My Bookish Woes (2)

I often tell myself that one day, when I grow up, I will read non-fiction too. But for now I am content with my world of fiction. Such a confession often invites judgemental looks. ‘So you don’t want to broaden the scope of your reading? You don’t want to be informed? Don’t you want to grow (and sound) wiser?’ These are the implied questions that are raised along with the eyebrows. The underlying assumption being: fiction is not brain-nourishing, to put it mildly, or that it is juvenile, to put it bluntly.

In the last post I talked about how while growing up I was never introduced to classics. So I was untouched by the art of the Tolstoys, Austens, Brontes, Prousts or Twains. By the time I came to realise the importance and necessity of reading classics, it had been too late. After a point you just have too much on your plate. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to take time out for such pastimes or to make up for what you had missed out in your childhood. And thus you want to make the most out of whatever little you get of this precious reading time. However, for a reader like me this situation presents a new dilemma. Should one read things that one would like to read or one ought to have read by now? Or should one read stuff that’s supposed to make one wiser and more informed (or at least make one sound wiser and more informed)? Of course, I mean non-fiction. 

Whenever I sit to read fiction something in me feels a bit uneasy. Or perhaps guilty. Guilty of not devoting this time to sharpen my wits by reading non-fiction. Does reading Pride and Prejudice not befit me, for it could be written off as nothing more than glorified chic-let romance from the Victorian era? Does reading Madam Bovary (or Lady Chatterley’s Lover) not become me, for it can be scoffed at as nothing but litany of woes of an ingénue who asked for all the trouble? And, of course, won’t my reading Harry Potter, at this age, make no-one want to take me seriously? (Yes, I haven’t read that either; don’t abandon me now please!)

Although people like me would want to believe that reading fiction makes you smarter, there’s not enough credible and concrete proof to suggest so. Thus we still can’t conclusively say that fiction indeed makes us smarter and nicer. 

One may argue that reading fiction comes with its own benefits. The staple ones being: facility with the language, enriched vocabulary, development of the organ of empathy, escape from grim reality, awareness of and exposure to other cultures than your own etc. But are these enough? 

Firstly, it must be stated that fiction is not entirely untruth. It’s not falsified reality; but it is reality ordered and arranged in a certain fashion so as to make it more lucid and tangible. There are indeed additions and subtractions done by a writer to dramatise and to intensify the reality, but the base is, mostly, the lived experience (of the writer’s or of the people they’ve known). Not even wildest of fantastic fiction is without modicum of reality. 

Good fiction can go beyond the aforesaid perks, I feel. It could help you crystallise sentiments that are otherwise amorphous. It breaks down, in words, what you may be feeling at any given point in time, or that you may have felt at a certain point in time in the past. The joy of stumbling upon sentences that capture ever so precisely what you’re feeling is incredible; it makes you want to thank the writer heartily. It could also make you wonder if the writer was snooping upon you, or if the writer is endowed with uncanny prescience. Emerson had once remarked that, “in work of a writer of genius we rediscover our own neglected thoughts”. That’s the beauty of art: it helps you find yourself by losing yourself in it.

  Good fiction can even induce new epiphanies. It holds your hand and leads your way to the threshold of the sanctum of realisation; and then it withdraws its steps as you enter the sanctum, while it stands at the threshold with its arms crossed, smiling, contented in the knowledge that within you’re revelling in the glow of that realisation. Thus in a way good fiction has the potential of not only informing your outlook (‘inlook’ too), but also rendering it anew. Like any other form of art, good fiction could be both informative and transformative.

Another thing that draws me to fiction is that it gives you an impression, even if false, that you can control time. Of all things that are disobedient, time is most annoyingly so. But when you immerse yourself in a good book, time does slow down. You get to observe and dissect those micro-expressions, micro-thoughts, micro-moments that elude us in our high-paced lives. The consciousness of a (good) writer can push itself betwixt two closely overlapping, infinitesimal moments, and then wring out the very essence of all that is felt by us in those fleeting moments, such that the consciousness of the reader can then soak up that distilled essence.

