Chapter 7: All Nightmare Long

Black was as black as it previously had been. The walls were their usual cocooning self. The sickening temporary glisten had all but worn out, leaving the world draped in its usual dimness. Aseem was mortified with utter perplexity. Questions popped up in his mind in billions, and he only barely managed to un-think them before the Arbitron could catch a whiff of something being amiss. His fingers trembled and his red eyes welled up with tears of alienation and severe misgiving. Here he was, right from infancy and childhood to adulthood, passing through each phase of the EPUU-ian life cycle entirely without incidence - until today. Everything seemed grotesque, nightmarish, off-centre, plain damn creepy. It was as if he was stuck in an endless bad dream, going over a single excruciating day over and over again.

The memories of earlier that day had turned dim and distant, and he had to strain hard to think back to how he had been brutishly fooled by the Arbitron to commit sin, and had been suitably flogged as punishment. All was justified in the natural order of the world as prescribed by the Unnamed, he repeated to himself in consolation. Maybe this sudden shock of brightness had also been an endurance test of some sort, a means to check his durability in times of hardship. His chain of thoughts was interrupted by a timely Arbitronic announcement:

“Thou have successfully passed thy First Surprise Franticness Examination, maintaining commendable control over thine thoughts and exhibiting a sound sense of alarm in the hour of (simulated) crisis. Similar toeing of the EPUU-ian line in future shall lead thee to the fruits of Eternal Bliss, after thou are freed of the mortal coil and the distractions of worldly indulgences. Peace be upon thee and the Holy Unnamed.”

Fade to silence.

He stood rooted for a minute, assimilating the symphony of absolute silence that evoked a flood of imaginary acoustic inputs in his mind; screechy, cacophonic, jarring, overwhelming sounds. The embalming effect of Arbitron’s announcement had lent a perceptible stillness to his surroundings, a stillness that carried the sweet aroma of normalcy. The effects were therapeutic.

His internal anxiety wafted away, blending with the calm outside. His muscles eased, his eyes opened to their full extent (for the first time in hours), and he felt relatively at ease. There was still, however, a part of him that dreaded any more unpleasant experiences to befall him. His rejoice was, hence, duly restrained and his eyeballs scurried up and down the entire length of the world, looking out for any aberrant visual stimuli. Life was better now, but he wasn’t keen on counting his eggs before they hatched.

Maybe he was right in doing so, because any amount of preparation could not have muffled his explosion of emotions at what transpired next.

Many things happened, all at once: a sizeable chunk of the wall to his left exploded, accompanied by a blast so awfully earsplitting that Aseem toppled over to the ground right ear-first. In a fit of absolute incredulity, he closed his eyes and huddled on the ground in an infantile self-hug. A pungent smell hit his nose, the very smell of hostility and alienation.  If he’d have the heart to open his eyes and look around, he’d see rubble lying around in a heap, and smoke billowing from where-was-once-the-left-wall-of-the-world.  

A gazillion thoughts scampered in his mind in the timeframe of a split second. It all made perfect sense. The rapture had been clarioned by the EPUU as the last straw for the correction of an over-sinning mortal. It had lingered over Aseem like the sword of Damocles, and today the final frontier of Unnamed’s tolerance had been breached for good. The 666^th Verse talked of it with justified pomposity:

“Whenever doth an errant mortal like thee commiteth himself to excessive sin, not to be corrected by any Arbitronic hook or crook, I must, in person, strike upon the creation with severe vengeance, level it down to ruins and start afresh with humanity. Those that tarnish my name and anoint it with the muck of their hearts deserve no less than my most furious ire, and shall forever be captivated in the deepest, brightest of Hell’s rungs…”

It was all over, the world was breaking down; the walls were being razed to the ground, collapsing on themselves. His lips trembled to make hurried, stuttered invocations:

“O GREAT UNNAMED, FORGIVE YOUR FAITHFUL ONE! O EXALTED THEE, MY HEARTIEST IMPLORATIONS TO YOU, SALVAGE ME FROM THE BRIGHT UNKNOWNS OF HELL AND THE OUTSIDE! I, WHO HAS REMAINED YOURS FOR THE LIFE, YOURS TO BEGIN WITH AND RETURN TO…”

His mad, deplorable chants were interjected by a much louder, stronger voice; the only voice that had ever fallen on Aseem’s ears except his own and Arbitron’s.

“OPEN YOUR EYES, COMRADE!” It boomed over everything else. “Open up now, be the human you were born to be.”

“I think he’s in shock, sir,” said another alien voice, shriller and higher than the previous. “May I?”

Aseem lay heaped where he was, mortified by things beyond his imagination. He was surely hallucinating now. A pair of feet shuffled across the besieged world, making their way towards him. He whimpered and scowled at the fear of whatever walked to him, clamping shut his eyes to the maximum degree. The boot-steps grew louder in their approach, and instincts made him cover his torso with his hands. “Get away fro me!” he feebly managed.

The high-pitched voice spoke from very close by, “Fear not, comrade. We’re on the same side. You’re free of your captivity. We have salvaged you from the fucking I-don’t-know-whats, but only just. You need to come with us, and pronto, we do not have much time!”

“Wh-who…what are you? Y-you all?”

He heard the footfall very near him, and shirked back violently when he felt a cold touch on his eyelid. He jerked it off madly and went into a spasm of violent acrobatics.

“WE ARE HELPING YOU, COMRADE! Comply for God’s sake!” growled the voice from afar.

He knew very less of what happened immediately after that. He could feel two pairs of hands struggling to keep him pinned to the ground and make him open his eyes. Their touch felt oddly human, as did their voices and gaits. When finding it helpless to struggle anymore, he resigned himself from all motion, repeating the incantations to the Unnamed in his mind over and over. The alien duo lifted him off the floor and made him sit up, propped against the common corner of two walls. His hands and ankles were bound by a thick, coarse wire or string.

What he saw when his eyes were forced open was a first: fellow humans. The room was unnaturally lighted, probably from the bright outside of the world, peeping in from the hole in the left wall. The two faces that looked upon him were ashen and worn out. They were wearing identical ragged, soiled black jackets and a tight black lower garment to match. They also wielded a sleek black metal contraption each, what looked to him to be some sort of weapon. Their hands clasped the posterior end and index fingers curled around a trigger. Their eyes were twinkling with an odd glow and lips curled upward in a faint smile. Aseem felt threatened but did not close his eyes again, more out of fear than anything else. One of them had a slightly odd look to him, so much so that it scarcely could be called a ‘him’. Its hair was longer than usual and tied in a thick bun at the back of the head. It had two uncanny bulges where its chest should have been, a different body posture than its partner and a strangely erotic look about it.

