Journey to past

A land that I hadn't known about - amidst the remains of an ancient civilization - a civilization that still continues to exist but has lost all connection with its past. It retains these remains in the false hope of a kind of revival. But it all never made any sense to anyone. People in this land keep doing their rituals the way they once did in their heydays. But in this time neither the glory nor the faith exists. I was made to walk through these lands and I had fallen in love with its history. The history was fascinating but there was nothing in the present that I could have embraced. It is true that I did absorb a lot from its present with all the time I spent there. But I also knew that there was nothing that would have come out of this love affair with an ancient probably non-existent city. I knew that it would only lead me to perdition and misery if I kept myself connected to the place. There was nothing in this place that I wanted myself to associate with. Still, on that day, a revelation told me that my future is limited (if not determined) by my past in the city. I can't run away from all what I had learned having lived in this abandoned city. I can influence others and be influenced by them, but there is that part of me which is totally owned by my past, that which would always be untouched by anything. My father led this trip to the place that I had never known, the place that holds the key to my future. I want to know about that place much as I want to know about the limits of my own world and my ambitions. My dad started the trip from a familiar place - near a ghat where I was asked to wait for some preparations to happen just like I used to be in the days of my childhood. The hustle-bustle of the city was never pleasant to me but I had learned to sense a kind of music arising out of it. I had actually started missing it from all these years I had been away from this world of antiquity. The next stage of the trip is hard to remember - I was sitting on the back-set of a two-wheeled vehicle - could've been the scooter that my dad used to have. The surroundings seemed bizarre and didn't appear very clear the way my dad was driving this green vehicle. After some time the surroundings started sounding familiar - may be my mind wasn't able to recollect things so fast. But it all sounded familiar now, like it all was known to me, like I was destined to be on this ride. But I still didn't know where I was heading to even though surroundings were all very familiar now - the old temple, the pan-shop, the binding services store, the drawing emporium, the book store, the muslim school, another temple. It all was coming back to me.

The last few miles of this ride were to be more bizarre. There was a steep hill, the one like Kamakhya in Gauhati except that there are no tantrics here. There is no much noise here which makes me believe that there are no sacrifices being done here. My dad still thinks looking at animals being killed is not good for me or anyone. If there were to be sacrifices in this place I wouldn't have been taken here. There is a steep slope and it only becomes steeper as we go further. At some point I wonder if we are still approachable with gravity. But my mind is not occupied by the centripetal and frictional forces right now, I am just thinking about the outcome of this journey. We are in a tunnel of some kind and I have completely lost the sense of direction. I feel weightless and I wonder if I am still limited by the space or the time. I still long for the past, the city even though nothing would've existed if there was no space or time. My dad has not shut down the vehicle and its probably in the neutral gear with its engine still on. That usually means I don't have a lot of time to spend here. I gaze at the walls of the tunnel. I now think its a cave because tunnels are not made of stone any more. I think this must be the end of the tunnel even though I don't see it. This place is so lit up after all. I can now see something written on the wall. It takes time to get used to light when you've been in darkness so long. There was my future inscribed for me, an result from astrology that was lost when I was young. My knowledge of sanskrit and math made me understand that the earlier calculations were all wrong but there was one pundit who had got it right, one who didn't live too long to communicate my future to anyone. It was through some mystical experience that my dad told me that I only I could've uncoded my future. And now I could find it written here in the classic script as if it has been there forever, undiscovered by any one. I can say for sure that it is for me because it spells my mom's and my dad's name right; it mentions the place and time of my birth to reasonable accuracy. It mentions the positions of nakshatras very descriptively. I now realize how fortunate I have been, to have known what millions before me had aspired to know. I came here to know my limits and I have all the answers now. My cynicism would die out like once all hopes died for me. I would die peacefully in an unconscious state. There might be much pain inside of me, but I would never be conscious to feel it. It is hard to say everything that I feel at this point. But it is strange indeed that I am so happy to know about my death. It is much stranger that I feel more optimistic after having known my limits.