“We can learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology,” Noam Chomsky had once said.

Even if not brain-nourishing, fiction could very well be soul-nourishing. Then, how could a reader, who has already missed out a lot of these wonderful gems in his growing up years, not feel compelled chose fiction over non-fiction? And even while I choose to read fiction, I am torn between the urge to read those classics and the stunning works of contemporary literature. As I read one book I feel tempted to pick another, echoing the perpetual complain of every reader: so many books; so little time! So apparently, my bookish woes aren’t coming to an end anytime soon.

My Bookish Woes (1)

I am writing this sitting in a train and next to me sits an elderly couple. The gentleman is easily in his mid-sixties and is reading a book. Curious to know what book he’s reading I tilt my head at a certain angle, imagining that I am doing so imperceptibly. But it is not so. His wife notices me and asks her husband to show me the book he’s reading. Embarrassed, I smile and thank him.

‘Oh, it’s just a novel! Tell me son does it suit him to be reading such novels at this age? Now at his age he should be reading Gita, but your uncle keeps reading these novels,’ the lady tells me and then chortles. The gentleman stares at her, then at me and goes back to reading his book.
This made me interrupt my own reading and reflect on this incident a bit.

 I was raised in a conservative vaishnav household, wherein reading any kind of secular literature, unless it was academic, was seen to be a form of dawdling. While reading non-fiction still qualified as quality reading, reading fiction (novels particularly) would attract disdainful looks from the elderly. ‘Human form is too precious to be wasted on these fabrications!’ their looks said. Reading novels was for idlers. My grandmother would tell us the story of some distant aunt of ours who’d earned a bad name for herself because she read too many novels; or maybe because all she did was to read novels. We were told that it was difficult finding a match for her. ‘Which saas would want a bahu that just drinks tea and read novels all day?’ my grandmother would say shrugging.

 As a result of this wariness that my folks had vis-a-vis novels, as children we were never exposed to classics; I had not heard of Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters until after I finished college. There was hardly anyone around us who read fiction, which obviously meant there were no works of fiction in the house on which we could lay our hands. This is not to say that there was aversion to books or to reading. In fact while my SoBo peers were reading Austen, Dickens, Twain et al., I was reading Meera, Jaydev, Soordas et al.

Now in retrospect when I analyse the situation, I find it very amusing. In one sense this practice could be seen to be very restrictive and orthodox, depriving a child of the pleasure and treasure of world of fiction. Yet in another sense it could be seen as an exercise in decolonisation, even if inadvertently so. We were not disallowed per se to read these classics, but we were never encouraged either. And even when we did read them (thanks to the school library), we were completely oblivious to the canonical status that these books enjoyed. For us it was just another novel, and for my folks, perhaps just a waste of time (and of the precious human form). We would have never gotten around to appreciating the indigenous literatures, if we were distracted, or even possibly consumed, by the glamour of the English classics or novels in general.

However, this ostensibly decolonising practice could have also taken a perilous turn: it could have made us myopic and parochial, and worse still, chauvinistic. We too could have turned into narrow-minded nincompoops, who are so blinded by the almost mythical glory of the past that they fail to realise its goriness. But we were salvaged. And like it is almost every other time, this time too it was mummy dearest to our rescue.

My mother had been a reader in her childhood. And I can safely assume that she must have been a secret reader. I don’t know how and when she lost touch with this side of hers; but during our late-night conversations with her, I distinctly remember, she would often tell us how as a child she was fascinated by the world that Enid Blyton would create in her popular series. She would get us Chandamama (in English) to read and would also often read it to us also. So she was the one who had introduced to the world of fiction.  More importantly, she had also passed on to us her love for languages and reading.

But perhaps it was a little too late. A considerable span of my childhood had already passed without reading fiction, and whatever little I read would not qualify to be called refined literature. Still, the seeds that mother had sown did not go waste.