“Sorry for the bad treatment, but we had to do it. We’re here to take you away, out of this confinement. You gotta come with us” it spoke in its high-pitched voice, while the man at the back looked on with impatience.

“Who-who are you? What the fuck is go-going on?”

“We’re humans, just like you. I’m Sanskriti, he’s Shimit.” It extended its hand forward. Aseem ignored it. It retracted it.

“Look here: you have been in captivity here for more than two decades, since you were born,” it went on, “We are one of the last remnants of the only human resistance on the planet. Our race was taken over by The Evolved Ones about 30 years ago. We’re a fringe military outfit, fighting back against their superior weaponry and mind control. They took away our children to experiment on us, know us better, study our behavior, make fluffy pets out of us, hold us on a fuckin leash for all I know.” It gasped for breath, its face full of emotion and redness.

Aseem remained silent, deadpan. All of this was gibberish to him.

The other man spoke up. “Long story short, you’re one of those they’re experimenting on. They’ve manipulated your mind to test their hypotheses on how the human body reacts to shit. Our hackers been intercepting with their mainframe for a few hours, trying to get to all of the prisoners down here. We even managed to flash our Human Resistance Manifesto in these cells for a few minutes, you might have read it.”

Memories of the walls turning blinding bright came back to Aseem, making him shudder.

“The marking on the outside of your door reads ‘Religion Specimen #12: Aseem’. They’ve been fucking with you all this while, man, taking you away from the one true God, inventing their bullshit around your life. I know coz I’m a survivor of this fuckery, I was once in one of these shells, running around in circle like mice, reacting to base, carnal desires. I came out of it, the hard way…”

He stopped and sighed a long sigh, putting his palm on his forehead, as if stifling a bad memory. He was shaken back into sudden alarm by a sudden blast outside the room.

“WE’RE WASTING TIME WITH YOU, COME WITH US OR DIE HERE!” barked the man, gesturing his partner to get up and get going. Suddenly their actions seemed tense, alert, vigil. They shuffled around impatiently waiting for a word from Aseem.

Aseem had nothing to say. He felt comfortably numb and distant, eyes unfocussed and ear latent to the sudden sounds erupting near him. He felt nothing, registered nothing.

“Die, you fool! We’re outta here!” said the man, and started making his way out of the box with its fellow human in long, measured strides. They seemed to stop short in their tracks all of a sudden, and a thick screen of faint-green smoke ascended from the ground with a hiss. Aseem felt dizzy and his head felt heavy. Unable to keep his eyes open, he relaxed them and lolled his head to the side

The last thing he remembered before collapsing to the ground were two dull thuds around him, and one of the humans’ eyes fixated upon him, ajar with terror of the highest order.

Then, nothing. 

---

EPILOGUE: http://kahaanikisse.blogspot.in/2012/07/epilogue.html

Chapter 6: Torture

[NOTE: I owe it to my handful, but faithfully anticipating readers: I am sorry for the delay. I was alternating between being too lazy, too uninspired and too overworked to write the next chapter the whole of last two months. But now that I am in the 'flow' of things, I hope I can wrap this up before long. Hang on, people, the finale will be worth the wait.]

The first of his two scheduled mental exercises was finally and – although he wouldn’t accept it – to his immense relief, over. It had been a draining, hard-on-the-ass field day till now. Hardly could he bring to mind any whacking that had been half as unexpected as this one had been. But it was all justified in the higher order of things; after all, the holy Unnamed worked in mysterious ways (not to mention painful and ruthlessly unforgiving, he un-thought). Love and compassion was for those sons of Ardhamanas who adhered to the erudite word of the EPUU with absolute, unflinching belief. For all actions that dared to stand out at non-conformist were dealt with the iron hand. Like sheep herded onward the rich pasturelands by men of god in the guise of peasants, such was the task entrusted to the Arbitron. It promulgated  'उत्तम मार्ग': 'the perfect way', the only way to lead a righteous life.

In all truthfulness, Aseem felt ashamed of his failings as a human being, his inability to follow in the hallowed footsteps of his forefathers: the immediate next-in-line of the venerable half-Unnamed.

The original man had passed down his form and shape to his progeny by means of miraculous reproduction, or  'चमत्कारिक प्रजनन'. The ability to bear an offspring was not said to be a pleasant experience, nor was it expected to happen to anybody who hadn’t attained the officially prescribed age of leaving human shape and journeying to the heavenly abode. Naturally, Aseem wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.

Prompted by Arbitron, he trod towards the Mental Work 2 bay, which was to occupy the better part of his remaining schedule for the day. Placing himself in a well-fitting corner that had emerged out of the wall, he covered his ears with a device that lay on the base of the opening. This piece of equipment had two rubbed-cushioned circular ends, one for each ear. A U-shaped ‘bridge’ connected the two earpieces, curving over the curvature of the head of the wearer. (The most apt substitute for it to be found in modern parlance would be a ‘headphone’.) This was worn, as per EPUU-ian parables, as a means to focus on the inner sounds the human body radiates when the individual is deep in thought or meditation.

His solitary agenda for the next 30 minutes was to generate a constant humming sound, close his eyes and concentrate on whatever thoughts flitted through his mind while he was at it. Every 20 seconds or so, he would steal long but hurried mouthfuls of air, punctuating the hum that filled his ears, brain, thoughts, everything.

With the passage of a few minutes, the only perceptible sensory input he received was his self created hum, overriding every other external sensation. This uninterrupted tranquil enabled him to do what EPUU called ‘singularizing’ his thoughts to nothingness. The first thought that came to him when he attained equilibrium with the humming medium he had created was darkness; pure, unadulterated, undiluted, blackest of black, serene darkness. Darkness that pervaded all fear, all misgiving of the relatively pallid outsides. The Unnamed was salvation, the Unnamed was darkness. And then there was Mary Jane, and Arbitron, and the hot cuppa he gobbled down every morning: all mere distractions from the path of true austerity and realization of the self. Trifling, sinful digressions in the path of moral rightness, planted in the path of man by the forever-scrutinizing Unnamed. The world was enough, the black ends of the world were too far displaced from each other, too far for any comfort. Something had to—

SCREEEECH!

