small town

When I look at all of us who didn't grow up in big cities I find ourselves still trapped in our small town - a place where most of happiness is tied to our small close-knit community. Our needs, whether emotional or physical are met within a few hundred people we have known for most of our lives and even though non-conformance is not an option here, we don't miss it because we have never felt the need to rebel. Life moves at its own pace here and there is a general feeling in all of us, often in defiance of reality, that we can take on anything that threatens to destroy our happiness.

It is probably difficult for a city-dweller to appreciate this life of contentness but a small-towner longs to reunite with this idyllic world that has no pretense, no hierarchy nor any pressure of any sort.

When a small-towner is thrown out of his habitat, he fails to enjoy the city life. He is a misfit everywhere he goes. He acts nice where he is meant to be practical and he is awkward where he needs tact. He doesn't like the hierarchy because he hasn't seen it before. He has neither felt any intense life-ambition nor known the ignominy of being nobody. Unable to do much to change this hierarchical world though, he ends up trying to assimilate himself at his new home. He extols hierarchy, ambition and the drive to achieve success in life. He finds the brutality of competition necessary even though he feels himself to be a victim at all times.

There are many among us small-towners who fight this inherent unhappiness. We are in the city but our heart lies elsewhere. We love the big-city but we often find the brutality of this world unbearable. The dualism kills us and rejuvenates us at the same time. We have ambiguous feelings but we have started loving the ambiguity itself. We are fond of our yoga classes, our drugs, our alternative music and foreign food. Yet we all have an unsaid commitment to money-making. We are scared of fakes and of being mislead because we know the disasters of loving a pretentious woman or a Chinatown bracelet. The small towner in us often finds his escape from small-town pointless but he sticks to his guns , often rebelling but returning after a small vacation. There is some sort of Stockholm syndrome at work with big cities as our invincible oppressor.

There are many of us trapped in the small-towns of our heads so even if we live big in big places we would be in our small-town forever.

Experiments with English

Every now and then I find my English writing abilities inadequate to express myself - largely because the way my mind works. Trained as a computer scientist, I find comfort in generalization. There is that mathematician inside me asking to find simple and clear definitions which can be used to describe the complex situation which I am looking to understand and describe. Fewer descriptions and simpler words are better than ornate details. Clearly this tendency works antagonistically with good writing.

A good writer finds the right word not by seeking building blocks of a grand theory but by choosing a word that associates a familiar feeling or a phenomenon with what he or she intends to describe. Perception is a lot more important than theorization here. Of course a good writer doesn't knows how to balance these two tendencies whereas I don't.

Another factor could be that English is hardly a first language for me. To this day I find faults with English grammar - as if to justify my shortcomings. I don't like the fact that just logically putting words together is never enough in English writing. One has to worry about how the whole sentence sounds in the end, checking if there are any word-repetitions of any kind, avoiding a sentence so long that the modifiers get detached, making sure the pronouns are referring to the right subjects and so on, If you're accustomed to using mathematical languages or a language with a heavy-weight grammar like that of Sanskrit or Latin, then such activities seems just extraneous and often boring.

Here are some examples where I wish English grammar could provide some enhancements :

1. The form What + are, Whatever+are is hardly used in English. "The cup can be replaced by what is now in gift box." is OK, but "The flowers would be replaced by what are on the patio." sounds awkward. An English speaker deals with the unavailability of the plural form of what in English by adding dummy objects. "The flowers would be replaced by things lying on the patio." is  a perfectly fine sentence. But a plural what could've been better.

2. The problem with ambiguity with the modifier's object is well-known. In a sentence, "I read the book lying on the floor."- one doesn't know whether it is the book or the person lying on the floor.

3. Could we make sure words like welfare and farewell don't mean things so different?

Book Review

I have been reading a book by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Before getting to the book I had read one of the articles by the author published in The Atlantic last year and found it very interesting and true (http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/racism-without-racists/245361/). Googling up authors usually gives you information about an their personal life, appearances on RV and News etc. but this time I got straight to this book probably because Mr. Williams was still in the process of marketing the book.

It is a well-written book. He surprises us with his inside knowledge of the hip-hop culture, his own experiences and echoes of hip-hop music, and switches over seamlessly to deep introspection, exploring ideas of love, attachment and political voice, things that we don't associate with hip-hop anymore.

Living in Harlem, I myself was told by a lot of people in the neighborhood that hip-hop isn't what it used to be. There was a whole social-movement side of it that has completely disappeared. I may not have listened to James Brown as a teenager but I could see and feel the power of his music in its political statement.

The author argues that the black community has somehow consciously stuck itself in a gansta culture, devoid of social introspection, a world that is unreal. The black community, according to Mr. Williams, rejects education and adores dirty-cash. He may not be the first one to think that way. Public intellectuals and entertainers alike have often hinted at a certain bliss in ignorance. President Obama himself has talked many a times about something being fundamentally wrong on the streets of the US.

It is difficult to hold such a position simply because the lack of acceptance of education and other Western institutions itself is a reverberation of years of oppression. For one thing, blacks were not even allowed in colleges for a long time. Even though we do live in a time when pretty much every institution is open to all, the desire for education hasn't developed equally in all ethnicities. Mr. Williams account of his own experiences makes it appear as if his proximity with the cannon of Western literature had liberated him. In saying so, he seems to be arguing that Western Cannon itself is the only way to achieve true liberty - a thought that would be contended by many of contributors of the Western cannon themselves.

In this memoir he does express a certain frustration when his interests didn't align with his friends any more. He seems to blame the black community for not accepting Western means- its ideas of beauty and love - but chooses not to inspect the history of black and white relationship in the Americas as a factor that might have inhibited the dissemination of Western ideas to all its subjects.