Much later in my life I decided to study literature formally. And my introduction to literature, and by extension humanities, as an academic discipline prevented my falling prey to chauvinism. (Though I must confess I was almost there. Almost!) It taught me that genius does not belong exclusively to one country, one race, or one community. And, interestingly, my being rooted in the indigenous culture in my growing up years also prevented me from blindly holding the western canon in reverentially high esteem. It taught me that imperfection also doesn’t belong exclusively to one country, one race or one community. So, in a way, it did solve its purpose of decolonisation. To put it simply, I realised: to err is human, and to think that we (the Orient) have never erred or that they(the Occident) cannot err, is bovine!


What I still could not fully shake off was this deeply ingrained guilt I feel while reading novels. Even today, I feel some sense of scruple if I sit to read a novel first thing in the day (no matter however desperately I want to). A couple of years ago an relative of mine had come to visit us. I was in the first year of my master’s and was trying to penetrate Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness. He walked in to my room and upon finding me reading, he asked me hesitantly: ‘beta, is this your course book or just a novel?’ For him a book that was not a course book (prescribed in the curriculum) and was fiction, was still just a novel. Just a(nother) novel. What a waste of the precious human form!

But my bookish woes aren’t confined to just this culturally conditioned guilt. Books now present me with a new and a different set of dilemma. I should try to write about those the next time though. For now I have a book to return to. 

PS. The elderly gent sitting next to me is reading Half Girlfriend

Squalor Of My Thoughts...

Tonight I sit to unload the squalor of my thoughts on to this pristine paper, thereby tainting it. Must not the paper resent me? There are better things that could have been scribbled on it.

And while you think that the daily drudgery of life is a battle in itself, a battle to be fought more with yourself than the world outside, life suddenly delivers a blow so staggering that you reel for days, trying to absorb the enormity of it all. Days! In those days you don’t live life—life lives you. You are just doing one thing after another to deal with the blow, hollowed out and crushed.

You just look around, amused, as the rest of the world moves on at its usual crazy pace, unmoved by your tragedy. You want the world to explode. You want the people to express profuse regret for what life has done to you. You want the world to come to a halt and just tell you how immensely unfair, undeserved, and incredible your suffering is. You want all of them to commiserate; and yet you get grated when the platitudes begin to roll: Keep faith in God. Don’t lose hope. Be positive. Stay strong...

What else can they say? They’re not at fault. Perhaps, they’re right too. Yet it all somehow sounds patronizing. You don’t want to answer the calls of the people who call to ask after how you are coping, for that would make you feel helpless all over again; yet you despise all the people who did not call to check up on you, to extend help. The problem is not them, it’s you. It’s what the tragedy has made out of you. 

You look at yourself in the mirror and realise that you’ve aged, suddenly, rapidly. You see it on your face and you feel it in your body. You begin to feel laugh at people who fuss over petty issues. You begin to hanker after the time you’d fussed over those petty issues. How wonderful those days seem now.  You begin to envy everyone around you who leads a normal life, or normally abnormal life, and deals with normal problems. You begin to wonder how elusive this one thing has been all your life: normalcy. All your life if there’s one thing you’ve craved immensely, it is: normalcy.

In the wake of the blow, though, you begin to see things more clearly. You get to know those who really matter. You get overwhelmed by the kindness and support that pours from unexpected quarters. You get disappointed when people you’d depended on the most turn you down. You look at a random person’s face (as you sit across him in a train) searchingly, meekly hoping that they may see, in turn, all that you cannot show the people you know. Because that will make you seem weak and vulnerable. You want to grab a stranger by their collar and collapse, yelling and crying.

The thing takes the biggest toll is your ego. It gets smashed utterly and brutally. The blanket of insularity you’d wrapped around yourself gets ripped off. The shell of solipsism, that you once aggressively guarded and rationalised, is pounded open and you stare, wistfully, at its bits strewn all about you. You’re left with only two choices: roll at the feet of others and ask for their favour, or perish.

Tonight I sit to unload the squalor of my thoughts on to this pristine paper, thereby tainting it. Must not the paper resent me? There are better things that could have been scribbled on it.