His stream of consciousness was broken suddenly by…he didn’t know what exactly it was. Suddenly there was light all around. From the safety of his closed eyelids, he could see his vision suddenly turn blood red. He dared to open his eyes and closed them almost instantly. It was sheer horror. The walls of the world were no more black; instead, they displayed multitudes of images of…he couldn’t fucking make out! The split second window of blinding vision he had braved had registered nothing in his mind, save for a sudden blast of dreaded whiteness. He shielded his eyes from direct brightness with his arms, and maintained the posture for about 5 minutes, waiting for shit to happen. Nothing did. Bewildered, terrified and helpless, he shouted and shouted, and then some more.

“HELP ME, ARBITRON!!! HELP ME, UNNAMED! WHAT SORT OF SHIT TEST IS THIS, GET ME OUT OF THIS DAMN INFERNO!”

Nothing budged. Reduced to a cowering bundle on all fours, Aseem began to weep. He wept profusely at first, tears rolling down from his hard-shut eyes. Then he cried with uninhibited shrieks and wails and whimpers and sobs, his body convulsing with the pain and burden of sudden light, of newness and of change.

And then, with characteristic suddenness, the brightness issue was resolved: the walls went back to their homely blackness. Aseem knew this because his vision was no more marred with the bright redness of the inside of his eyelids, it was back to black. However, try as much as he might, he could not get his eyes to open up for more than a quarter of an hour after normalcy had been retained. And when he finally did, much to his surprise, absolutely nothing had changed.


-
Chapter 7

Chapter 5: Miracle Drug

[The shortest chapter and probably the weakest. You'll say I've lost my touch considering that I took the most amount of time writing this, and I will not disagree. I intended it as a bridge between two highly pivotal chapters. I intend to wrap this up in about 8 chapters.]

Aseem loved chocolate.

A few questions and 35 minutes later, he was scheduled for a 20-minute break that he could utilize for light food and/or rest and/or a pneumatic shower, depending on his temperament that day. His usual choice would have been a quick, rejuvenating shower followed by a power nap, but when the time came, he surprised himself by going in for a bar of chocolate.

The Arbitron obliged and a bare, dark-brown cake of chocolate exited from a slit in the wall nearest to him, one that was chiseled to a perfect rectangular shape and had a smooth, silky texture to it. This, of course and like all other eatables, was the handiwork of the Arbitron which adhered to the General Cooking Manual. The chocolate had been cheekily nicknamed ‘Mary Jane’ by the Arbitron itself, which seemed to have put all its creative energies into naming things of daily use with an idiosyncratic, almost anachronistic, self-referencing twist (Runaround, Mary Jane, itself to name a few).

Aseem snapped a chunk off the top-right edge of the bar and popped it into his mouth, involuntarily oozing a mouthful of drool while at it. Eyes closed and taste buds excited in orgasmic anticipation, he finally got his teeth to gnaw the chocolate between his canines and molars, letting it melt and spread all over his teeth, tongue and gums. And it happened; a feeling of utter rapture, of isolation but of infinite fulfillment, of consummate ecstasy, vivacity and climactic glee engulfed him. It was as if all physical, mental, sexual and environmental desires he harbored in his body had made a vanishing act, all of his senses charged-up to the extreme. He could visualize a parade of flashy colors and zany shapes conjure up in front of him, and a tingling sensation all over his skin, something he resisted as well as relished, much like what a tickle is to an unsuspecting tot.*

Aseem did not know how long the moment lasted, for he was busy losing himself in the endless nooks and crannies and lanes and by-lanes of the world of Mary Jane. Unbeknownst to him, the chocolate bar came to an abrupt expiration after the designated 20 minutes of rest; all its affects worn themselves out, and he came out of his prolonged daze with a heavy, cavernous gasp. Eyes wide with having felt a myriad of alien visual cues and sensations, and skin still perspiring with activity, he tried to acclimatize himself to the newfound normalcy of his universe, and failed. The blackness of the box, the comfortable innards of an outside-less world, the subservient yet overseeing gaze of the Arbitron, forever fixated on him; everything seemed new all over again. His experiences had been immensely satisfying, but not without a slight tinge of yearning: yearning to experience all that he had, all over again, and then some more. He looked around for the remaining bit of chocolate he had held in his hand absently, but it was nowhere to be found. Like always, he thought, Arbitron had obediently picked it up from where his hand had left it in his ecstatic state of stupor, cleared and put it away inside the intricate machinery of the four walls the universe.

Chocolate, he said to himself and not out loud (for that would be a positive symptom of dementia, something not expected before he turned 68) was the best thing he had had.

*A word or few about the nature of Mary Jane before proceeding further, in the interest of the obviously flabbergasted reader: chocolate, in Aseem’s day and age and universe, is akin to a strong, cathartic drug that brings tension levels to practically nil, takes sexual realization to an off-the-chart high, and most importantly, curiosity levels to a sharp, crashing dive. In short, it has similar effects to the human body as to what the reader might be familiar as cannabis, or hashish, or what-have-ye.


--
Chapter 6: http://kahaanikisse.blogspot.in/2012/07/chapter-6-torture.html

Why Agent Vinod is an important film

[NOTE: One of my non-Stunted posts, this. Do not worry guys, Chapter 5 is well on its way, just that this came across spontaneously, and I HAD to post this. I am not abandoning 'Stunted', it is very much on. The following write up is the closest  I can come to reviewing a film as of now. Do read it all, if your patience doesn't give way before that...]

It was only last week or roundabout that I found myself sitting in a fairly peopled movie hall (the occupancy was slightly measlier in the front rows, which is my natural turf as a frugal moviegoer, living under the illusion that I’m saving my parents’ hard-earned money by doing so, conveniently not factoring in the amount that I’m guzzling by watching the film in the first place), somewhat eagerly awaiting the screening of Sujoy Ghosh-directed ‘Kahaani’, what one of my most enthusiastic friends had labeled as an exemplary work of ‘evolving Indian cinema’. I was taken aback by the claim, I daresay, for I had made up rather modest preconceptions of the film owing to its hackneyed marketing image, which had made the film seem to me to be a run-off-the-mill, holier-than-thou yarn on female empowerment, with the poster girl for topical, ‘serious’ and society-challenging roles, Vidya Balan falling into the mould of stereotypically unidimensional roles that filmmakers love to cash in on. At best, I conjectured, this could be a politically-correct version of Anurag Kashyap’s fiercely indie ‘That Girl in Yellow Boots’, one that had impressed me both as a lover of films as well as a Kashyap fanboy (more latter than the former, I’ll acquiesce).