Though the writing style is excellent and the realism of his account riveting, the author does limit his scope to raising questions, instead of trying to answer them. He is not a sociologist, he admits in the end. His honesty in rest of the book as well makes it a very interesting read.

King Leopold II and Kashi Naresh

As a kid, seeing gifts from King Leopold II of Belgium in now destitute Ramnagar Fort in Benares made me think of an era of coordination between the kingdom and Belgium. It was only in adulthood that I could learn what sort of coordination the Maharajah could've offered as gratitude for the Order of Leopold II he had received.

http://www.historytoday.com/tim-stanley/belgiums-heart-darkness
http://www.royalark.net/India/benares3.htm

About the blog

This particular blog has been for personal anthems and quarterly resolutions. I have a new resolution every quarter, since the yearly ones never last long. There is a lot of bad writing and I hope that my audience is not as big.

Personal Achievements

30 years of my life, gone. I achieved nothing - which to be honest, doesn't come as a surprise. Only about six years back, thoughts of suicide seemed interesting. I carried on, finding suicide too as meaningless. That I can now think of achievements again may be the only achievement that I count of.

I did make some money too in the way. It is probably enough to settle in Himalayas for the rest of my life – which would've been a dream in my 20s – to escape the immense pressure of making good money. There was no pressure from my parents, who still live a content middle-class life. My protected and blissful childhood didn't drum it in me to get ahead and move upwards. The escape to Himalayas seemed achievable and desirable.

But it was the sudden appearance of money-power in post-globalization India that pushed me into the whirwind of money-making. I consciously played along with those who find money to be the ultimate solution to all problems.  Having spent  a middle-class childhood surrounded by more books than toys and gadgets, I knew that money didn't buy happiness – but in the times when consumerism had dawned on Inidia, I suddenly found lack of money to have been the root of all my problems.

With the sort of upbringing I had, I was meant to find a stable job, get married and follow this quintessential tradition of my forefathers. But now I was suddenly supposed to ride a honda, buy designer clothes every season, impress a hot woman of the same status and interests, listen to cool music and eat at expensive restaurants. I was short of money.

The safety-net of the olden days, when it wasn't considered shameful to be supported by your family and when money wasn't the sole end-goal of life had withered away and we were left in this Bangalorean world of shiny bikes, hot girlfriends and macho-coolness. I didn't fit anywhere in the picture and longed for the world when pursuit of a deeper meaning was possible.

Running up to Himalayas sounded like an escape and I ran away. I would've felt dead if I lived in the moribund Bangalore. I don't regret it. I think that was the best thing to have done. Even though it was my  own helplessness that made the new globalized world appear a dejected place, my escape from it was what gave me a second chance to look at this new world in a different way and find my place in it.

When I started from zero, I could set goals for my life, I could choose my friends or choose not to have any. I held myself responsible for what I did and who I am, instead of feeling as having been setup and victimized everywhere.

A new confidence was born and some money came on the way but the fear of taking risk still lingered because of this escape from my habitat. I could no longer enjoy Rafi and Mukesh. I felt that it was a part of my own humiliated past, an era that was effaced and forgotten for hip-hop and sexual liberty. Shunning one's past is never without feeling a little humiliated – I later realized.

Spending time in New York, I wished to become a movie-director. But this uncertainty of one's own past, the humiliation, prevented me from seeking interested partners and or pursue film-making seriously. It was as if I had lost a voice. I could never up the camera – because there was nothing to shoot or cherish for me. I became afraid of my background, afraid of being judged. In my mind I was hating the world dominated by big media and shallowness but in reality I was mourning the death of my own voice.

Afraid of taking risks and having spiraled into depression, I was soon to discover finding female partners much more difficult. What happened with a lack of voice was a little worse. The lack of female company made sexual pleasure a fantasy, so much so that the real sex wasn't as much fun any more. The fantasy element seemed more interesting. The wish to have sex with a girl who lived on the block seemed more interesting than going to a club and approach sex in conventional ways.

Sex too, became a way for denying the fear of rejection. It probably had always been like that, it's just that the new liberties, the freedom to choose your surroundings exposed the reality. If I had retired to Himalayas or had lived the centuries old tradition of having an average job and raising families responsibly, I would've have experienced the cycle of rejections and failed relationships.

Fighting rejection, I soon wasn't interested in women who were interested in me. Since I wanted to overcome my shortcomings, I wanted to get women who were not interested in me. I wanted them to like me while always hating myself for being not good enough for them.

It was now that I realized that my limits in my world were posed more by my self-hatred and fear of being rejected than because of my background. It is this lack of voice that was causing my misery. I had to go back and correct myself where I had gone wrong.

New York might have given me great opportunities but it also perpetuated the view that money is a panacea to my personality issues. I thought that making money, would have me rise up in the social ladder in this great melting pot. I didn't know that backgrounds still did matter. Expression of power was necessary to survive. Money did buy things and although it was fun throughout, I slowly realized that you needed loads of money to stay in the game and more importantly to mend your ever shredding personality.

I had to correct myself. Goals in life are never linear and pursuit of money is pointless for the most part. You try making money and when you realize that you have some, you are already entrenched in a system that would never let you free. You need money, but your dreams of a possible quiet life in the Himalayas are more distant than they once were. You try to talk yourself out of the dream of settling in Himalayas that you once had. 

I knew from the very beginning that I wasn't made for living this dream of monetary glory but when I wasn't left with many options, I went with the flow. I do like feeling victimized and conjure reasons for not having taken risks in life. What needs be pursued is not money put passion. Passions don't survive in the world without money but yet money isn't what drives passion. Ignoring financial constraints may leave you penniless and deny you all experiences that might help you live your passion but caring for nothing except finances can do worse - deny you of passions which you wanted to have money for in first place.

If you don't pursue what you love, then you're left with what you hate the most.