Category Archives: Food for thought

One at a time

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For the uninitiated; I’ve been running a campaign, of sort, titled ‘One at a time’ (with hash tags #OBAAT, #OMAAT, #OPAAT, #OSAAT) wherein I take up an artwork and write my thoughts on it. You may know me as someone who writes well, but I don’t give that credit to myself. In fact, remember that article that The Hindu published on Mother’s Day which I wrote? Frankly, I don’t recall writing it so well. I knew that I wrote it, I knew that I sent it without reviewing it, but I never knew that it was written so well. Till date, I’m in disbelief. Despite all that writing and pen craft, I have trouble articulating my feelings. I have no qualms thinking out loud, but when it comes to the emotions and actually putting down substantial words on paper, I’m severely limited.

I had great difficulty writing, like I used to write before. Earlier, I had trouble expressing my emotions. Now, I have trouble expressing my emotions and my thoughts. And, that is detrimental to me. What if I told you that you are to breathe to be able to live, but you can’t breathe because your nose is stuffed with cotton? To remedy this situation, I started going to eat in the places which had a good vibe. Take ‘Amethyst’ for example, it’s a garden restaurant in Chennai. I went there, had a Caesar salad all by myself. I went there just to put myself in hitherto unfamiliar places, hoping to rekindle my spark. I went to an in-room concert, travelled for a long weekend to a hill-station, and even tried to get sloshed in a bright afternoon – all because I wanted to see and feel enough to write something about it.

That is why I started this campaign. I had 300+ books (physical and digital) at my disposal, and I had watched and listened to ample number of songs and movies to start it. I demanded something very simple of me. I set up 4 generic questions that I had to answer for each artwork that I was to post about. Be it a song, album, movie, series, book, painting or anything that was created as a result of the pursuit of art. And, I sometimes wrote single word answers to the generic questions while I posted about them. Even when I had a lot in my head, I could only write in three or four words that barely formed a sentence.

I know, all of this qualifies to be a rant, but it is essential that I write it so that the next couple of paragraphs develops the gravitas and helps the reader understand that perspective I am coming from.

I’ve not cried at my sisters’ wedding, I happened to chuckle when I heard about my maternal grandmother passing away, and I came to the point of trapping a free bird that got stuck in our apartment’s stairwell just so that I could write about it. I was willing to cage a being, albeit momentarily, so that I can walk outside and inhale fresh air before going back inside the humid, moldy place. You know what, now that I have been able to write a page, I want to talk more about the wall that is around me and how it broke down.

My childhood years are nothing but a haze, an after-smoke. Thinking about it now, I remember the little things I used to do that brought me unadulterated joy. I used to take a fistful of rice and count the grains. I used to take a thread roll, de-thread it and then re-thread it. I used to find unwanted strings of thread of various colours and sizes, I used to knot them into one long string and re-thread it after de-threading it. I learnt to ride a bicycle when I had grown taller than 4 feet. I proposed to my school teacher to hold monthly seminars where students can talk on a topic of interest. Consequently, I was chosen to talk about Ramanujan (renowned mathematician) and nuclear reactor on two separate occasions. I liked to have friends, and I would go all out to impress them and help them decide that they wanted to be with me too (I came with perks – I was good in studies, I was on good terms with teachers). I never spoke overtly about my religion and the rituals, fearing that the folks around me would deem me uncool. I ended up developing a closet relationship with the Gods, who I now see as an omniscient and omnipotent version of me.

My entire life, even the life I am living now and the one I will live in future, has been about being the guy who people will like. So, there came moments when the image of ‘the guy people liked’ clashed with the image of ‘the guy that I was’. And naturally, I let the image of ‘the guy people liked’ win. On an afterthought, it was good I did it. That way, I became self-aware and empathetic. I was an ambidextrous individual from the start; I used to write with my left hand, until I was forced to write with my right hand. And now I was an extroverted introvert. I developed great hesitation asking favours for myself, because it dawned upon me on multiple occasions that people like getting help not giving help. On the contrary, if someone was in trouble, I was able to go out of my way to help that person. In high school, my friend hurt his ankle. There was a police jeep stationed near the school. I went to the police inspector and asked him to drop my friend to his home. He was surprised at me asking it, but he agreed. Had I had a broken leg, or even a femur protruding from my thigh, I’d never have asked for help (fearing rejection).