With this frame of mind did I go in for the film, seated there in the third row from front, the big screen looming right in front of me, big enough to fill my vision completely and at an angle enough for me to rest my neck to its full pivotal extent on the head-rest and make the proverbial sit-back-and-enjoy adage assume literal truth. The national anthem blared on for more than the endorsed 52-seconds (or did I get my obviously insignificant general knowledge wrong on that account?) the lights dimmed, the trailers came to a respectful fade-out, and with much fanfare, the real deal began. If anywhere there is heaven on earth, it is this…

The movie started from the word ‘go’, scampering nimbly from scene to scene at lighting fast pace, never for once stopping for so much as a breath. I did not have time to brace myself for the awesomeness, and from the generally discerning and scrutinizing viewer that I fancy myself to be, I transformed into the same awestruck, starry-eyed ninth-standard child who had fed on films like Gulaal, Memento and The Usual Suspects, never for once letting down the look of sheer glee from his eyes throughout the length of these cinematic Mona Lisas. The climax edged closer, and after many an edge-of-the-seat twist and turn and revelation abound, as the cinema gods would have it, the ominous, pre-assuming clouds in my heart gave way to the bright sunshine of filmmaking at its glorious, luminous best. I could not deny the fact that I had been utterly wrong about Kahaani to begin with; it was a top-notch thriller that came very close in class and content to motion pictures that had helped chisel the genre to the exalted state it is in today, such as The Departed, The Usual Suspects, Se7en and many more to enumerate. It is a winner in almost all departments of conventional movie-making: tight editing, almost-impeccable a script (almost, for I had minor reservations regarding one or two plot points, albeit forgiven in the long run), indulgent yet no-nonsense direction and a power-packed performance from an all round ensemble cast, with Balan adorning the central spot. I couldn’t help but second the eager friend of mine who had gone all out in her praise for the film. I myself had no qualms hailing it as one the few rare films made in India to have done gotten almost everything ‘right’, in terms of parameters I’ve listed above.

It was a week later (today, that is), that I decided to go in for the long-overdue Agent Vinod. Now, to all those readers who know me personally or are even remotely aware of my cinematic inclinations, would know that Sriram Raghavan is another man (along with Dibakar Banerjee, Kashyap and Vishal Bhardwaj) who I hold in deep reverence as a storyteller of the finest class. His two previous outings as writer-director had yielded great results, both as crowd-pleasers and intelligently unconventional cinematic treats (Ek Hasina Thi, starring Saif in a career-altering role, and Johnny Gaddaar, a gem of a neo-noir with a nod to the genre’s masters). With such lofty precedents, the weight of performance is bound to register on the shoulders of a director who is working, incidentally, with actor-producer Saif Ali Khan in his most ambitious project till date. Taking an unusually long time to be produced, the film opened to much hype and din on an unsuspecting Friday, only to be panned almost unanimously by the multitudes thronging to the movie theaters, and amassing middling to devastatingly poor responses from the film-criticism fraternity. I was very surprised with the critical verdict more than the audience’s verdict, partly because of my vainglorious assumption that I’m more intelligent and highly sensitized to non-conventional filmmaking than the general junta; their rejection to the film was not fractionally as unnerving as the snide write-off that the experts had dealt the film with. I was, to say the least, shocked. I wanted to see Agent Vinod for myself, rebuff the wisdom of others and be my own judge. This selective faith in critics to suit my own liking had started with films like Don 2, which I had thoroughly enjoyed, and so had been relished by film critics abroad, but the critics back home had been, let’s just say, a little less appreciative (read dourly contemptuous).

So there I was again, surrounded by the muffled, curtained, sound-cocooning walls of the movie theater, finding my seat close to the giant screen (as always), comfortably resting my neck and sitting back and enjoying myself in the most literal fashion. The same old rigmarole followed itself over: the national anthem came to a gradual close, the trailers came and went by, and a rather in-your-face statutory warning against cigarette smoking made way for the beginning of the film.

I will be very cautious not to give out any spoilers as I go about discussing the film, and merely skim over the unimportant tid-bids that shall only appetize and tease, not spoil. First things first: the opening quotation to the film is quick to come and go, without idling much to have its full impact registered on the audience. It is a quote from The Good, The Bad, The Ugly that said something about real identities and names not mattering much (I will not do injustice to this write-up by quoting the exact dialogue with the help of Google, because I want to understand how much of it would an unsuspecting viewer be able to retain hours after the movie, and this is exactly how much). This is followed by a gritty introduction to the character of Agent Vinod, a swashbuckling start to a film that maintains the tempo it sets in these initial action scenes and loquacious dialogue exchanges. So far, so yum.

Going all guns blazing: Agent Vinod in action.

I expected the film to taper into boredom as the first half wanes because as much had been suggested by the critics; that doesn’t happen. As scene after delightful scene unfolds, I mark an evident experimental style: the quirky, idiosyncratic use of music to lubricate proceedings. The BGM is literally non-existent at places where conventional filmy wisdom would have it going into dramatic undertones and muffled beats to further the build-up to an explosive fight scene, whereas it is arbitrarily loud and retro, even multi-lingual at places where convention will deem it sacrilegious to be so. I found a similar oddity in David Fincher’s understated masterpiece, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, an adaptation of Late Steig Larsson’s ingenious crime novel. The most chilling scenes (such as the one where the killer takes the protagonist-detective by surprise and tries to choke them to death with a polyethene) have the most innocuous-sounding background numbers, while intense conversations and other dramatic scenarios having no music cover at all! The point is, it is masterful only as long as it doesn’t seem shoddy; to elevate it from the level of a gimmick to an effective plot device is something which both Fincher and Raghavan succeed in doing, in their respective films.