Degrees Of Torture

“Why would someone want to see me at eight in the morning!” was my first response when I was told that the HOD of English department of a school, a former colleague of my mother’s, wanted to see me. This was a high profile school and there was an opening for the post of an English teacher. Through some internal (and mysterious) channels, the HOD got to know that I happen to teach English somewhere. She phoned my mother. To cut the long story short: I was summoned. 

Now, I already have a job so I was not too keen on or desperate for this proposal. But the only thing that tempted to even consider it was: an opportunity to work in a purely academic space with young students who are going to be (can’t resist the cliché) our future. 

The previous evening while talking to friend I happened to mention this proposal by the way. 

“So you want to be a school teacher!” His eyebrows rose in unison and so rose his pitch. Clearly, he was surprised. 

“Well, yeah...I won’t mind. I teach for a living anyway. So except for the change in the set-up I don’t perceive any dramatic shift. Plus, I’ve always fancied being a teacher,” I said.

“Still! You’d better think through this,” was his last word on the matter. 

I understand his apprehension. In this highly competitive world the notion of one’s aspiring to become a school teacher might seem anachronistic and lax. 

In retrospect, I think, I should have qualified my affirmative. I would like to be a school teacher among the many other things I’d like to be. The best feature of my present job is that it gives me the time to do things on the side. And for a person of my temperament, it is critical. Apart from working I also need to constantly be doing things that don’t feel like work and yet give me a sense of accomplishment (hobbies stand discounted by that measure). I would want a job wherein I am not doing JUST that.

However, while in this job, too, I teach, I can’t play the role of a nurturer, as it were. The framework I operate in is highly transactional and performance driven. You don’t have students—you have clients. They have to be pleased. You talk to them about climate change or gender equality or the things that matter beyond exam scores, and all you see them do is return a blank look at best or yawn at worst. How to crack the damn exam is all that matters to them.

My mother was insistent that I consider this proposal sincerely, for she wants me to have a ‘settled and sorted’ life (ha!). My kind of job doesn’t have universality she says. It’s fine so long as we live in the metropolis, but what if we move? Will there be such jobs elsewhere too, she asked pointedly. 

Schools are everywhere (thank heavens!). So if I am a qualified and experienced school teacher, my chances of being unemployed will be minimal, now that I have long abandoned the much beaten IT path. I understand her concern too. 

But what she, and perhaps even I, do not (fully) understand is that my life defies any form of regularity. And quite vehemently so. In my life, since my very birth, deviation has been the norm. Whenever we have even attempted to make it follow a set path, there’s been a backlash. (So, yes, we have collected quite a few lemons by now). 

____________________________________________________________________

After much ado I (somehow) reached the said school at eight in the morning. The receptionist had a harried expression on her face, and I am sure she half frowned at me when I told her that I wished to see the HOD. Maybe expecting a smile from someone at eight in the morning is too much, so I did not quite mind her. 

“You wait there,” she said pointing to a couch (without losing that half frown).

I saw what made her behave so: there was a steady stream of people she had to attend to: there were parents whose wards had forgotten their lunch-boxes, there were parents who brought along with them models and projects that were too large to be carried by children themselves, there was a loud lady whose son had missed his school bus because the timing of the bus was changed without intimation and she wasn’t willing to let go off this anytime soon. 

After a few minutes I was ushered into the HOD’s room. She wasn’t around. I was again asked to wait. Soon she walked into the room. A short and stout woman easily in her late fifties. She had fine a complexion that complemented her pink (think Roohafza mixed in milk) sari. Her glasses made her big eyes look even bigger. She smiled at me warmly as I rose to greet her. 

A middle-aged man followed her into the room, panting.

“Just give me a moment. I need to get this sorted,” she said to me coolly.

The haggard man stood right next to me and placed a paper on the table. The paper looked as worn out as did he. Apparently it was a grade card. It had different columns and one entry under these columns was circled.

 He began from where he must have left off before he had entered the room: “Madam, I am telling you there has been some discrepancy. These grades are wrong. This should be C1, not D1. The final GPA will increase definitely...”