I was quite poor in sports and you can’t play football or cricket all by yourself. So, I found a willing refuge in books. I used to love reading comic books, so I naturally picked up magazines I found in my home and started reading it. So what if they were women’s magazines, they had some good stories. In Loyola College, I discovered the library beneath Bertram Hall. I saw the amount of books neatly categorized under various departments, I felt like I was in heaven. One of the first books that I read from the library was Jonathan Livingston Seagull – and I was strangely able to relate to Jonathan. From there started my tryst with books of all kind – from Small Is Beautiful, The Goal, The Alchemist to Atlas Shrugged.

I picked books at random, liking either the book name or the cover or the length. I didn’t realize until later that the books I picked up were under the realm of philosophical fiction. My parents remarked that I read such books where characters were outcasts, and thought that I was an outcast myself. But, it was the other way around. I was a misfit for as long as I can remember, I never had peers of my age who were not from my school. My moral compass didn’t allow me to not report my friends who brought hairstyling tools in school when school did ask them to not bring it. I never really had friends who helped me, and when they did help me, I had trouble believing it because the helpers would end up exploiting me. They’d team up with me, make me come to their home in the other side of the city, make the presentation together, and end up hijacking it and present it as a one-man show.

Naturally, I felt a closer bond with the dead and skinned pages which were strategically disfigured by ink, than with humans. And then of course, I wasn’t allowed to adopt a being. Once, my music teacher’s pet cat delivered a litter and she encouraged that I take a kitten or two for myself. I took them home, only to be scolded upon, and made to return them to her. I started watching movies and series for the same reason why I started reading books in the first place, to experience a world that is not my own. At first, I watched the silly movies – the movies which had no head or tail whatsoever. I received recommendations from friends to watch a movie, and they vouched for the movie. I started accepting their recommendations and liked their movies. Soon, I started combing the World Wide Web for movie recommendations and the web didn’t disappoint me.

I’m not able to recall the movie or book or even song that first made me cry over an artwork. But, I’m forever grateful for that piece of art. My empathetic self never allowed me to hate others, even when they metaphorically castrated me. I could always put myself in the shoes of my perpetrator and give that person a clean chit, having able to see things from that person’s view. But, that left me both exhausted and hurt. I didn’t have anyone to shout at, kick at – not even the door because I placed feelings on a door too. The artworks that made me cry helped me a lot by nudging the dam open. Schindler’s List, Inside Out, Siddhartha, and Life Of Pi were a few artworks that helped me cry. I doubt if I’ve written all that I wanted to write, but I’m starting to feel the light dying. Before that happens, I’ll write about the song that made me write this piece. My parched throat can wait, my sweaty underarms can wait, and my hungry stomach can wait. It all can wait.

B is for Braille – the piece I was supposed to write before I ended up writing this piece

Now that I have written about the song, I feel at peace. It feels like an empty mind that you feel just before you drift off to a dream in the lap of Mother Sleep. I will try to write again. Of course, my novel ‘Homebound’ can wait. So can my second and third books of the ‘Be Trilogy’ – ‘Becoming‘, ‘Befitting’ and ‘Believing’.

For now, I’ll write for the sake of writing.

B is for Braille

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B for Braille is a song that is an initiative by White Print (India’s first lifestyle magazine in Braille) and I heard it first when it was showcased in the channel called ‘MTV Indies’ in 2014. The song is in Hindi, and the English lyrics are displayed on the screen as the story progresses on the screen. The story is of a blind boy in a lower middle-class family, who is fidgeting with his toys restlessly when he discovers an object which has a paperboard cover and it makes a rustling sound when shaken.

