Songs of Sapphique

"I have walked a stair of swords,
I have worn a coat of scars.
I have vowed with hollow words,
I have lied my way to the stars."

From someone who also said,

"Walls have ears.
Doors have eyes.
Trees have voices.
Beasts tell lies.
Beware the rain.
Beware the snow.
Beware the man
You think you know."

Snow

"How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?"

*
"There are two kind of men, said Ka, in a didactic voice. The first kind does not fall in love until he's seen how the girl eats a sandwich, how she combs her hair, what sort of nonsense she cares about, why she's angry at her father, and what sort of stories people tell about her. The second type of man -- and I am in this category -- can fall in love with a woman only if he knows next to nothing about her."

**
Both these quotes are from Snow of Pamuk which I haven't read. But quotes were worth scribbling down in that little gray notebook.

Statistics

Confidence in self is faith/ trust in others. Both intangible, strangely unquantifiable.

No numbers attached to its strength just members of ordinal scale: good, medium, bad. Making room for mind games.

And remain fragile and crushable, for values, justice, fairness remain malleable and not absolutes.

[Just] speaking statistically.

Greed

If you think you have overcome greed of human kind, then in all likelihood, you haven't dealt with the complying submissive weighing scale.
S-i-g-h!

Dhobi Ghat (Mumbai Diaries)

Dhobi Ghat encapsulates lives of four individuals, four strikingly different individuals, from four different backgrounds and classes, belonging to four different stages of lives, who manage to merge their hues and intertwine incidences of lives by being in a complex relationship with one complex city, Mumbai Bombay. A city of hope and aspiration but also despondency and dejection.

Kiran Rao's ensemble of background and its presentation is dexterous and full of poetic details. Merging of foreground and background and many treatments of b/w cityscapes, moldy buildings, its worn-out people, complex choices, bumpy lives, personal and private moves is intelligent. Yet, somehow when the characters takeover and she begins her storytelling, something goes, may be not awry but perhaps missing the zing or brilliance that could have been. Whole movie experience gives you disparate moments to relish and you linger on to certain details and cleverness behind for a little bit longer. But overall you feel disconnected and detached or always trying too hard to anchor into most characters turmoil except for Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra), an enthusiastic chirpy Muslim girl originally from UP now married to a man in Mumbai. Her trailing enthusiasm towards love, married life and small excitements of life brings her to a drastic finality. And you wonder how quietly a city engulfs a life even if its the end. And Arun (played by Aamir Khan), a recluse and a pensive painter while he gets his mannerisms of a painter quite well. He looks away if the conversation is not of his interest. He gazes at city deeply. He looks at objects for details, touches and feels them with fingers for texture to know more. He is finicky enough to use the same mug for his coffee every-time at home. Yet, when he opens his mouth, you beg God to stop him, whatever it may take to do that and you are willing to pay for it. His speaking mannerisms are abrupt and perhaps make it worse since he delivers his words in English. Awkward. Something horrifically amusing and reminds me of another disastrous effort by Hrithik Roshan in Kites. It was to, omg, stop! effect. But then that movie itself was a disaster in totality. This perhaps can be attributed to years of training them as Bollywood mold of larger than life 'superstars', where characters don't play them, they play the characters.

To conclude, Dhobi Ghat gives you several special moments to cherish, things to smile about despite its multitude cliches on Mumbai rains or romanticizing its underbelly. Its pleasurable to watch Munna (charmingly played by Prateik Babbar), and voyeuristic pleasures provided through Shai. She tells us through her character that no matter how uber cool and detached we pretend to be in public but we all still harbor this private intrusive life even if it means just speaking mild lies or intrude privately but obsessively, delving into gray areas about someone if that someone is of interest. Dhobi Ghat is about savoring these divergent vignettes, merging of characters and their habitats but regretfully its not that comes out as one cohesive experience.

Laughter(stock)

Perhaps, when fleeting laughter quietens,
enduring smiles make their way.

....

