straying consciously

MFH turned 94 the other day. Whatever else he may be, he is constantly changing his views. His views change but not his manner. What he said regarding Mumbai films a few years back seems to have changed. Now he calls them all 'nautanki'! Yet the way he says it, the attitude and elan, the nonchalance, has not changed. He contradicts himself, he is large...

To Expect him not to change is to expect him to be dull. That may diminish him, re-size him a bit. Hussain can not be re-sized. He is a massive program, stretched over 90 years! And he gets upgraded; he flows with times, adapting, shifting, again adapting...

For instance, he said regarding Indian artists something else with the same conviction few years back as he said recently to the effect that those who have (...) in them stay, the rest are eliminated. He does not seem to consider the timing and the infinite variety in the taste, often bad, of some connoisseur who can overnight 'make' an artist.

If the man is talking about his own staying power, well, I have nothing to say. I have nothing to say regarding his painting, too, except that I do not like them a great deal. There is nothing I can do to stop him though, so what I think does not matter at all.

For all his histrionics his self imposed exile is an escape. What does he have to lose at 94? He says he wants to return 'home', yet he would rather stay in N.Y. and elsewhere for fear of a few cases against him. What could happen if he is incarcerated? In his cell he will have enough wall space to paint his heroic trajedies! 

Heroic trajedies? The words contradict. So what? Contradictions are a norm apropos of MFH.

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Lata Mangeshkar is 80.

My admiration of this unassuming lady borders on worship. But I am not a worshiper. I have other ways in which to adore.It is my own thing.

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I guess I have lost a bit of my naivete of late. Now I dare to stick on to doing what I think I like doing. Previously I used to be rather impressionable. Well, people forcefully say what they want to. Neither their force, nor their opinion, need determine what I should like or do. It takes all kinds. So me, I am what I am, or as my profile says, "I am just about me" ...

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Blogging interests me. I follow some blogs. Not all I follow I do for the same reason. There is one from Scotland by Kim Ayers called ' ramblings of the bearded one'. I like his 'straight-from-the-heart approach. I am happy that his blog got noted by the powers that be and now Kim is, well, a cyber-celeb of sorts. He himself seems to be affected by the adulation, for the last few ramblings of his are, indirectly, about fame and stuff connected with all that. I hope he prevails; has it in him to see the chimerical edge of fame. The net can kill a man's simplicity.

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Right to beat

Indian Express today carries on it's first page this: 

"Hands down, TN women surpass men in justifying wife-beating".

Nalini Ravichandran/ENS reports: "a study by International Institute for population Sciences reveals that 51% of young men and 56% of young women in Tamil Nadu justify wife-beating".

Well, what can you say?

The four 'circumstances' under which wife-beating is justified are

• suspicion of wife's fidelity to her hubby
• refusal to kowtow to hubby's opinion (!)
• going out without permission
• refusal to have sex with  Mr. hubby....

I am shocked!

In the first instance, he only has to just so much as suspect her fidelity! He may himself have two wives (cinna veedu) and screw around the entire jungle, hopping from woman to woman. Fucking silver back morality or what? In this case poaching seems good. It should be encouraged, methinks!

The article does not say all that but it is pretty common, no? And 56% women subscribe to this lawlessness. This,clearly, is a sleaze.

On count 2 the article says that if the wife has an opinion different from her hubby then he is justified in beating her. Hello? What is this, a domestic third Reich? In this case women should revolt against suppression of the divine fundamental right to think.

Going out without permission! Going out of the house without hubby's permission! I wonder what marriage is supposed to imply. Not ownership certainly? But this third 'circumstance ' amounts to that.

Fourth one is pathetic. Husband comes home to a tired wife, hot and horny from all those ads and stuff and hot film-numbers whirling in his head and he demands his right to rape.

The dictionary definition of the R word is this:

1- "force to have sexual intercourse...against their (victim's) will."

