as I had noticed, she put quite an effort on her smart phone internet browser to track down the actress she was referring to, for she was not able to recall her name initially. There was an earnestness in her effort; the discovery was somehow important to her. If it was due to the delight of discovery itself, or to seriously compliment the other lady (her friend!), I couldn’t say with certainty, though suspected that it was the first. I too had a look at the picture of the actress and strained my eyes to discover the resemblance, which, if at all there, mostly eluded me; it was, at best, even with liberal use of my imagination, extremely marginal, and generic in nature. Irrespective of that the recipient of the compliment seemed pleased. So, the purpose was served. Something in the compliment seemed odd to me, though. Neither the compliment was out of place for the person being praised, she indeed is a beauty of some merit with very amicable facial features and worthy, nor the exaggeration of comparison, for that is the nature of a compliment, aberration, as I discovered in that moment, was in use of the reference point- a film star!. 

It was a cliched compliment; coming from imagination which was not sufficiently aroused. Awoken only by a weak stimulus (woman to woman!), which did not really set imagination of giver on fire to find the highest of similes, instead it went for most easily available one. And safest too, as comparison with a Bollywood heroine comes with lightest of burdens on the recipient - for, it is merely a description of a state of being without onus of an action, just to keep looking like as one already does. Also, it was delivered more like a pleasantry; where the overtness of expression was more important than the content of it. I would tend to believe that genuineness of compliment leads to the choice of subtler form of expression. A well heard compliment is exactly for that- ears.

If we leave aside its usage in deliberate politeness of acceptable social behaviour which treads on the grey area between truth and lies, a true complement stems from admiration which is very personal in nature. It operates purely on emotional level. Any chosen form of expression adulterates it with own deformity- in form of limitations of medium to transmit it with its full emotional content. Hence the propensity to go for subtlest of expression. Eyes top the list. Eyes are glass windows to the sealed chamber of purest emotions, where the outside air has not touched and discoloured them. Anything visible in that glass is pristine. No other form of expression compares, including poetry, in its expressive intensity, with smitten look in the eyes of lover for beloved. And, even layman can read it in those eyes. All stronger forms of expression of a complement are meta verbal; relegating the verbal expression to the bottom of the list. To preserve the emotional impact of a complement against these deformities its content has to be bolstered, like hyperboles in poetry- i.e. lies, hampering its genuineness. And, in that sense even the most smitten poetry is peppered with lies.

On the other hand, social complimenting is tricky business as it operates on a spectrum carrying infinite variations of form linked to endless degrees of subtle to overt. The choice of form is dependent on the purpose of compliment and the genuineness backing it. In majority of situations though purpose it self dictates the genuineness of the compliment, it also depends on the perceived intelligence level of recipient to see through the fallaciousness. This trickiness makes complimenting more of an art than science, and a breeding ground of artful, who have gladly turned it into a weapon, for which few have developed a defence and are waylaid by it on day-today basis. 

In social utility of a compliment, a closely weighed complement by giver leaves recipient wanting for more and loses its value significantly. For its proper effect to take place it must build an allowance on the overstating side. Under the influence of inflated self perception, every man’s disease, a closely weighed complement will fall short of expectation of the recipient. Here truth and credibility are linked with a factor which is equal to the factor of inflated self perception, and recipient is happy to offer higher than appropriate credibility to the giver in order to believe in exaggerated complement to that extent. The only situation in which recipient will critically analyse the complement and will tend to discount it is when an agenda is perceived behind it. Powerful people receive complements with much higher frequency and discount them for the same reason. But, surprisingly, they do miss them if frequency reduces; complements are a measurement of power, and a reduction signifies loss of power to them.

-Pulastya

Muse and Poetry

I feel relegated to the league of petty admirers- every girl wants to keep a line of them as trophies in cupboard. 

I wanted to be touched by your young desire to infuse verve into my poetry; nothing more (as you see it!), nothing less(as I see it.).

But, it seems, that percolation is not possible across male-female barrier. The reality of prey, predator and hunger is too powerful to be eased by poetry. 

Perhaps what I want is too little, and seeking less from you insults you.

Everything that I said in your praise in my poetry was for poetry's sake, not you. Muse is never bigger than poetry. Poetry is not merely a moan of desirous, it is a prayer that gives birth to a Goddess. 

Birth of a poem is a long labour, birth of a goddess merely a whim to ease the labour pain. 

Time to create a new Goddess.

-Pulastya

Noise

Noise
Is a replacement of thoughts
In a mind incapable of thinking,
No wonder
Chatterbox says little of worth,
And philosopher is mute...