It was to this personal India, and not the India of independence and its great names, that I went when the time came. I was full of nerves. But nothing had prepared me for the dereliction I saw. No other country I knew had so many layers of wretchedness, and few countries were as populous. I felt I was in a continent where, separate from the rest of the world, a mysterious calamity had occurred. Yet what was so overwhelming to me, so much in the foreground, was not to be found in the modern-day writing I knew, Indian or English. In one Kipling story an Indian famine was a background to an English romance; but generally in both English and Indian writing the extraordinary distress of India, when acknowledged, was like something given, eternal, something to be read only as background. And there were, as always, those who thought they could find a special spiritual quality in the special Indian distress.

Above is Naipaul in The Writer and India.

If there is a silence, a dullness, a strange sense of calm, it is because the streets are full of people who have made peace with misery and helplessness; the state has banned all other possibilities, and done so with some violence.

And this is Pamuk for Kars in Turkey, while writing Snow and I found a remarkable similarity in the sentiments of both the authors.

Madame Bovary: Gustave Flaubert

Before the wedding, she had believed herself in love. But not having obtained the happiness that should have resulted from that love, she now fancied that she must have been mistaken. And Emma wondered exactly what was meant in life by words 'bliss', 'passion', 'ecstasy', which had looked so beautiful in books.

From Flaubert's novel: Madame Bovary.

Ambar Se: Raghu Dixit

Happy to discover Raghu Dixit's music. May be he is already really popular, and I had not heard of him before. He is brilliant. Liked Ambar se and No man will so far. Happy to share here.

Raghu Dixit - 04 -...

Coetzee's Disgrace

Harder, yet easier too. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet.

David Lurie in Disgrace, a middle-aged South African professor in Cape Town reflects after multiple disappointments in his own life and circumstantial failures brought upon him by himself. He is resigned towards his life and makes no attempt to resurrect what he loses with a casual affair with a much younger student. He is reckless, we get to know as we are told about his disinterest in his job, towards his personal life and missing passions. He has intellectualized all the events in his life so far. He has been dismissed from his teaching job at the university as a consequence. After which he tries to move away from things, city life, its intricacies and takes refuge at his young daughter's farm. Lucy Lurie. Lucy has chosen a country life. As David reflects his move to his daughter's house,

But he is a father, that is his fate and as a father grows older, he turns more and more- it cannot be helped- towards his daughter. She becomes his second salvation, the bride of his youth reborn.

All is going just like country life, until that day, the event which shakes his calm and gives rise to only, commotion of feelings, of a protective father. His daughter gets assaulted and plundered physically. After which he is not the same and probably never will be. His quiet reflections are always towards the incidence or some aspect of it.

Menstruation, childbirth, violation and its aftermath: blood matters; a woman's burden, woman's preserve.

Not for the first time, he wonders whether women would not be happier living in communities of women, accepting visits from men only when they choose.

And since Lucy decides to choose silence over the event of her violation, he thinks,

They will read that they are being sought for robbery and assault and nothing else. It will dawn on that over the body of the woman silence is being drawn like a blanket.

The book is a quick one, stunning in certain portions, a page-turner with a certain distinct quality of narrative darkness. My gripe with the book: Coetzee skipping more detailing of certain characters, like Melanie Isaac the girl he has an affair with, never makes an appearance in his life and sort of strangely disappears abruptly. And then Petrus, farm neighbor to Lucy. It is subtly hinted that he is a complex character in all its simplicity and might have something to do with the incidence but rarely gets more attention.

Reparation

When gaps get filled,
surface is created.

Orwell on Mahatma Gandhi

Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realize that Gandhi's teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that the world of solid objects is an illusion to be escaped from. It is worth considering the disciplines which Gandhi imposed on himself and which — though he might not insist on every one of his followers observing every detail — he considered indispensable if one wanted to serve either God or humanity.

Full essay here.

Its refreshing (an old essay, it just resurfaced. I might have shared this here earlier) to see a critical view on Mahatma Gandhi in a world of psued-activists who have found it fashionable to quote him and talk hastily about his philosophy.

...

Saying 'certainly' without confidence,
or,
having values without conviction,
are both ineffectual.

Design Like You Give a Dump

Where all that is toxic, is annihilated to green clouds and green thoughts.

