Attitude!

 I have always wondered at this so-called 'attitude'. Why is it that extreme uncouth, arrogant behaviour be called so? What a misnomer indeed!

Attitude, if you were to look up the simplest dictionary, is something basically positive. It suggests a mental framework through which we comprehend the world. In psychology hence, we have the 'positive' attitude, a mental schema that suggests an optimistic outlook.

The so-called 'attitude', indeed it is difficult to guess why this populist misnomer, is weird. It is exhibitionism of the worst type. It is downright aggressiveness though it is considered, oh, both hot and cool!

Actually such kind of cheap show of superiority complex is in reality a  deep sense of inferiority. To hide it, there is this facade of arrogance. Deep within, all these people are extremely  insecure and unsure of themselves. To hide this truth from others, and especially from their own selves, emerge  these pretenses as defense  mechanism.

Such people are to be pitied than hated. They are their own victims. It is a kind of psychological autoimmune disease that deeply destroys them, their own selves, their own self esteem.

If they cross their limits because you are decent, better make these filmy melodrama wallah's a public mock. If you manage that when they irritate you despite ignoring them, you have put them in their place. 

Actually though, our strategy,unless repeatedly provoked, should be pity and ignore them. Did not Blake say,"Where pity, love and peace dwell/there God resides, too"!

Pratima@ Attitude, actually,  means a little something that makes a big difference.

S(h)ame, s(h)ame!

 What you do not want to be done to you, do not do it to others. That is the advice  religion and philosophy bombard us with. Yes, I have used the verb 'bombard' carefully and knowingly.  Well, I believe the principle thus stated and/or its inverse/reverse are not always right or so followed in the reality. In fact, they can be downright destructive of your social standing at times!

Let me tell you why/how I arrived at this conclusion. I was travelling back home after my P.G. lectures. Most commuters on the bus looked dead tired, and were, like me, stealing a wink of a sleep, too, as much and as often as possible.

It was at the Deccan bus stop that this girl got on to the bus.  Near Alka Theater, the very next bus stop, she was screaming at a dicey fellow who tried to touch her inappropriately. In her anger, she yelled,  "what would your mother or sister feel or do if they were to face such behaviour?" 

Before the entire bus, shocked by his crude and vulgar answer, came to senses, he got off smirking. You know what this beastly remark was? He casually said, "my mother would love it. So would my sister!"

What-about-ery does not always help. Very few people have, forget empathy, even sympathy. With the consumerist mindset ruling the roost, instant gratification by any means, and anyhow, is what matters the most for the majority. Ethics has taken the backmost seat long long ago. So never ask anyone the question, "in the same situation, how would you feel/act?" Such a horror would be the answer, you would feel,  "shame, shame"!

Pratima@ we are mere sidekicks in most people's scenarios! " extras in their play" opines Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Making Meaning

 Have you seen that confusion confounded in mystery covered up in a puzzle? Oh, yea, I am referring to illusion art.

Very intricate is this version of art. The artist has to create a painting operational at multiple levels. It essentially has to be multidimensional. It houses very many realities in it, and the wonder of wonders is that all the aspects are present and yet absent at the same time. Obviously an absolutely virtuoso performance!

This form of art is still more special because it is the best example of the spectator finally completing the meaning in/of the frame. Indeed, finally, the meaning of art lies in the audience perspective. Whatever might be the intention of the artist while creating it, it is the viewers who finally decide the meaning of the art, whatever might be the form of the art. 

Let me give you an example. Coleridge's great poem "Christabel" can be seen as a narrative poem, as dramatic verse, as a gothic text, et al. Personally, I feel it is about the corruption of gullible innocence that thinks the whole world is as good as self. Hence I find in it a great variation on/of the Christian myth of the pre-lapsarian and the post-lapsarian realities.

In fact, since readers/audience can thus find new meanings to/in them, the ancient texts appeal to us. Otherwise, why read the works by  Sophocles or Shakespeare or Kalidas?