As the first half drew to a close, I was already admiring the painstaking detail that the filmmaker had put into everything, right from the witty dialogues laced in James Bond-esque cheesiness to the well choreographed fight and chase sequences (one of the most memorable of which had a rapidly switching non-linear fistfight between Vinod and a villain he has earlier had a fight with, both of the fights intercutting each other to produce a visual chutney), that promised thrills scarcely seen before in Indian cinema. The film opened up not as a whodunit or whydunit or who-dies-in-the-end conundrum, but as a Herge-esque adventure of sorts, with protagonists often at loggerheads, trotting the globe to bring down a common enemy, revealing a conspiracy that threatens a common, larger goal. The duo of Tintin and Captain Haddock comes to mind when we see Saifeena sizzle the screen with their good-looking selves and smooth-talking, fast-thinking, double-crossing ways. Add to this unrelenting duo of protagonist an ensemble cast of veteran baddies (and minor characters) including Gulshan Grover, Prem Chopra, Shahbaz Khan Zakir Hussain, Rajat Kapoor, Ravi Kishen and Ram Kapoor, and there’s enough great acting to chew on for the length of the film.

The highlight of the second half is surely the Raabta song sequence, which is in accordance with the idiosyncratic music sensibilities of the film, with a single shot fight sequence that stretches on for more than what seems like 5 minutes! That single sequence is worth everything you pay for the movie, and then more. Added to the blend is some more globe-trotting (closer home this time with saadi Dilli and its cramped, overcrowded bylanes captured beautifully in the frame) and a climax that could have been better, and less long-drawn. It is only towards the end that one realizes what is wrong with Agent Vinod: it ends up being too self-indulgent to see itself end soon enough, and it goes on and on for more than half an hour in excess. I believe this to be the burden of the lavishness and hugeness of the scope the film sets out to capture: one gets flown away into many scenes and scenarios of digressions, which, when seen individually, are flawless, but do not add much to the whole of the film. It is for this reason why ambitious films take years to be completed; their makers get everything right and time the film to be just as epic as their efforts that have gone into making it. And here, they falter.

This brings me to the central point of what I’m saying. In India, while small-scale or independent films on the lines of Kahaani, Paan Singh Tomar, That Girl in Yellow Boots, Soch Lo, etc. are coming-of-age in terms of handing and execution of their content, experimentation is also being ushered in by these movies made on shoestring budgets. It has, however, been very less to see large-budget films delving in any form of experimentation on a grander, more global level. Agent Vinod breaks this barrier; Raghavan remains ever-consistent with his desperate will to break conventions and aim for bigger, better avenues. Whether one succeeds or fails in doing so is another story, but the fact that such audacity is nurtured and supported is of utmost importance. A case in point would be the recent, post-fame works of auteurs like Tarantino or Nolan: Inglourious Basterds and The Prestige. We have seen both of their iconoclastic abilities in their completely self sufficient and independent projects such as Reservoir Dogs and The Following, and with their later films, not only have they not degenerated into mainstream bullshit but have also charted new courses for filmmakers to come, by challenging norms on a higher, bigger scale. In their case, money has not corrupted, but invigorated. Such is the case, as I see it, with Agent Vinod. It aims at something higher than any Hindi movie till date, something that movies like Kahaani and Johnny Gaddaar can hardly even envisage. The fact that it almost succeeds (if it were only for slightly better editing) in this experimentation is what underlines the vitality of such films. We must make it a point to support, encourage and appreciate works that are not afraid to experiment even when big money is at stake. For this, I think, we have all but Sriram Raghavan and Saif Ali Khan to thank.

It is in this regard that I salute and bow to Raghavan and his genius as a teller of stories and as an able craftsman bold enough to be undeterred in his urge to non-conform in all that he does.

As for Indian cinema per se: so far, so yum!

Chapter 4: Something unboxly

Another question faded in.   
“You feel the urge to excite your sex organ when the titillation bay is inactive. What will be your line of action?”  

This was more of a revision, a rubbing-it session for all he knew. He had sailed over this question in the past without a fumble.   

Have a bar of chocolate, he wrote.

Simple as that.   

The letters dissolved into blackness, but before a subsequent set could replace them, another rumble rocked the world, more notably that the last time. A thud was what Aseem made of it, and he could swear by the Unnamed that something unboxly was afoot now. This was a first; the world quivering and whirring as if it had transformed into a blown-up titillation device.  

The titillation device was part of his weekly regime of sexual stimulation, a basic human need as per the EPUU. It was but human need to eject slithery, sleek, muddy-grey jets of fluid from its sexual organ on a weekly basis; this was achieved by inserting one’s cylindrical sex organ inside the rubber sheath that protruded from the wall of the titillation bay, and have it vibrate manically until what Aseem had termed, in a brainwave of creative excess, as ‘climax’ occurred and the resultant fluid was expelled into the bay. This animatedly described process was what the EPUU defined as ‘sex’. Aseem could only define sex as the most pleasurable human process there ever was and could be. It took him less than 30 seconds of titillation, sometimes even 20, to hit his climax. He had been instructed by the EPUU that a human who could elongate the period of titillation with mental sinew and will was a man worthy of a life free of punishment and retribution, someone who could hope for a peaceful afterlife.  

The tremor had subsided presently; the world was back to normal. Aseem’s goldfish curiosity remained for a second more, but as inevitability would have it, it succumbed under the sheer weight of newfound relief. The world was alright, it hadn’t given way, and it was comfortingly pitch black and four-walled as ever before.  

He concentrated on the next question.   

“How do you feel about the daily questions? Does answering them put your mind to rest?”  

This was another of the meta-questions that kept cropping up every once a while. The trick was not to answer keeping in mind the distinctions of right and wrong, but by gauging one’s instinctive reply and writing the opposite of it. This always resulted in the ‘right’ answer.  He though about how he felt. 

He felt nothing; neutral was how he felt.   

It is a feeling of immense satisfaction and fulfillment. Moreover, answering them gives me the incentive to look forward to life with a better, closed-minded view.   

He smiled as, predictably enough, new words replaced the existing ones once more.   

“The box is a lie.”  

He gasped and double checked what he had read, and there they were, the cold, ruthless grey letters on the black background: 
The box is a lie.  

A second passed and Aseem blinked; the letters were no more to be seen, they had simply vanished, as if physically wiped off a surface in the split second the slits of his eyes had closed and opened. He touched the platform to reaffirm his visual input. He felt the plain surface, black as ever, not a gray tinge on them to be seen.   

