Reveal 7 random things about you

A fat friend of mine whom I know from schooldays (or at least that's how I would like to remember him even if he loses his weight) wrote an entry on his blog about "7 random things about you" at the behest of some other friend of his. My initial reaction was to ridicule him for claiming that he is tidy (or what he calls as his 'organized chaos') since I know from college days that his room was far from it. It was littered with the junk and filth he collected from his seniors. But then I refrained from calling him out on it, mainly because I had started to think whether I also have 7 random things that I could write about myself, that is, do I know myself well enough to write 7 such things? After a bit of struggle, I finally managed to write them down:

1. I like to imagine myself sitting at a window in an old English style cottage on some remote East Coast island. From there I watch the gentle waves of the ocean as they caress the pebbly beach lying beyond a vast patch of sun dried beach grass. I sit at that window all day, envying the playful gulls as they hover above fishing boats in fearless joy. But when I hear the whistle of the occasional ferries that arrive at this island's harbor, I get reminded of the mainland to which I belong, and from which I am always eager to escape, even if only for a moment, even if only on a flight of fantasy.

I did manage to escape to this island once on a cold and misty December morning. It goes by the name of Block Island.

2. I like to wander through a city's streets and back alleys, like a ghost, free of all commitments, worries and squabbles of everyday life, indifferent to all feelings of pain and joy, and just content to watch other people as they go about with their miserable and mundane life. They are all performers on a stage who are blissfully unaware that I am one of their greatest admirers. And so, as a ghost I am fully free to enjoy my anonymity amidst these teeming millions of gifted playwrights and talented performers. They all can act without memorizing any script or having any rehearsals. They come and go, shouting out their lines at random, but still behaving as if their cacophony has some definite meaning. Does this play belong to the Theater of the Absurd? Am I watching Ionesco's The Bald Soprano? But no, this is not it. Gradually I have realized that although this play is meaningless, it is still an epic drama -one whose plot and scenes are totally unknown to the entire cast, and even to a ghost.

3. I like to read fiction and to watch movies. They allow me to forget the burden of existence, which according to me, like almost everything else, is completely meaningless. And any attempt by human beings to assign meanings will be quite arbitrary, and therefore, must be rejected. Some of my friends say that I am a 'nihilist', maybe so, but such labels have no meaning for either me or any true nihilists as far as I can tell.

4. I like to sit in coffee shops and bookstores, and preferably in bookstores with coffee shops. One awakens the mind, the other awakens the senses.
The Rittenhouse Square Barnes & Nobles has a cafe that is particularly interesting; you get to enjoy your coffee under the watchful eyes of Kafka, Joyce, Shaw, Wilde, Woolf, Twain, Tagore, and a host of other literary geniuses, who all share the cafe walls with many yellow hued photos of 19th century Philadelphia.

5. I have a love-hate relationship with my hobbies of painting and sculpting. I have a habit of destroying these works, and I have been like that since childhood. I am very self-destructive; it brings me great suffering and melancholy -the two basic ingredients I need to transform me into my ghost.

6. I am anti-religion to the core.

Religions are the most dangerous invention of human imagination. If mankind has to progress and survive, religions must die, along with all their delusional saints, prophets, charlatans, fanatics, gods and goddesses (yes, I refuse to use capital letters for them). All that should survive this purge are the elaborate tales about these beings that we have spun for our impromptu script, so ardently and desperately with the hope of giving some meaning to our wretched lives, or perhaps to convince ourselves that receiving justice is our birth-right, and that we all will get it someday, if not in this life then in the afterlife for sure. Till then we can only seek pity. The idea of an unfair world is so terrifying that we prefer to live in hope than to face reality. Some like me turn to fiction and fantasy instead. That way they can live in a much fairer and colorful world and carry it around within the modest enclosure of their skull, at least as long as the chemicals inside it permit them to do so.

7. I like to travel.

In my memory, Chicago is Steel Gray, New York is Blue, San Francisco is Orange, Seattle is Bluish Gray, Rome is Brick Orange, Venice is Ocean Blue, Portland (Oregon) is Green, Boston and Delhi are Red, and Calcutta is faded Yellow, like the shades of old photographs from an album that was locked up in a chest and later forgotten along with other memories of yesteryears. I have also seen many photos of the same hue lining the walls of a Philadelphia bookstore's cafe; they were pictures of busy markets, trams, and horse drawn carriages -like the ones I saw in front of the Victoria Memorial when I was a boy growing up in Calcutta.

The yellow photos of Calcutta that my mind has preserved, although somewhat damped and discolored, remind me of the city's lawless yellow taxis and policemen in yellow khakis who have to regularly teach them the law for a nominal bribe; the yellow school building where I wasted twelve years of my life; the yellow pages of the used books bought in College Street; the yellow facade of Medical College where patients and their relatives lie scattered on the front stairs like victims of a massacre; the yellow coaches of metro rail that slither in the city's underground passages and the decrepit yellow trams that once ruled the city's surface; the yellow rajbhogs and yellow kachuris that my grandma liked; the yellow saree that my mother sometimes wore; the yellow goddess with ten arms and four children who comes to Baghbazzar year after year without any slightest change in her routine; the yellow marigold garlands that adorn her neckline; the penniless yellow eyed drunks who having fallen out of the goddess' grace lie next to the drains overflowing with yellow urine; the yellow dump trucks of KMC (formerly CMC) that collect all this shit and garbage from the city, and the yellow river Ganga that dutifully washes away all the city's filth and sins into the heart of Sunderbans -the islands where yellow tigers live, and where playful gulls hover above fishing boats in fearless joy as I watch them from another continent, miles and miles away, through the imaginary window of an old English cottage on a remote island, where I travel freely in space and time, seeking refuge from the realities of my unscripted life.