True,  in brief, that art allows fluidity of interpretations. The illusion art excels in this aspect of art though. In the same innocent frame would be innocuously hidden multiple perspectives which are both present and absent at the same time.  The viewer is challenged to locate all these.

Art and its interpretation thus become a 'heady' job indeed. This intellectual challenge is often supposed to be full of psychological meanings. If you see the hare first, you are left-brained, while if you see the duck, you are right-brained apparently. Most often such a painting proves most viewers to be harebrained though.

My problem with such interpretations is that not only do I see the duck and the hare simultaneously, I can also spot the squirrel the psycho interpreters never assign any value to!

Which proves perfectly my point  about making meaning. Art and the meaning lie in the eye of the beholder!

Pratima @ art is great because it eternally challenges us and our fixed paradigms in to newer moulds.

Severest Suffering

 Like the play I described in the blog yesterday, the following incident, too, took place in the CIEFL.  Well, I was the Mess Secretary. There was a huge influx of the floating population of short term course students that December.

My attempt was to give a truly wholesome, varied and yet not horribly expensive fare to one and all. Believe me,  being a mess secretary when  some two  hundred  strong student population, all adults in a varied age group of twenty three to fifty-five, eats there thrice a day, is quite bothersome. 

People may eat the simplest, tasteless food at home. Their expectations shoot sky high when they are in the institute mess, for example. At times, so obsessed can they be over some minor item that you wonder if they have come to  study or to hog. Soul curry and food for thought are laughable concepts in such contexts. 

There are all sorts of stakeholders, moreover; the mess workers, their regional affiliations, their hidden associations with regular students and the teaching staff, the institutional canteen owner, the service providers, the hostel office staff‌, and the warden. All sorts of politics is eternally brewing, cooking up in such a situation.

Yet I could manage to make the show run rather well. Most of the participants were very happy indeed. The evening tea used to be at five and it would go on for half an hour. As the mess  secretary, one should keep on checking the process at all sorts of times. So I came to the mess hall at 5.30ish that evening.

The mess was getting lonelier as people mostly used to crowd in at 5ish. There was a lovely tree nearby. I had a nice cuppa sitting under it, watching the ants run their eternal errands. I had a brief talk with the mess workers regarding the dinner, and I thought I would get back to my room/studies.

Suddenly there was this man in his mid fifties who said he would like to talk to me. Well, I had always kept an aloof profile, especially because I used to be truly busy with research work and language learning simultaneously. 

I hence wondered what this total stranger, he was from the short term courses, would have to say to me. Some mess bother, I thought. Suddenly he asked me if I am from Pune and if Bider is a railway junction on the way. Yes, I said, but the train would be there at about two a.m. One never really gets to see it hence, though it is at this junction that the train truly diverts.

He said suddenly , my son got off there while travelling to Mumbai. It seems his son was hyper intelligent, committed, a good boy. For getting water, he got off the train and the train started, it seems. In the hurry to get on to the train, he was crushed under, between the platform and the wheels.

Well, I had never expected any such incident to unfold. I was young, too. Nor had I experienced any such huge tragedy in my life. For a minute, I was so severely shocked I did not know what to say. 

But then I made that hapless father sit down, talked to him of all sorts of consolation possible. Basically I made him realise that I shared his sad shock . At the end of our talk for some fifteen minutes, he said, "I do not know why I felt like talking to you. I thought you alone would understand."

My 'wedding guest moment' as in Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner' thus turned in to one of my hugest compliments by a total stranger. I would never ever meet that person again. The only thing I know of him was that he was from a very small village on the Kerala-Tamilnadu-Karnataka border. I do not know any of these languages either.

Yet it makes me feel a tremendous sense of soul satisfaction that I could heal in a minor way a suffering father's oozing wound, and that a total stranger felt I could be a humane, sensitive person. Thanks be to my upbringing and my love for literature, I believe.

A child dying is the worst possible trauma, I think. Especially unfathomed would be the father's unspoken grief that he cannot even give a voice to, given the societal gender roles. If there has been any minor misunderstanding with the child just before the incident, difficult to imagine would be the eternal self torment, the constant march of grief accompanied with self recrimination. Impossible even to imagine.