Annie Leonard's newest addition, Story of Electronics.



Amusing thought: Imagine, Bill Gates, Gordon Moore and all those honchos taking a nice swim in a pool of same warm toxic water and saying to each other, "how are we gonna get out of that one, man!"

Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red

I haven't gone too far with this book yet, thanks to several failed attempt to revive reading it. However, this time, it looks like I will make it and who knows without a failure. Grouses aside, little bit from the book where Pamuk through his narrator in Chapter 'I am called "Butterfly", explains about Style and Signature:

As long as the number of worthless artists motivated by money and fame instead of pleasure of seeing and a belief in their craft increases, we will continue to witness much more vulgarity and greed akin to this preoccupation with 'style' and 'signature'. I made this introduction because this was the way it is done, not because I believed what I said. True ability and talent couldn't be corrupted even by the love of gold or fame. Furthermore, if truth be told, money and gold are inalienable rights of the talented [...]

Detail review shall follow once I finish the book, whenever that may happen. Or so I hope!

As a bonus, to all you handful but wonderful followers of my blog, I would like to pose this quote by Mario Vargas llosa. (See, I can be very kind and generous too, at times).

Prosperity or egalitarianism- you have to choose. I favor freedom, you never achieve real equality anyway. You simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

Wonderwall

Wonderwall by Ryan Adams remains my most treasured song, probably, in all my lives. The composition gets even more special because it belonged to Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind.



I haven't been able to keep count of how many times I have seen this movie or others in which Kate Winslet has acted. Revolutionary Road, The Holiday, The Life of David Gale, The Reader. She is a bliss, she is magical. Her performances are powerful. Burnt-orange color haired, free spirited Clementine of Eternal Sunshine remains my personal favorite and somewhere in that space also belongs April Wheeler of Revolutionary Road.

In Broken Images

Happen to read this poem, In Broken Images by Robert Graves. Sharing it here for greater common good. Its about our perceptions and of two or more facets of anything and our penchant to pick and stick to our very own version.

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images.

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images,

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance.

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact,
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact.

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses.

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images.

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

~Robert Graves

Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground

I recently managed to understand what Orhan Pamuk was implying when he said,

It was as if Dostoevsky was whispering into my ear, teaching me secret language of the soul, pulling me into a society of radicals who, though inflamed by dreams of changing the world, were also locked into secret organizations and taken with the pleasures of deceiving others in the name of revolution, damning and degrading those who did not speak their language or share their version.

Above is quoted from Pamuk's views on Notes from Underground in Other Colours and how deeply he was impacted by it and how it was also one of the key readings early in his life to shape and shook his thinking. Pamuk's Other Colours remains one of the most important book that I have read to say, if, I have to be economical with words. Returning to Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, sample these.

Man has such predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

And what is it that civilization softens in us? The only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations- and absolutely nothing more. Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers?

Our choice is usually mistaken from a false view of our advantage.

For if a desire should come into conflict with reason we shall then reason and not desire, because it will be impossible retaining our reason to be senseless in our desires, and in that way knowingly act against reason and desire to injure ourselves.

And finally the notes that struck me the deeply,

You know the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia.

All "direct" persons and men of actions are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you: in consequence of their limitation they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones, and in that way persuade themselves more quickly and easily than other people do that they have found an infallible foundation for their activity, and their minds are at ease and that is the chief thing.

George Orwell's 1984

Much has been written about this classic, 1984 by George Orwell and in all its sanity, justifiably so. I am glad to have it read and honestly it was easy as the book seemed to pace itself and pages turned swiftly and effortlessly. I hope no one misses this book in their lifetime. I was struck with its finesse, right from the beginning, where in opening pages, Winston Smith, the protagonist, contemplates about and pen and yet to be written creamy paper. He goes on to think:

The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil.

To mark the paper was a decisive act.

All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

But he realized, even in his panic he had not wanted to smudge the creamy paper by shutting the book while the ink was wet.

And what follows in the remaining pages is nothing but similar genius quality. Don't miss it.

Inverted

With clear sky under your feet,
you will always be head over heels.