Inside a darkroom, where paintings, a treadmill, a huge bed,
a television set, cupboards and so many other little vignettes of the owner’s
memories take different forms and shapes and in my feverish vision I see them
moving from one place to another. Now a painting starts talking to the mute blind
television set which has never been switched on by me or anybody. It resists
the advancing of the painting with its coldness. The treadmill start running around
the room, increasing the pace and it pants itself to halt after a few minutes.
The red dots on the digital screen flash ‘fatigue’. Books start murmuring to
each other; why doesn’t he pick us up and fondle us with care and love? The
laptop screen turns itself on and calls out for my attention. Bullets and blood
shower from the ceiling. Small pocket cartoons, strip cartoons, edit page
cartoons fall like dead birds on the floor of my room. I hold myself together.
Anger, grievance and condolences flood in the screen and my snow white bed
spread turns red. I send out a silent scream. Nobody is there in the room. Maupassant
and Saadat Manto discuss innocence and violence. I want to run out of this
room, from fever and from my skin. But where to? Nowhere to turn and nowhere to
run. So I lie down and watch the speeches of Rajiv Dixit in Youtube. A man
finally got killed himself for being terribly truthful and right.
(Saadat Hasan Manto 1912-1955)
If dying for a cause is martyrdom, then each human being is
a martyr. They die silently each day standing up for a cause and eating bullets
of arrogance. A lonely man is a martyr. A man in the crowd is also a martyr.
Somebody sitting in a cosy room is a martyr; one who lives a luxurious life is a
martyr. Nobody is spared. Bullets are waiting for you. It is just the question
of time. Between the bullets of arrogance and your head or chest there is only
a thin line of your opinion. Once that is made clear, be sure you are in the
firing line. Each person in the street reflects the frightened faces in Goya’s
painting, Third of May 1808. We have become so used to the scenes of soldiers
carrying heavy arms and today we are used to the scenes of pirates and fundamentalists
similarly armed and hooded. They represent the two ends of the same ideology;
supremacy for ideological power. One works for the system and the other wants
to disrupt it in order to establish a new system. Which system is good? Nobody
knows. A woman in burqa blurts out: I feel naked when I lift the hijab off from
my face. Is she right or the one who wears skimpy clothes and protests that men
pass lewd comments? Both of them are led by two different ideologies and we
should know both are right. If both are right how one right could be more right
than the other? Why our god is better than your god?
(Wanderer Above the sea of Clouds- painting by Casper David Frederich)
That’s why I like lonely people; they are loners because
they have accepted the rights and wrongs of others and they do not want to
argue and establish the supremacy of his own thinking. His silence itself is a
form of resistance from getting affected by the rights and wrongs of others. He
has his rights and his wrongs but he does not want to impose it on others. So
he remains aloof, letting others go ahead. If everyone could do this then
this world would become very beautiful and worth living. You may argue that
such a world will be very boring; a world without conflicts and full of boring
lonely people. No, loneliness does not express boredom or antisocial behaviour.
It is a form of solitude which is poetic. In these moments of aloneness one
could imagine oneself as a dancer, singer, actor, scientist, artist and what
not? One could perform one’s own talents before an imaginary audience that
does not judge or mock. You do not even need applauses. You just need to show
off, display and flaunt what you have; so fulfilling. Terrorism happens when we
start judging others. In domestic front, in love affairs, in world affairs,
this judgement has created terrorism. You argue to win and it is terrorism;
persuasion is another form of terrorism. You can spill blood by making somebody
blush, said Levinas.
(Take me where I belong- painting by Shibu Natesan)
That’s why I felt so much of happiness when I saw a young
man doing his contemporary dance steps at a deserted railway platform. I was in
a train heading towards south and he was waiting for a train going towards
north. This was an empty station as it is located near the administrative
blocks of the city. After seven o clock in the evening, hardly people come to
this station to board trains. This boy was looking like an apparition with a
sling bag on his shoulders and he was making his graceful steps as if he was
holding a beautiful dame close to him and making dance movements together. Or
was he enjoying his steps alone or was he anticipating the people in the other train
in which I was standing and watching him to appreciate him? Or was he imagining
some girls in our train and wanted to leave a mark in their minds? Was he
imparting a sense of wonderment to us? May be or may be not. But a person like
me still lives with that moment of his dance movements in a lonely station.
There is no competition, there are no spot lights and there are no judges.
Those are just a few steps that spill out from his limbs as he could not
contain the happiness surging in him. There is no terror in a lonely dancer and
there is no terrorism in creativity.
(One of the Delhi Metro trains)
I stand in another station in south and wait for a train to
my destination. I see, to my surprise, a new train coming to my vision. The
dull silver grey of the metro train has gone now it looks pure white and I see
a lot of girls standing there, slightly larger than life. The windows, doors
and the glass panes over them are not left. Everything is covered with one long
envelope of white. It is an advertisement, I realize. But the train looks cute
and I cannot stop smiling at the train. The train looks like a little creature who has got a new coat. The underground tunnels where the metro runs now turn into
a wonderland where this happy new creature chugs around. There are small little
things in our lives that bring smile on to our faces. We have seen trains of
Indian Railway completely covered by some sort of weird painting. I look around
for an explanation. One can understand that train could be covered with pictures
either as a part of beautification or as part of revenue generation through
advertisement. But this train looks really ugly. This looks like a politician
has done some painting and that has been digitally multiplied and pasted all
over the train. But then I could only look at that train with sympathy. It
looks like a school child in ill fitting gaudy clothes amongst a host of kids
wearing proper uniform. I need not go out and torch the train to right that
wrong. May be many people are happy with it.
(Chilli plant - for representational purpose only)
A conflict free world could be generated if you are lonely
and meditative. Loneliness and meditation do not have anything to do with
recess, holidaying, spiritual retreat, going to hills, sea sides, visiting
churches, temples, gurus, yoga teachers and so on. To be lonely and also in
meditative mood, one need not do anything particularly. One could be in
kitchen, one could be in classroom, one could be in a laboratory or one could
be in a studio, one could be climbing rocks, one could be playing cricket, one
could be toiling in mines or one could be making garlands, one could sweating
out in a farm and one could be sweating it out in a gym; one could be pushing
pen on files while one could be sitting and reading in library; whatever you do
you just need to do that because that is your choice. But you could do one
thing, a simple thing; you can just stop comparing and judging. The moment you
start compare and judge the conflict starts. You are beautiful but the moment
you want to be more beautiful, conflict starts. Your clothes are already good,
but you want to dress up better than someone else, conflict starts. I am not
advocating the idea of curtailing aspiration. Aspiration should be there but it
should not be in comparison with the other. Your desire should be the desire to
be best in you not in comparison with others or other things. The creator has
created us differently. Ideology homogenises us. There is a compromise between
the two and that is the survival in an all time evolving society. We make
constant adjustments to survive but there too one could be absolutely comparison
free. In the given context we could be less judgemental. Besides, we could
change the context from within the closet contexts. Let me tell you, you cannot
make a huge estate of vegetable plantation more productive unless you employ
artificial modes of nurturing and tending. But you can keep your kitchen garden
pesticide and fertilizer free because you could use your kitchen waste to make
your own manure and pesticide. If not you could derive happiness from seeing
the small little white, red and green chillies or tomatoes sprouting out of the
plants that you have grown at your kitchen window sill. Do you want your
tomatoes or chillies bigger than your neighbours?
No comments:
Post a Comment