What in Unnamed’s great name could it mean? How could the box simply be a lie? That was beyond what could be humanly fathomable, he thought; if the box was a lie, then where was he right now? And why had Arbitron randomly passed on the cryptic message to him instead of the question? And then, in a sudden surge of realization, it hit him.  

Curiosity is sin.   

This was a surprise assessment to test his ignorance and suppression of sinful curiosity, and he had failed by having reacted in an evil manner. The whip-arm of the Arbitron appeared as its hoarse voice blared verse 012 of the EPUU from all directions.   

“To mull and brood and ponder too long fixedly on any theme is Evil cognified. Thou shalt not remain entranced by thine sights and senses for any longer than it takes for thy limited mind to form a first make-up on it. Any act of violation of the aforementioned Utterance such shall result in no less than 25 whips being inflicted upon thy pitiable derriere. Peace out.”  

And it was on once more: the delicate pinning down of his torso by one arm of the Arbitron, the repeated rapping of its other arm on his behind, the muffled gasps of pain that emanated from Aseem’s mouth, who was already repentant of his sinful indulgence of wonderment and surprise: the biggest perpetrators of evil and villainy.   

“Forgive me, O Exalted one; Hallowed be thy un-name,” he chanted over and over as the lashing went on and finally drew to an excruciating climax.  

The arms eased their grasp, receded and finally became one with the wall. Writhing and squirming with pain, Aseem lay where he was, not a thought entering or escaping his mind. He had genuinely been puzzled by the mystifying message; he had been taken unawares by The Arbitron. Maybe it had felt that it was getting a bit too easy for him that day; maybe it was time for him to know the pain of having sinned, know the pain of retribution and be reminded of the wrath of the Unnamed. Though he no longer was employing any cognitive effort to it, the eerie, vivid image of the message remained in his eyes:  

The box is a lie.   

He was thinking yet not thinking; he had finally learned to cloud his thoughts from himself. His thinking remained a split second ahead of his consciousness. It was akin to dreaming; He knew what he was thinking would be forgotten the moment he put his mind to it. It was like watching a rapid news feed on an endless marquee, being able to make out a few words here and a few phrases there, but what registered on the whole was nil. He could finally evade the Arbitron into believing he was not thinking, while he most certainly was; so what if only passively, and so what if the thoughts he thought would vanish the second he thought them out.   

An abrupt announcement brought him back from his stupor.   “It is requested that you return to your mental work bay 1 and resume your daily schedule as per the time table,” proclaimed the Arbitron.  Everything forgotten and his lesson well-learned, he set to work once more. Another question appeared, another trick employed, and over and over it went like clockwork.   

“God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,” hymned someone with contentment, far away from Aseem, and breathed their last. 

-
Chapter 5

Chapter 3: Curiosity, thou art vitriolic

[NOTE: I had committed a huge error in the previous chapter that was due to my lack of foresight and future planning: Aseem's work routine is said to be 12 hours and 30 minutes long. I have changed it to a little over half of it: 6.5 hours. I know it is comical for me to have done so, and hope this doesn't ruin the reading experience. My sincere apologies over this unprofessional act. Also, since my final term exams are a week away, my further posts till 27th of March will be sparse, if any. I regret the delay. Thanks for sticking around, guys. I know you're a handful, but fuck that, I love you for all the support. And now to Chapter 3.]

Something had happened. A whir or a hint of a vibration; just a subtle, low tremor that went over the whole room and was over before he could put his mind to it. It was so slight that Aseem wasn’t sure whether it had been real, physical vibration or a sound so lowly intense that it had come across as a material quiver. He forgot all about it in a while, conforming like a faithful believer to what had been prescribed in the EPUU in matters of shunning enquiry and excessively critical thinking. The corresponding verse on the topic read:

Be not the proponents of Evil, for Evil corrupts and corrodes the soul in the death chalice of Sin. To mull and brood and ponder too long fixedly on any theme is Evil cognified. Thou shalt not remain entranced by thine sights and senses for any longer than it takes for thy limited mind to form a first make-up on it. To accept and abide by the Holy Utterances of the Unnamed is the biggest hope of service to thyself and to the world thou remain enveloped in.

Aseem hadn’t been taught to take the EPUU-ian commandments with a pinch of salt; heck, he had not been taught about taking anything with a pinch of salt, with the exception of his closely regulated daily meals that the Arbitron provided. His diet comprised a healthily balanced share of proteins, carbs and fats (all of which were garnished with taste-enhancers and complementary roughage, cooked up by Arbitron as per the ‘General Cooking Manual’).

Teaching had been, and still was an integral part of Aseem’s life so far. His learning was to cease only when enough information had been fed into his brain, in fact more information than it could sanely handle. Over-information, not misinformation caused the delirium of man, and according to the parables of EPUU, such a descent into oblivion was the natural, holy path to being unshackled from the mortal coil. It only implied, then, that too much learning was a direct detriment to human health, and to seek more of it would amount to slow suicide. Suicide, as the Holy Unnamed defined, was the murder of the self. Of the self, yes; but murder nonetheless. And murder was sin. Adding two and two made Aseem reach the epiphany, the zenith of human thought: knowledge is sin. And to sin was to be flogged by the Unnamed’s faithful Arbitron.

Presently, he had moved on from Bay 1 of physical labour (the runaround) to Bay 2, which required him to do bodily contortions corresponding to the figures that appeared in front of him on the wall, again in grey outline against the black background. The forms that appeared were stick figures that shifted shapes every time Aseem successfully aped them. These exercises were, like everything else the Arbitron came up with, direct downloads from Aseem’s potential knowledge vault. How humans’ untapped potential could be used by the Arbitron to build itself from scratch revealed to Aseem his own greatness as a human. The greatness which could allow the advent of a whole world out of nothing was nothing short of divine, and this thought kept him going. He was never disparaged by the monotony of his life or the hardships he had had to face time and again in the sometimes-unfair black boxed world of his. He continued to strive for his ideals, the ultimate path of life, the strict adherence to EPUU-ian teachings and his own calling to the Unnamed.