-Pulastya

On V. S. Naipaul

V. S. Naipaul is dead. Gone with him is his mastery of colonial mind set. His highest contribution to literature was to uncover, in that mindset, the framework used for glorifying the defeat- how the vanquished people psychologically evolved themselves to learn to live with the loss. How they fundamentally changed the status of conquerors from opponents to masters and lords and expelled them from their daily lives. How they instinctively figured that complete surrender was effective way of forcing their masters to leave them alone- an amazing trick where political freedom was surrendered to protect ways of life. And those ways of life were also gradually adjusted to mimic their master’s, without internalising the thought process (a high caste Hindu in western style suit and with western education and yet fully believing in caste based untouchability), to make the surrender look even more complete. A grand effort by vanquished race to cover up the ignominy of loss and surrender through selective mass amnesia, which over generations of subjugation became less and less selective- so much so that they had to discover their right of political freedom from the eyes of their conquerors. Such a race, even having won its political freedom was not able to shake off the mindset of colonial day’s and still struggled with confused identity mainly characterised by an inferiority complex and inability to give up what was not relevant any more.

Naipaul was a product of subjugated race, subjugated to the extent that its ways were ritualised in daily living. And, somehow, he became aware of it. This awareness did not lead him to empathy, but to contempt. A camera like contempt, which does nothing to cover the nakedness it captures, instead uses an angle to magnify it to its fuller extent. In ‘A House for Mr. Biswas’ Biswas is a portrayal of his own father, and though in real life Naipaul had great relationship with his father Biswas receives no sympathy from him. He, in the eyes of Naipaul- the writer, is fully responsible for his own predicament and deserves the life that he lived. Naipaul is of the firm view that weakness is not deserving of empathy but of only contempt. What irks him most about weakness is not the infirmity itself, but it’s tendency to descend into hypocrisy, denial, and false bravado to cover itself, specially that it happens at society level. That’s a constant theme in all his writings. His portrayal of Caribbean, of India, and of converted Islamist countries uses the same lens to see these people. He had a cold and clear eye to hunt down the symbolism used (in form of ironies, and tragedies) by these societies to avoid a real sustained fight and to only create a semblance of it to maintain the esteem without any real gains. What magnifies the blow ten fold is his description of these events/people in a comic sense highlighting the frivolity with which these participants conduct life. This frivolity emerges from their misplaced priorities dictated by their selfishness and lack of vision. A vicious cycle which Naipaul bitterly exposes.

No wonder he is accused of biases, against Muslims, women, Africans. An individual without biases is inconceivable, and being a man of intellect more so with Naipaul; but his biases were not superficial, they were based on deep and prolonged observation processed through a sharp, and mercilessly critical mind and one can not ignore him without being accused of same malice- the biases for less scathing. Balanced view is also an euphemism for avoiding controversy (thus veiled lying), Naipaul never gave two hoots about that. 

He wrote beautiful prose. Short sentences of such precision that they did not need the force of context to pierce through any intellect. His description of a Hindu joint family in ‘A House for Mr Biswas’, its people, hierarchies, mechanisms of power, politics, nature of intrigues, is amazingly accurate and possible only through close personal observation. Who can forget the scene in ‘ A house for Mr. Biswas’ where one of the ladies in the house dominates in an argument by violently beating up her own children in a display of anger; or, his explanation of why in India so many people name their homes and business establishment after their deceased parents in “ A Million Mutinies”; or, his description of how the remanent of an old demolished Shiva temple with now a mosque standing on it were enfabled in a Muslim legend to usurp it as Muslim in “ Among the Believers”. His ability to keenly and clearly observe, analyse, convert in to precise thought, and replicate those thought in words on paper was unmatched. No wonder “A House for Mr Biswas” is considered best piece of English prose written in twentieth century. 

Great writer are superior intellectual beings. They have their value as a mirror to the society. This puts them under the label of dangerous; dangerous to the establishment, and dangerous to society as well, for they may cause embarrassment. And, thus both try to control them, establishment through force and censor, and society by castigation and labelling (such as biased against, Marxist etc). All the allegation and controversies that Naipaul lived through are hallmark of his independence of thoughts and expression of it. 

-Pulastya

Three stages of happiness:

1. Living moments of joy
2. Memories of lived moments of joy
3. Display of having confirmed (more like not left behind) to the stereotype of being happy 

(Wonder why doesn’t anyone put picture of reading a book, with tag: having a great time reading.........? Answer: because no one does, hence not a stereotype of being happy.)

-Pulastya

In defence of post-processing of a photograph:

In art form a photograph is an independent reality, not a slave of the reality whose image it captures. Its independence is seeded in the fact that it is not a true image, only a perspective in a particular moment. A ‘true image' photograph is an impossibility, because true image can not be separated from its reality either by space or time. In both separations image ceases to be true at the very moment of separation, for their flow into the future takes different paths-their similarity starts diverging. 

In fact, the moment idea of a picture is conceived the path and destinies of the picture and subject begin to diverge. In conceiving itself factors like camera angle, lens, aperture diameter, exposure time, time of the day (the day itself! Rainy day, sunny day etc!), extra lighting, and focal point all play a transformational role: they change the reality of subject in favour of the reality of picture; and, also, capture only a part of the true (whole) image. 