Remembered all of this because my cousin wrote to me about his son's death anniversary . One could sense the raw grief behind the philosophical explanations of  religious texts. I have shared this kind of intense suffering when a colleague lost her ten year old son. Such was the deep pain that later, when I was explaining the mp Wordsworth poem on the same theme, my students felt I was near tears.

Well, life very very very rarely gives a second chance. Most people are unfortunate thus. Better to live every moment most sensitively!

Pratima@you never know how strong you are unless there is no alternative to being strong, I suppose!

The wor(l)d is the stage

 The world is indeed the stage. We have the authority, the alibi of the great Bard to authenticate this truism. Not only in exam answer sheets but even on the actual stage, all of us would love to follow the path he details.

Yes, each one of us would like to don the grease paint. But we all know the selection process at the school level! Most all great, celebrated actors were denied any stage presence by their respective schools. How can my school be an exception to this universally accepted truth?

At the college level, there are cliques, dominating even the practice hall. Less said about such grandees, the better! And yet in my stints as a lecturer at the BMCC, the SNDT, the  SP and the P.G.Wing, Gholap college, I had wonderful opportunities at this creative and fulfilling passion. More about each one of these, some other time.

Since it is the World Theater Day today, let me right now talk of the street play I wrote, directed, enacted in at the CIEFL. The theme was the ills that dog the educational system. To make it a complete critique within some forty five minutes, I chose the format of scenes depicting typical systemic ills, strung together through a chorus. 

To make the street play truly full of punches, I used many parodies of famous Bollywood songs. As it was a very democratic, open attempt, during the practice, we all fine tuned the parodies, added a few more, and so on. When our troupe of committed but amateur actors used to practice under the canopy of the huge tree right in front of the academic building, the monkeys in the branches above would chatter if the voice rose a little too high pitched.

As it was a street play, our costumes ,we could assemble them from our own personal clothes. Instead of elaborate drapery, I came up with the idea of pungent placards. We worked on these most creatively. Oh, yes, the Office Superintendent called me aside to convey the Registrar's message that nothing be objectionable. I suppose, a sweet smile a la mysterious Madame Mona Lisa is the best antidote to such censoring! 

It was all word of mouth publicity. Yet there was a sizable audience; in fact, it was full forum. As the theme was so close to everyone's heart, we got a very enthusiastic response, too. Immediately after the performance, in the  institute Mess, I was congratulated by even the floating population of students who were there for short term courses. A pan Indian appreciation it was, given the institute profile. The usual chatterati, the dear 'dahlings', too, could not help but say good things, even behind the back!

As I was  basking in this glory in my own mind, a surprise was awaiting me in the wings, so to say. The next morning, Prof Amrutavalli, who was not exactly  very fond of me; in fact, I was not even a regular student of Linguistics, called me. I was a little worried and nervous as I had often seen her enact the Vesuvius.

Surprise of surprises, she asked me to submit the script which she said she would preserve. As the Head of the RTV (Radio and T.V.) Department, she said she wanted us to perform yet again, and it would get recorded.

Well, I do not exactly know why/how the posterity is never going to enjoy that great recording, but the perfect script is still with me in multiple copies.

Yes, dear Will, the wor(l)d is indeed a stage. Here is a  debut director, dramaturge and a debutante actor bowing down to your infinite wisdom as ever!

Pratima @ "suit the action to the word/the word to the action" to hold the mirror up to nature as Hamlet would advise. You indeed said it, dear Shakespeare!

Making memories

Time flies. With a breakneck speed. The shadows that it leaves has multiple shades to them.

It is difficult to believe that a year has just passed by the fatal day. Throughout the year, there have been very many times I felt she is very much there, may be, at Raju's or Sanju's place. Often my impulsive response to some event or the other would be 'Aai needs to know this'.