The HOD signalled him to stop by a wave of her hand. She examined the document carefully for a second or two and referred to a list that she had handy. 

“I have already reported this matter to the class teacher but the change hasn’t been made yet,” he said, addressing me as though I was his interlocutor. “You see it’s a matter of my child’s future. This is unacceptable,” he added. I nodded awkwardly.

The HOD looked up and spoke: “Sir, have patience. Please sit down. Let me explain things to you.” 

“Madam, there’s nothing to understand; the matter is simple.” He tapped the paper with his index finger.”You just increase the GPA and allow my son to take up mathematics. That’s all I want.”

“Will you please sit down and listen to me for a moment,” the HOD said sharply. The man sat down and wiped his forehead. “Look, sir, the matter of correction has to be referred to the examination department. I will call up the concerned person right away and get that fixed. That’s not a problem. But...” she paused here for a moment to ensure that he had all her attention. “But the problem is that you want your student to have maths and with that GPA I can’t give him that.”

Here she sank further back into her chair anticipating another round of rant from across the table. 

“But madam if this D1 gets changed to C1 then it...” He wasn’t allowed to complete though.

“Sir, even then the GPA will increase by 0.2 points. It will be 7.2. I am not giving Maths even with 7.4.  The cut-off is 7.5. Even a 7.4 won’t work. I am sorry. Besides, just look at all his grades throughout the year: I don’t see an A anywhere. Where were you all this while, now that you’ve suddenly grown so concerned?”

“My son was ill for some time. He sat for the annual internal exam too! Doesn’t that count?”

“Ill? Throughout the year? Let’s not kid ourselves, sir. I am afraid I can’t help you here.”

“I want my son to have Commerce with Maths, not Physical Education. I want him to become a C.A. Now you tell me how could you help me? What’s the way out?”

She almost smiled realising that now she was in command. “Apply for a T.C. That’s all I can say. He’s not getting Maths here at any rate.”

“How can you say that? We have been associated with this school for the past 10 years! And that’s all you have? T.C.?” He sounded defeated now.

She grew sympathetic and softened her stance. “Look, sir, I understand what you’re going through. But why are you pushing your son for something he’s clearly not capable of doing? You’re doing him a disservice. Mathematics is not the end of the world. People without maths excel too. I am myself a student of Humanities. The subjects he takes up now are not going to define his entire career or future. This is the age of inter-disciplinarity. Let him do what he’s comfortable doing. Believe me, sir, I speak from experience. This is my fifth school. I am on the verge of my retirement. You just said it yourself: it’s you who wants him to become C.A. Ask him what he wants to become. Subjects don’t matter, talent does!”

The man kept gazing at the paper that lay on the table. The HOD rang up someone and explained the situation.

“Now, my office-boy will take you to the examination department. Just go there and hand over the document; they’ll take care of it.”

The man made a reluctant exit.

She turned to me and smiled again. “I am sorry about that.”

We went to converse about the job profile and responsibilities.

“Your mother told me that you’re teaching somewhere. I think you’d be great at the job. The formal interview will happen sometime next week; I should let you know about it. I just called you over because I wanted to see you. I will pass on your resume to the director,” she said.

“Thank you!” I handed her my resume.

The lines on her fair and graceful face grew slightly more prominent as she read through it.

“O dear!” she sighed.

“Is there something wrong?” I asked.

“You have a B.Tech degree in your undergrad, not a B.A.?”

“Yes, but I have an M.A. in English and a B.Ed. Won’t that count?”

“But, you see, it’s a distance learning program.”

“Yes, that’s because I was working simultaneously. I have been working, teaching rather, all these years,” I said.

“Well, it sort of counts, but you still don’t have a B.A. And with a B.Tech degree I won’t be able to offer you a job of an English teacher.” She sounded genuinely sorry.

“It’s a pity that talent doesn’t count in this country. We are a country obsessed with rules and norms. I wish I could bend them for you. You’re like my son,” she said to me, handing back the resume.

I smiled back at her and thanked her for her time and concern.