The controversy surrounding M. F. Hussain's citizenship

I was constantly surprised to see how irrational most people's views are when it comes to social issues, and in this particular case, about freedom of expression. I read this entry titled, "Does India deserve M F Hussain?" on Soutik Biswas' BBC blog. There was a long list of vitriolic comments left by the angry mob, consisting mainly of patriotic Indians, proud of their new found wealth and status in the world, confident of their self-assuring rhetorics about diversity and tolerance. Most commentators identified themseleves as Hindus, some of whom, surprisingly enough, even claimed that they were liberals, only with a small yet immensely confusing clarification that they were of a special kind that respects freedom of expression in arts provided that it doesn't cross the boundaries of tolerance, that is, as long as their holy cows aren't tickled. As far as I can see, they are the moderates who mistakenly believe that they are liberals, or perhaps enjoy proclaiming themselves as liberals. Anyway, I don't intend to appear condescending based on such trivial matters of nomenclature, especially not when all their arguments can be deconstructed point-by-point to reveal their meaninglessness. The bulk of their opinions fall into one or more of the following four categories, each of which are nothing more than a reflection of the prevalent illogical and reactionary sentiments which continue to plague India's social progress.

(1) Some readers feel that M. F. Husain should have depicted some Muslim or Christian Prophets in nude so as to balance out his 'offenses' in the eyes of Hindus. Their claim is that Hindus are more tolerant and that Husain has exploited this tolerance.

This is by far the most ignorant and illogical argument. It seems that our standard of tolerance has gone down to such a level where Hindus think that they are being more tolerant as long as they don't end up killing an artist for his artworks. Extremism is not the benchmark against which tolerance is to be judged because in that way any fundamentalist action, no matter how damaging and disreputable, can be passed off as a mark of tolerance. Such incidents have happened even in the past with Deepa Mehta and Taslima Nasreen's works, and their recurrences only prove how intolerant the Indian society is, no matter how fervently one claims otherwise. Indians should not even approve, encourage or justify such behaviors, irrespective of what other countries and their religions do. Husain should be free to paint anything he wants, and in similar way, all bans on Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses', Taslima Nasreen's books should be lifted. Those who don't like an artist's work can write a rebuttal or review, but have no right to stop him or her from creating their art or prevent others from enjoying it. Only a psychologically repressed society advocates violent retribution, and unfortunately, India is one, as amply demonstrated by most of the commentators. How did it all come to this is a question that one often wonders when they look at the creativity of our predecessors. For India to truly develop, advances in technology must be accompanied with much needed social reforms.

(2) Some comments argue that Husain's art goes against Indian 'morality'

This too is entirely meaningless, since morality is not an absolute concept; it is subjective, and above all, it continuously evolves over time, and rightly so. In fact, it is the duty of an artist to challenge the prevalent notions of morality and to make people question them so that we don't get stuck with false, yet well-accepted, notions about morals. In any case it is not some abstract notion of morality that Husain's art poses a threat to, if at all, it just exposes the fact that the idea of morality, at least among a large portion of the Indian population, is too closely associated with religious beliefs or simplistic sentimentality as opposed to conscientiousness.

(3) A few commentators suggest that Husain should have been more 'sensitive' about general public opinion.

Artists are perhaps the most sensitive and conscious beings in the first place. Over the course of mankind's progress, it has been the artists, scientists, and philosophers who have mostly held ideas that were extremely unpopular, if not downright unacceptable, to the general public at the time. And so they made many enemies. But that didn't stop them from provoking the public again and again, not out of malice but out of the sheer need to seek truth and to enlighten the masses. If the argument that one should not express oneself out of sensitivity towards the general public opinion was justified, then we would have lost most of the great writers, painters, playwrights, and in fact, we would still be believing that the earth is the center of the solar system. Therefore, it is not only appropriate but also necessary that thinkers continue to offend the general public by forcing them to face realities and questioning their holy cows. Public opinion cannot be a consideration while expressing oneself through painting or writing; if the public doesn't like it then they can simply turn their back. An art form that is unaesthetic it will die out naturally.

In conclusion, it is important to accept that Indians need to show true tolerance instead of simply speaking about it, and that overlooking or denying our society's flaws is not an act of patriotism, but correcting them is. What India desperately needs is a wave of social reforms -an Indian renaissance that will enlighten both its thriving middle income class and its oppressed lower income class. While the technological progress is already happening, the cultural and social reforms are yet to be seen. It is the artists who can show the way. But time is of essence; the nuovo rich society is being numbed by the comforts of the cozy multiplexes and shopping malls and are simply turning apathetic to the need to fight against all kinds of bigotry, religious dogmatism, superstition, and ignorance. It will not be possible to sustain the country's progress in the absence of that consciousness.