San Jose

San Jose
Originally uploaded by anuragr

The half-moon beach in San Jose is the first beach I have been to which is misty all through the year. It felt very different partly because of the amazement that it is to get to a beach with green water and dusky sand after driving for hours between clouds and mountains.

Summer in New York is great as usual, but I still miss the snow (My apartment in the pic).

Newcastle cast

The whole star cast of NewCastle at Tribeca film festival.

to nothingness and back...

The only form of existentialism that I have gathered is probably due to the sense of disconnection I have felt. It reasserts itself when I watch Bergman or read Camus. It arises due to the disconnection from my own surroundings - this perceived meaninglessnes of all relationships feelings and passions. When you have been disconnected for so long then your newer connections happen to be mere make-beliefs - making up a consciously chosen or sometimes a conceived reality. You get involved in people, their activities and lives even though you realize at all times that they all mean nothing. A certain goal or a certain requirement (not necessarily yours) was what drove you there and it would have no significance after the fulfillment (not necessarily yours). What then is anything for? With no love, passion and emotions what really separates life from death. Kierkegaard says that we judge others' emotions with rationality but don't want others to do that for our emotions. Its not just selfishness it is the inherent paradox in rationalization of human needs. If everything is just needs and fulfillments, where is the space for emotions? My short encounter with Christianity does try to achieve an answer. I think that if God (despite the vagueness and ambiguity that is associated with it) is not believed to be the prime motivator of everything one tends to lose the belief that we are capable of changing anything in this world. Everything becomes deterministic - past determines the present and the present determines the future. Everything is need and fulfillment - the emotions become a matter belief - one like that in God Himself. One's connection with God in all its innocence is a strong force that maintains the essential adherence to the dynamics of this world (whatsoever little we may understand of it). With belief in God, we believe in ourselves and tend to feel the control over this world. It might all indeed be fake but it is what works for most people. For the most part, believing in God is only as incorrect as believing in oneself.

However this is far I can get with existentialism. Existentialists (those that I have known) tend to deny rationality yet continue to harness what rationality provides. There lies a hypocrisy. But so would be the case with those who deny emotionality on one hand (in all their actions) and then just assert "God" on a superficial level - just by saying the "words" but not really believing in any of sense of them. Giving a name to the problem is never a solution. Saying that "God" governs everything doesn't free us from the responsibility of understanding the order of this universe. There is a hypocrisy in considering knowledge as solely determinable by rationality but still having beliefs or asserting a spiritual power. Any belief that we hold has to be seen in actions as well. Thus our actions and institutions should reflect what we believe. There are problems, in leaving beliefs as the residue of ratiocination. For me rationalization could be inadequate but it definitely isn't unnecessary. We need rationality to understand things however we do need to understand what we believe or admit that we do believe. Our institutions need to give way to our beliefs for their own sake. Rationality is essential for our understanding and it probably is the only medium we can trust upon (it would be paradoxical to say it isn't so). Yet we do need to acknowledge our beliefs and prejudices that we choose to live with. It is not "wrong" to have a perspective, I think; but to admit the perspective is as "right" as we can be.

with inadvertence ...