Yet, despite the loss, March 26, 2022 had indeed a good feel to it as it asserted yet again that  she is alive in so many hearts that cared for her. Vinaya, whom she alone called Bakuli, remembered her as soon as the day began. She helped out with  the subtitles of the video I made for Aai. Her newly married son, Rohan, worked at it far away in Australia. 

Heartfelt messages, chats, phone calls kept on pouring in. Prakash Mama, her brother for whom she was a proxy little mother in his childhood, liked my write-up on her, for instance. Her nephews and nieces remembered her most fondly. So did obviously her immediate family.

What I mean to say is that we carry on with life. We have to. There is not any alternative available. Time shoots like an arrow, straight ahead, never to  come back.

It is hence necessary to create as many good memories as is possible within the limited period that could be allowed,  that is allotted, to us. It is with this firm "re-solve" that I bid a final farewell to this year of mourning.

She, like Papa, would always be there. Tears, like right now, are umpteen times going to well up in my eyes. Yet, hereafter, I shall not wallow in grief. Instead, I shall spend every minute in a way that would make them both be proud of me, as they always were during their lifetime. 

Pratima@ parents much missed/how memories cherished call out/beyond boundaries

The Dark Night of the Soul

 That fatal, dark night exactly a year ago! It was March 25, Thursday, while this year March 25 falls on a Friday.

Aai had to be fed nasally, directly in to the stomach. She hated such indignities. Due to the hospitalisation, it was made compulsory by the doctors. I asked Amit if she can be bottle fed or if the tube can be removed. Her doctor was not ready for it, anyways.

Actually, it was inevitable that she would not be able to long tolerate the tubes. I had earlier heard her repeatedly talk about how hard, in fact, impossible, she found the plight of her cousin or her distant friend. Hyper self-respecting and basically a healthy-ish person despite the b.p. and diabetes, quite under control, though she had to take medicines for some twenty years to keep them checked, she disliked intensely the nasal feed, et al. 

How I wish she would not have to go to the hospital! No use now discussing why she had to be taken there. It requires tremendous courage and ethics to accept one's mistakes! Very, very rare are people who own up their misdeeds how much later they regret or rue their hurried carelessness.

Actually Dr. Khare checked her on Tuesday late at night. Once again on Wednesday, he was here at home as he had to fetch his oxymeter he forgot here. I fed her all the feeds at the right time, her medicines as usual.Only the elektral, as an energiser, though not compulsory, given the drastically reduced quantity of food, had yet to be given.

I woke up at four-ish after a tired, stressed sleep. I tube fed the elektral water, quite a longish process. She appeared okayish. By the time, I washed the entire equipment, it was almost 4.30. 

I thought better to check all her basics before going back to sleep. Suddenly the oxymeter would not show any activity. I checked it on me. Then I realised something is the problem. I called up Dr. Khare, he came almost immediately. But it was no use.

I do know I, too, would die one day. What was tough for me was the fact that just within thirty minutes or so, an entire lifetime changed!

The only consolation I have is she breathed her last in her own bed at her own home. It must have been terrible, the last moments, given the heart attack. But she looked peaceful, almost as if in deep sleep, fast asleep. There was no disfigurement due to death.  Most importantly, her sad demise could be honoured, unlike millions who died a very sad death  due to covid.

I felt numb like anything. Some part of it yet lingers. Well, I am not exactly a person who can showcase her grief and bereavement. Yet I remember the doctor had to remind me that I should call up Raju-Sanju. I was so dazed that I remember factually talking to Dhanu who was weeping inconsolably when she called up. Dr. Khare was still there,too. Finally, he had to ask me to throw the catheter in the dustbin.

Tough were those hours. I do know that instead of her suffering more and more due to bedsores, and all, she literally slept/slipped in to that eternal sleep, in a quite okayish condition peacefully. She did respond quite well to the Doctor's queries on Tuesday. Her mind was strong, but the body was weakened beyond tolerance. 

Every year March 25 will come, but never this dark night of the soul!

Pratima@tears, not shed, are the real language of deep grief.