Also, ’True to reality’ itself as an idea is an oxymoron. Something that doesn’t exist. Can’t exist. For, there is no reality without a perspective. If it was otherwise then there would be no distinction of “good photograph” and “bad photograph” of the same subject (reality). How you capture it makes that distinction. ‘How’ is the perspective- a distortion that work as a knife to scrap away the image from reality.

So, then, what is reality? Reality is a hint, a clue, a stimulus, a signal to be sensed with our five senses for arranging our thought. This arranging is important for that creates a semblance of living. Anger, fear, love, hate all are arrangement of thoughts in our head stimulated by hints that we call reality, and our perception of it.

A beautiful photograph is an amalgamation of the view, aesthetics, and emotions. “What” to capture dissolved in to “how” to capture and “why”, these coupled with “how much” to capture and “when” are the decisions to be made, which keeps the mind of photographer in a state of constant reviewing of thoughts evoked by the view in sight. It (this constant reviewing) is like first growing an ‘eye of mind’ to find beauty, and then leading biological eyes through a training where they learn from the ‘eye of mind’; and deepen, broaden, soften their understanding of beauty. The “eye of mind” is the emotional capability of brain which does the emotional referencing of things in sight, giving them a meaning, which biological eyes can not do. An ant carrying a load ten times it body weight and struggling up a wall is not a sight of visual beauty, but makes up for immense emotional beauty-for ant’s will-to-live despite life being so hard on it(from the human perspective of physical labour). So, despite the individual ugliness of the subject (ant, and the carcass of a dead moth perhaps!) it would make for a good picture for its emotional content; if the struggle part is suitably highlighted by capturing the relative size of ant and its load and the height it has covered, along with capturing, possibly, the distance it has yet to go. And, that will decide the “how much” (of what is in sight)to capture part.

-Pulastya

Dance

Reverberation, thunderclap, and then strike of a thunder bolt...

This’s you dancing:

blooming, basking in attention,

glowing in reflection of wide open eyes on you,

killing with every move....

ah!....

the gentle swaying of waist like a silk thread,

those body twirls powering whirlpools,

that walk of a gazelle showing off,

arms sculpted from ruby and flowing like waves,

twist and turns of a cotton bulb surfing the storm.....

You sway with joy of a flame dancing with the wind...

-Pulastya

A Date

The moment:

After dinner, ready to part, we said goodbyes. Then, while proceeding towards waiting car she turned around and stepped closer to me, and before I could anticipate and be ready, she hugged me.

Leaving me startled and dazed she moved away, and turned to keep her vanity bag in the waiting car. Heavy pleats of her skirt floated in the air shaping it like a blue mountain, the sharp cut of her plain white top made her back look like a milky river arriving in a plane and flowing between the lines narrow at the brim of her skirt and broad at her shoulder. She seemed to me to be a glorious fragment of earth, alive, beautiful, generous, and benign. 

The hug:

I was still soaked in the sensation of the hug. Floating with its memory in lightness. As though I had held a flower in my palm and pressed it to my cheek; filled with tenderness I felt immensely powerful (for, what is tenderness if not how powerful looks at the fragile with affection).

In my arms when she was, I did not feel her weight; I was in embrace of air, scented pulsating air. And I, fearing that air’s exquisite sculpting in her body shape might get disturbed by my pressing on to her, held her ever so slightly. She felt to me so small, so light, so fragile, something precious pressed against my chest, despite being a full woman that she was. Feminine in bloom is all tenderness, free of barbs and rough edges. Her arms around my neck, elbows resting on my shoulders, she slightly reclining towards me, her feather like touch- all sensation no weight. 

With my face over her shoulder and eyes behind her back I could see that exquisite heel of her right shoe raised, sharp and shiny like a rifle bullet, and taut calf muscles of her curvaceous lower leg emerging from the shoe like an art work, wrapped in the skin that was perfect piece of silk held stretched by two perfect lines of tendons, ready. Many a poems were buried there on that skin to be uncovered by sensual touch of the tip of a dreamer’s finger, or lips; depending on the depth of his devotion, for if he chooses to touch or kiss the feet of his goddess. 

Her cheek so close to mine, I could feel the warmth in her blood through her skin. Mild and sweet though it was, it made my face shimmer. 

Her scent, which now will be my definition of a woman for ever, in those few moments transformed itself into my deepest memory. 

I remember soft exhale of her breath on my neck. I can not recall if I was breathing or stopped; perhaps it was she who having taken my breath away, was breathing for both of us. Or, in that embrace I was nourished by her life force and did not need breathing of my own!

The spell:

These thoughts mesmerised me. They were as pleasurable as the moments of their origin. 

Then she looked back and saw me. Her effect was written all over me. And, either as an act of kindness-to cure me, or like an enchantress giving final touches to her spell, she hugged me one more time. 

- Pulastya

Photograph

Photographs: moments rebelling against time.
They disobey laws of time
And slow down its passage,
By freezing themselves in a replica on paper;
Sometimes a single moment living 
over centuries,
Till the picture lasts. 

-Pulastya