It’s a book. To him, it’s as good as nothing so he shows his mother the book. She advises him to ask his father to read it to him. He stands in front of his father and shows the book ‘Malgudi Days’ that he is holding. His face shows the excitement that a kid feels when it is seeing the train for the first time. He discovers a world other than his own when his father reads him the stories. His father, at one point, has to leave his child as he works in another part of the city. That leaves the child disabled.

Before he encountered the book, he had known disability all his life to the extent that it was part of his life. He hadn’t known any other way to live his life other than by his parents’ constant assistance. He thought that even though he is blind and others are not, everyone is disabled in some way or the other. The thought gave him comfort.

But when his father left for work; he had a book with him that he couldn’t read, let alone see. The book was a stark reminder of his inequality, his disability, and his inability. Before he discovered the book, he used to play inside the four walls that defined his home because he never thought of playing outside. From the time he started to make sense of the world around him, he knew that his world was severely limited and that he couldn’t have a normal life that normal people have. He had accepted it just like you accept that two and two equals four. That was just how things were, and they can’t be changed. Can they? Can you change the result of 2 and 2? No. It’s a scientific, universally accepted, undisputed fact.

With that book a part of his reality now, he stumbled upon the truth that he is ill-equipped. Everyone around him can view their reality without rolling their eyes haplessly in every direction, walk without having to bump into something, groom themselves without having to part their hair the wrong way,  and see the wound on their body due to rough play. He couldn’t do anything. If he knew the meaning of the word ‘Impotent’, he’d name himself that. He couldn’t part from the book because the book was proof that he was missing out on pretty much everything, even if the mere existence of the book in his hand gave him pain and uncertainty. He thought how could he be deemed real if he can’t have the same experiences as anyone else?

With the advent of the book in his life, he had stopped playing with toys. What use is a toy that you can’t see, when the book described a world that he can imagine? Surely people will think that a blind man can only imagine in shades of black, who are they to tell? He might as well had made his own colours in his mind to fill the world that he was being ushered into, with his father holding his frail arms and guiding him with his voice and tone. He’d be a little happy if he had known that the humans can only see a minute part of the light spectrum, that he can imagine colours that no one else can simply because the others have taken the colours that they see as an undisputed reality and hence gave up on creation.

Not long after, he hears the familiar footsteps. His father is standing behind him; he can sense his father’s guilt. He knows better than to just go and hug him, how could he show him a better world and leave him abandoned? Didn’t he know that his son would be lost in Malgudi? But he missed his father equally, as much as the world that he had shown. He threw himself on him, and locked his arms around his neck. He thought that this time he’ll never let him go. His parents take him to the National Association for the Blind, where a teacher introduces him to the braille script. His joy knows no bounds; the doors to the world were open to him. He could visit any place he wanted, he could meet anyone he liked, he could be whoever he wanted to be. In his unadulterated and pristine joy, his parents took a step back and watched him learn. For that is all children want really. They want to make friends with the toys, pencils and rubber balls. They want to make friends with words.

This is what it is, really. I saw the video for the first time, and tears were trickling down my eyes. I wished no one saw me crying because then I’d have to explain them why I am crying (‘over a song? Really?’ is what people would exclaim), and I wanted to be seen crying so that I can be asked the question I ask people often (‘Are you ok? Do you want to talk?’). I’ll never be able to imagine the life of a blind individual, but the song gave me an infinitesimally small glimpse of it – enough to help me empathize and feel the world through the child’s eyes. That is what art is – you see a movie, and it makes you feel about something you’ve never felt before. And even if you have felt it before, the artwork helps you gain a new perspective that will help you become self-aware. Every human can only experience so much by itself, hence the anecdotes and stories and legends and cave paintings and novels and songs and sculptures and movies.

B is for Braille.