As Bay 2 was over and done with in an hour’s time, it was now time for Mental Work Bay 1 to welcome Aseem into its alcove. Here was something he looked forward to after his strenuous dose of assuming bodily postures and running around on a fixed axis, moving all around and yet remaining stationary. His work for the next hour was to solve logical conundrums fed to him on a black desk that had appeared out of the wall; pen, pencil and other stationary included. These were, of course, to be solved on the principles of the EPUU, as logic would have it.

A seemingly cozy seat had also emerged from the floor, its feet fluid at the ends to allow for slight adjustment. As he sat down and made himself comfortable, the Arbitron sensed his presence at the place where he was, and words started to appear on a slightly elevated platform on the monolithically black surface of the desk. The letters, as the reader might very well have guessed, were a dull shade of grey. The first logical problem read:

“Consider that you are trapped in a world full of light and infinite space. You cannot see anywhere dark or safe to go. What do you do to save yourself from certain termination?”

Trick question. He chuckled; he knew how to tackle this one.

Close my eyes, try to sleep, pray that it’s a nightmare and nothing more, he scribbled.

The letters faded and the next question appeared, in acceptance of the fact the answer was spot on and his logical thinking remained impeccable.

-
Chapter 4

Chapter 2: All in a day’s work

He slurped off the last bit of his coffee tastefully and unhurriedly, and placed the still-lukewarm mug in the cleaning bay, a multipurpose shelf tucked away in one alcoves of the large black room. Looking forward to his day’s installment of the Annual Work Schedule as chalked out by the Arbitron in its 58^th update (which had been triggered at the exact moment Aseem came of age), he stretched his arms and back once more, setting aside all tingling memories of the unfortunate day he had suffered physical reprimand for infringing upon the code of the EPUU. He had tried hard to shove the shameful incident out of his mental consciousness, but the more he tried to do so, the more the memory convalesced itself.

The physical gashes he had suffered at the hands of the Arbitron-whip had all but vanished, but the deep rooted guilt of having committed a sin and trespassing upon the forbidden made him feel terribly self-deprecating and ashamed.

He had been taught since he gained consciousness that EPUU was the most consecrated, most impregnable and venerated of all texts ever to have been penned down. The holy words contained therein had been recited by the Unnamed in continuous verses and jotted down obediently and subserviently by Ardhamanas in a dazed stupor of divine communication. It was the Unnamed that had granted the necessary bends in the physical laws of nature so as to allow the potential vault of Ardhamanas’ brain to dream up the Arbitron out of thin air. Hence, Arbitron too was a divine controller; built by man (inadvertently) but made possible by the Unnamed. The world was the Arbitron and a single man at a time was what inhabited it.

It was exactly 10:30 as per the time-piece embossed in matted gray on the wall, and the Arbitron announced in a voice somewhat laced with everyday tedium, “Day 3609 of the Annual Work Schedule commences now. Next let-off scheduled at 06 hours, 30 minutes and 01 second. Proceed to and prepare for Physical Labor Bay 1.”

Ritualistically, Aseem walked over to the designated alcove in the right-wall, which opened up further to reveal what the reader would understand as a distant cousin of a treadmill and a cycle rolled into one lofty contraption; the Arbitron called it ‘Runaround’.

A comfortably wide, soft-leathered and full-backed seat lay invitingly at a 45 degree tilt from the ground. It had a seat belt latch at the side, which Aseem slipped into with habituated smoothness. Back rested and head cocked backwards in relaxed ease, he bent his legs to a spot on a foot-platform detached from the ground, where were latches in which he slipped his bare feet and felt the knots tightening around them to a comfortable yet firm fitting. Knees slightly bent at a lethargic angle, he began pacing his feet on the smooth surface of the platform, thus making the whole apparatus take a circular loop around its axis. The faster he sprinted, the faster the machine completed its loops and spun him around 360 degrees.

At first the very purpose of it would seem befuddling to the third-person, but Aseem had complemented his adolescence by being sufficiently inquisitive about it with Arbitron. As the latter explained, the machine had a deeply metaphysical and spiritual basis to it, not to mention the many physically conducive effects of strenuous exercise to the human body. The circular motion had its roots in the EPUU-ian philosophy of completeness or consummation; the circle was symbolic of the fullness of life in all its glory, and was to serve as a reminder to man that life always came full-circle, and all his deeds were met with counter deeds and that nothing ever was left open ended in the natural order of things.

More importantly, it was said that The Unnamed especially favored the fluidity as seen in the figure of the circle; it was oddly cathartic to it to know that the world was indeed governed by a circular law, a law that dominated that karma (deed) always had to have a corresponding phal (outcome or result). The unnamed, shapeless force dictated that the laws of nature be rigged in a way that all life came full-circle in some manner, somewhere. Such was the profound philosophy that Arbitron waxed eloquent on when explaining to Aseem why the Runaround was to be manned and worked with everyday of his 68 years of existence, before being loony caught up with the rigmarole of natural order.

And so Aseem kept on with his toil, running around sans-haggardness, relentlessly going on with the day’s hard work. As the hours crawled by his mind had already started feeling the numbness and laxity catalyzed by spiritual self-realization and mental hibernation. And no more did he apply any effort to his muscles, all inertia had crept out of them in the wake of his being one with his black, boxed world of the Unnamed; it went like clockwork, the rigorous yet gracefully cyclic flip-flopping of his legs, pressing down the platform and him leaning back on his seat.

It was bliss.

---

Read Chapter 3

Stunted

“The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.”
-Lao Tzu

Chapter 1: Arise, awake, and stop.

Aseem woke up with a big fat drool linking his lips to the black-tiled floor of his home. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but nothing commonplace too; pretty much like real life, yet not completely so. Drowsily, with the slits of his eyes clamped intermittently at the ends by solidified eye matter, he got off his bed, stretching his arms, in effect creating a number of overlapping cracking sounds of limbs shifting gears and springing from disuse into activity.

Everything about his home was pitch black, like it had always been; the blackness eased Aseem’s eyes immensely, providing a comfortable recess from the nightmare-esque visions of blinding white light he had been harrowed by during the night.

He still reminisced vividly his initial lessons from Arbitron as a child, when he was lectured at length about the irrelevance and randomness of reveries, of the arbitrary mind process that ‘spat out’ or ‘spilled over’ some seemingly perceptible but eventually inconsequential chunks of information into his sensory-perception system. The bottom-line was that dreams, nightmares, visions and such were to be overlooked at the onset, and to discern or scrutinize or hold them in observance would invite nothing but misery. And that was that.