2- "carnal knowledge of a woman without her legal consent"

If the woman says "please, not today", or, "not now", the husband is justified in not only raping her, but also, beating her prior to raping. NOT GUILTY ON BOTH COUNTS...sometimes, animal sexual behavior seems several times better. At least it is not 'whenever he wants to'.

What is particularly annoying is that many of these young adults are what is called 'educated'. Educated in what? Systematic rape?

For most part, tradition is synonymous with backwardness.

extract from a letter

 ...I am  a self-acclaimed pacifist myself. 'Peace', like everything else, lends itself to a range of interpretations. Peace is at the core of every societal  aspiration and adventure of man. Aman is the root driving force as claimed by the interpreters of Islam. Of Christianity, it it the very symbol. Shanti is the condition and the aim of every vedic ritual, I think, which is why most shlokas (which I have read at least) end with an invocation "om shanti shanti shantihi..." All major religions have a peace agenda, as I see it.
The avataric organisation of life as presented in our two major itihasas, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are actually stories of valiant fighters...(fighters who fought to establish peace? May be.)
The entire interpretation of both, the word and the principle, must needs a central and overarching, an extra-large super-objective without which it is as futile as trying to catch your own shadow. Small goals with peace as its condition is fine, but the condition itself has to be established in the first place, and it should have an enduring basis.
The thing is, unless the ultimate goal is not defined, it is pointless to run after the 'maaricha' ( the golden deer, chimera etc.) of peace. If the goal is peace, the way to it is toil. If the goal be toil, it is a perverted objective and must be shunned.
Peace is central to Auroville's goal as well as the road to it. And thanks to an early recognition of my affinity with Sri Aurobindo, it is personally one of my favorite subjects.
Om shanti shanti shantihi...
 

Love to all...
Charudatta Ram Prabhudesai

Irony

In this otherwise irregular, unreliable (anittyam, asukham) Bharatvarsha of ours, some odd things have a clockwork precision. You wish for these things to happen less punctually or others, which are reliable, to be not so damn reliable. But that is mere wishing. It need not yield in India.

For punctuality, I am referring to power cuts: A threateningly rare number of professionals keep their appointment without an excuse for the inadvertent (always!) delay. A carpenter says that he will be there @ x.yy hrs, but he shows up just as you are preparing to get your afternoon siesta five hrs later, just when you do not want to be disturbed. The chap who has to do a routine UPS/inverter monthly check comes a month or two later. You ask him about the check for the previous month and he says, "my boys came, but no one was there." National dailies slog it 24/7/365 to bring the daily news to people on a daily basis, but the delivery man DOES NOT deliver your paper when it rains. Why? "because nerriya mallay peieeda, sorry Sar!" You want to ask whether he is sorry because it rained, or because he did not bring the paper.

These things get at me, these lies and the shoddy state of affairs and the irregularity and above all the total absence of professionalism. But the regular punctuality with which they cut your current supply is something which really upsets me. They announce in the papers, " due to X reason the transformer at XXX is in a state of disrepair..........

THERE IT IS, THE CURRENT IS OFF! RADIO STATIONS AND THE TV STATIONS PLEASE ADJUST YOUR CLOCKS! IT IS 9 O'CLOCK, THURSDAY THE 17 SEPTEMBER 2009.......(it is 9.2 as I type this!)

......I read in the Hindu this morning an announcement about the power cut today between 9.00 and 17.00. I had about 18 minutes to write this and post before the cut. And Lo! What I am writing about has come to pass. That is what I am saying - this almost eerie reliability! Unfortunately it happens only in matters of vital necessity like power supply. As for the rest, it is best left unmentioned.

The other thing that punctures my balloon of mirth is the sticky sticker on plastic bottles or cups and other bottled products. I believe that those bottles are designed for reuse. After you have finished the contents of one you want to wash the bottle for reuse and so you start scrubbing the unassuming little sticker. It simply does not come off! You soak it in eau d'javel, burn it on glass bottles, scape with cutters, knives or blades, it simply remains there, stuck and unyielding. That, too, makes me mad. Paula and I call it "indian-design".