Somehow over last few years without making any conscious attempts I have been able to tell if any word has germanic roots or not. It is not a hard thing to do, if you are a linguist / etymologist; but for what I am, an "enthusiast" at most, it should be considered no less than an achievement since its done so inadvertently. In retrospect I started working on my English vocabulary about 4 years back, when I felt my vocabulary was too limited and its only use had been to translate my thoughts from my native language - Hindi. I took a more sophisticated way towards improving my vocabulary, not because the crude way of memorizing the words painfully was too easy for me, but rather because contrarily it was impossible for me to remember word-meanings ever since my childhood days. Since memorizing dictionary meanings was neither feasible nor interesting for me, I took the rather long way. I just took the OED and traced the whole history of a new word. I could then understand that when someone makes vitriolic remarks, s/he is actually just reusing the medieval sense of throwing vitriol. Obviously vitriol is sparingly used in modern English, but the word 'vitriolic' is quite common and when used could be considered a sign of your command on English language. I rather naively, observed that almost all sophisticated words (esp those "power" words from law, politics and economics) in English had to have latin roots. Romans didn't just have better armies than Germanic tribes, I thought - they also had a more organized language. Latin grammar easily would have prevailed all over Europe. For English, however this was an uninformed speculated generilization. English was transformed more because of the French invasion (Norman conquest of England in 1066 by Duke William II and the subsequent replacement of the Anglo-Saxon rule). Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon languages then combined to become what was later to be known as Middle-English. A lot of English words thus show roots in French. I was excited to observe that all English words ending in -ive were directly (or rather shamelessly, I thought) borrowed from French words. Old French positif, affirmatif were brought into English (and modern French) as positive and affirmative respectively, for example. This was just one of the many observations that I made by myself.

All this was enough to make me feel deeply interested in the French language. While learning French I realized that the old French mostly used the corresponding Latin words almost unchanged. An improved French vocabulary eventually enriched my knowledge-bank of Latin roots too as a result. This wasn't over yet. My interactions with a few other enthusiasts on an online community whetted my appetite for Indo-European etymology. I was thrilled to observe that so many of Sanskrit words (Sanskrit: mother of most South Asian languages) shared roots with Latin words. With later studies in Latin grammar, I discovered that the grammatical similarities in Latin and Sanskrit were even more conspicuous. This was inexplicable for me. I thought that Tower-of-Babel could be the only possible answer to such striking and profound similarities. Then this crazy idea came to my mind - to see if there could a sanskrit way of speaking latin- and hence speaking English too. After researching a little bit, I realized that it isn't just possible. The way words are formed, they follow a certain path in history. There are metaphorical and allegorical remarks that go into formation and popularization of a word. I might choose a parallel in another language, but that doesn't necessarily reject or isolate the history of the word in the source language. That explains why I always felt uncomfortable with certain words in Hindi that were translated from English (some Biblical words especially) but didn't make any sense in the native language. They were just transplants of unknown origin and always failed to make the same impact as the original English word.

Smithsonian

Who knew that Kongorikishi (Aka nio) was the one to protect Buddha while the latter's visit to India. Who even knew that Buddha would have to be "protected" in his own birthplace - the place that he first preached at. It took me a visit to this museum at the Smithsonian to realize all that. There is this beautiful tall statue of Kongorikishi and his brother, who ruled the two kingdoms in Japan, and helped Buddha in spreading his message.

After taking a look at this fabulous collection of Asian arts in the Smithsonian institution, I visited other museums in the area. All of these museums are free to public. Looking at these museums you can easily tell that they still don’t run out of funds at all.

I took special note of Thomas Wilmer Dewing, a nineteenth century artist who has some naturalist expressions of the female. It was quite interesting to see Algernon Charles Swinburne advocating the oil paintings of James Mcneill Whistler which promoted a euphoric stance in philosophy - aestheticism.

“Frida Kahlo” painted by Alfredo Arrequin was captivating. After looking at some of these great paintings by John Alexander, I would start to consider him one of the greatest painters of our times. His allegory of double life has been used in a lot of paintings (the most simply depicted in his work – the man of two lives) (http://johnalexanderstudio.com/main/prev/106?page=4 )

Jasper Francis Crospey was the land scape artist for the day. The other most interesting landscape artists was Robert Duncanson. Angel by Abbott Handerson Thayer appeared to be the most accurate depiction of an angel to me so far.

The real size piano by Thomas Wilmer Dewing is enchantingly beautiful. So are his other paintings. The landscape by Albert Bierstadt was a surrealistically pleasant depiction of nature’s beauty. One cannot expect this kind of a reality except in fairy tales.