On my way back I could not help but smile on the irony of the whole episode. 

Is it any wonder, then, that we have Tomars and Iranis (allegedly) forging degrees?

Hopelessly Hopeful

It's that time of the night when I sit to unload the squalor of my thoughts on to a pristine paper, thereby tainting it. Must the paper not resent me? There are better things that could have been scribbled on it.

The promise of a better tomorrow, better still, the illusion of it is what drives one today. This tomorrow feeds off the hopes one raises today. Every evening the sun hides, unable to bear upon itself all the burden of hopes one invests it with as it rises. Then the night falls. Enough time for one to recover from the momentary realisation that the perishing of those promises is as inevitable as the rising of the sun the following morning. Also, enough time for one to weave a new tapestry of hopes that one expects life will fulfil. 

One adds a dash of that hope into tea one brews in the morning. One slathers some of that hope with butter on a piece of bread. One pours some of that hope with hot milk into a bowl of porridge. And one opens the newspaper with the hope of finding a possibility of that promise, pressed neatly between the folds of those pages, resembling tiny ants fighting for space, materialising. The newspapers have enough material to demolish all the hopes of having such hopes; and yet one, incurably and hopelessly bitten by the bug of hopefulness keeps hoping.  With the pages of that newspaper the hope gets recycled too. It’s presented to one afresh the next day in a new form, new variety. 

They don’t make a big crashing sound as they perish, these promises. They don’t go all BOOM and BAAM! They just fade away. And fizzle out without much fanfare. A silent death mostly. And then, even before one is done mourning for the lost hopes, new ones start budding and replace the former. And one begins to chase the newly arisen hopes. One knows it’s a bait. Yet one is drawn to it guilelessly and helplessly. Just a certain GPA , a certain degree, a certain job, an apartment with a certain number of rooms in a certain neighbourhood, citizenship of a certain country, a certain person…just this one thing, or that….just this one. And then will commence the gilded age. Does it though? Even if one gets all of these and maybe more?

It’s a Sisyphean task: one tries to claw their way out of this pit, a hopeless pit made of hope, and having come out of it somehow, one finds themselves in an even deeper pit. The pit only multiplies, and one is plunged further into multiple pits simultaneously. Hopeless pits made of hopes.

All of life is this: digging new pits, trying to get out of them, only to envy the pits of the others and wanting to dive into them right away, or to pity the pits of others hoping to never get pushed in those. But a pit is a pit. Hopeless pits made of hopes.

It's that time of the night when I sit to unload the squalor of my thoughts on to a pristine paper, thereby tainting it. Must the paper not resent me? There are better things that could have been scribbled on it.

The Gentle And The Men, Drove On

The gentle and the men
Drove on,
Driven by the yen
To extinguish the anguish
That life and living spawn.

The gentle and the men
Drove on
On the roads that bend
As they please,
Refusing to be predictable,
Refusing to cease.

Two rivulets rushed down
The hills
Like streams of milk
Oozing out of breasts of mother Yashoda
Upon seeing Madhav
Return home at dusk,
 Spent and worn.
The gentle and the men
Drove on.

 The stately hills looked on.
Or did they too giggle
At the banter produced by
The gentle and the men
As they drove on?

The clouds and hills squabbled.
In a bid to be one up,
The clouds cast shadows
That eclipsed the hills; and
Hills, they raise their heads,
Impudently,
To touch the very clouds
They won’t fawn
As the gentle and the men
Drove on.

The clouds gloated
Over their mobility
And fluidity,
Mocking the static hills;
The hills took pride in stability,
In their simple forms and regularity,
Changeless since they were born,
As the gentle and the men
Drove on.


Who could say whether
The mobility was not freedom
But punishment?
It came at a cost—the lack of belonging.
Everywhere but nowhere.
Wasn’t the stability an act?
An act under constant attack from
Forces of nature—the winds of desire,
The torrent of temptations,
The quakes of urges.

Neither was better off.
They laughed at the facades
The hills and the clouds don,
As the gentle and the men
Drove on.



~ aviD