Revolutionaries

One of the exercises when we begin work on a new play is that we write an autobiography of the character each one of us, the cast, plays. Writing in the first person gives me that psychological boost to justify my actions on stage as my character's.

In January 2007 we did Hamlet. I played Claudius. Our Hamlet was not the prince of Denmark, but the son of the Chairman of 'Denmark & co'. The play was set in our times of corporates rather than kingdoms, and directors rather than kings. It was called "corporate Hamlet".

That gave me a good deal of space to not only improvise but relate better to the character of Claudius because I found it easier to understand the sub-structure of a rich man's psychological make up better than some near mythical , out-of-reach monarch.

One British critic, taking her presumed authority on everything English for granted - Shakespeare being her national property ! - lampooned our Hamlet. She liked nothing in the play save one of the subordinate grave-digger characters played by the only British player in the cast! She found my Claudius "too kind" to be the "ruthless murderer". Her reason must, obviously, have sought to see my villain through the key-hole of a more established manner of playing villainy on stage. That a villain as cold and calculating as Claudius, the killer of his own brother in Denmark of several centuries past as suggested by Shakespeare in his play, could be played differently was unacceptable to her. But my Claudius was not an absolute Dictator of several centuries past. He was the head of a corporate house in 21st c. He lives in our times when absolute positions are keenly questioned, even challenged. In times such as ours a figure head of a corporate house can not but be diplomatic and cunning. He would be forced by the dictates of the contemporary times to coat his hatred with veneers of smiles and glib talks rather than flick a silent belligerent gesture. My Claudius would HAVE TO BE a con-man and not the "ruthless murderer" of a princely sort. He had to seem kind in gesture and appearance, but wily. Mine was a different Claudius because the premise of our play was different.

The exercise mentioned above helped me to understand for myself the shift in the premise when I started building Claudius. It helped me to break away from stereo-typical, notional portrayal of villainy. I was not merely recreating but creating Claudius, giving the shift in the ideal Claudius a tangible, convincing form. The Claudius I created felt pain. He could laugh and cry with the people he loved - for villains can love too - as real people do.

It is time to create again. We are scheduled to produce a play called 'Revolutionaries'. It is an analysis of events which perhaps determined the colour of what became the erstwhile USSR. The play is set around 1922, one year before Lenin died and Stalin became the socialist dictator.

Waiting

Remembering from past is somewhat like cleaning up the attic. You catch some thread and dig in and once in, you dust-up all those fond memories tucked therein. Though not all are fond, there are those particularly vicious ones, mixed with the ones you want to keep. You have to keep those because it is impossible to chuck them. They are there for you to live with.

I am quite lucky apropos of this. I should suppose so, for I like most of my memories, and, I am rather sympathetic to the undesirable ones. A puritan might see a certain perversion in me, but honestly, I have made peace with most of those bad ones. I see it as my merit!

Not the past, then, but the present it is that I find myself in conflict with. While the past is harmless and the future is far yet, I am ill at ease tackling the lie of the NOW. But then it is there; I am all the more without help. I struggle to channelise this duality, this almost "to be or not to be" aspect , the - always-on-the-brink-of-commitment-factor - into drawing or painting or writing or playing or chatting. I fill up that huge emptiness with 'nonpaying 'activities.

Gap? Yes, gap. Between the causal proposition and effective action thereupon is this spec-like gap to help reflection. Procrastination stretches it, a prompt action resolves it; a new act for a new cause: thus goes the never ending activity of mind. I watch and wait, not knowing quite what or what for.

***

...And then I catch a silk thread and tug at it. Out comes a bundle along with hopes put on hold and crumpled disappointments, missed opportunities and other bric-a-brac. The parcel has a name ... This is not really a memory but a dormant issue that may bring me back again, for it has that unquestionable karmic feel about it. Vis-a-vis this particular one, I wait, too, and I know what I am waiting for. Or is it who? Then again, this may be dormant in my mind alone; for the rest out there it may be dead!

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