The Arbitron whirred to life upon sensing Aseem’s movements; it kept close, ginger tab on each and every one of Aseem’s activities, even his mental upheavals, ambitions, unconscious thoughts and so on. If there was to be a dictionary where Aseem lived, the term ‘privacy’ would not find itself a spot in it.

“Coffee, black,” Aseem fed his aural response to Arbitron by the vibration of his vocal cords and the simultaneous compliance of his jaw muscles, tongue and mouth; all of it happening, to the delight and amazement of the detached observer, at the very same time as his calf muscles, femurs and countless other localized bodily systems allowed him to walk across the floor, cover about four yards, and disappear behind the enclosure that was the excretion bay.

Coffee was served after the excreta generated overnight in his body were ejected (with a little help from the suction machine) in the excretion bay. He proceeded to drinking his favorite hot cup of black coffee, tastier than anything he was privileged enough to taste.

The amazing utility of Arbitron in everything from preparing food, providing knowledge of affairs of worth, control of body activities to being a source of mild entertainment and sexual fulfillment did never strike Aseem as out of the normal; and justifiably so. It was the Arbitron itself that had made him aware of the astonishing truth of the world, the world that did not exceed beyond the four walls of the, well, world. No matter how many romantic and wishful leaps of imagination Aseem took, the boring truth remained, after all, the only truth; the objective, deadpan, singular truth.

One principle that had been fed to him over repeated lessons during his adolescence was that the simplest explanation to any occurrence is most probably the truth, or the closest to it. He liked to kid himself into believing that such a fundamental inference could have been reached even without it being pointed out to him by the Arbitron, but another of the most basic principles conveniently nullified this line of thought too. It went something like this:

When engaged in a problem of any importance or difficulty, it is never enough to keep in mind that the ‘primary human instinct’ is always wrong, and will lead to misery.

Learn to gauge this impulse, suppress it, and then use it as a beacon of how not to do the given task, instead employing the direct opposite line of action.

As to what defined ‘primary human instinct’ and ‘misery’ was mentioned only in passing, in a tasteless, bland manner; the only to way engrain them into one’s active memory was by rote learning. And rote learning was something he had practiced to manifest in himself through rote learning itself. It was like breathing; years before he was taught about it, he had been doing it as a basic function for his existence.

As he sipped at the coffee in small mouthfuls, his sight instinctively flitted to the corner of the wall farthest from him, where nondescript, dull-grey outlines formed a meaningful mathematical figure against the pitch black background:

09:09:00

Exactly nine, 60-second time intervals had passed by since he had been woken up by the Covert Hiber-Rise, one of the many cutting edge features added to the Arbitron in its latest update, a direct download from Aseem’s right-brain potential knowledge vault.

These scheduled updates had been preset to happen at various stages of his life, and ended only at the age of 50 (which is the minimum human age limit as per The Obligatory Charter for Human Development), when the adaptability of the human body to any further advancements in the Arbitron started to decline, finally ending at a state of complete mental degeneration, or senility, at the age of 68. It was sharply ironic that it took all of 18 years for man to reach the peak of mental and physical capability, only to lose it years later in roughly the same amount of time. It conformed perfectly to the Exalted Prescient Utterances of the Unnamed (EPUU), the holy word of that which transcended creation and human life itself, that which stretched beyond the world of the room in which Aseem resided.

The Arbitron was a wondrous contraption of input and output centers and collective consciousness of all human understanding and wisdom. All condensed in physical form in the shape of the jet-black world that was the room.  Its multi-pronged functionality controlled and regulated every aspect of the small world Aseem inhabited. He himself had gaped with amazement when, in his advanced-level education he had learnt that the formation of the world had taken place with the birth of his great-great grand ancestor, Ardhamanas.

It was documented in the then-Arbitron that he was half-human and half-Unnamed, making him the closest any remotely human individual could come to being the venerated creator of the room itself. Ardhamanas was created, not unobviously by the creator, the Unnamed. Naming the Unnamed was forbidden as per the EPUU, the word of the Unnamed itself. Even to think of the Unnamed in any manifestation or figure or form amounted to heresy and punishable sacrilege, if detected by the Arbitron.

On the same account, Aseem had once, during his routinely chores, stopped in his tracks to realize to his horror that he had subconsciously been thinking of the Unnamed in the form and shape of a human being, with his long, golden locks of hair caressing his broad, robust shoulders, and a loose wheatish cloak with which he covered his bosom, flowing in the light breeze inside the four black walls of the world. His stature was long and lean, his fingers dainty and feline, borderlining on the inhuman. His arms were stretched ahead in benevolent acceptance and head glowing reverently in a faint, grayish halo.

Before this utterly nonsensical figure could take complete shape, an amoebic tentacle suddenly detached itself from one of the four walls, almost as if emerging from nothingness. Simultaneously, the cool, husky voice of the Arbitron (another update from Aseem’s right-brain potential knowledge vault) flooded the world with Verse 266 of the EPUU:

Thou shalt never, in voluntary course of action or otherwise, think of restricting Me, Your Creator, the Unnamed, into the trifling moulds of human figure, nor shalt thee demean and belittle Me by confining me to the meager names of the Human language that I have so benevolently bestowed upon thee. The punishment to any such act of callousness and extreme ignorance will be no less than 25 whips on the blasphemer’s derrière at the hands of the Arbitron. Peace out.

Aseem knew he had breached the law of the land in his blatantly ignorant act of blasphemy. He braced himself for what lay ahead, even as the Arbitronic tentacle pressed him down hard on the black floor. Another arm detached itself out of the wall, and approached him ominously, with him lying spread eagle on his chest, helplessly regretting his momentary lapse of conduct. This arm being the whip-arm, was more solid and sharper at the open-end than its amoebic counterpart. The arm stopped about a foot away from his skin, and then suddenly swung over and struck his behind with immense momentum.

“One,” announced the Arbitron in his clear, penetrating voice. Aseem winced in pain and repentance.

Forgive me Unnamed, for I have sinned. Forgive me in the name of the Unnamed; let me be free of any further thoughts of corruption and heresy, thought Aseem as the flogging went on.

Two. He gulped. Forgive me O Exalted One, for I have sinned.

Three. He spat a mouthful. Forgive me…

Four. Enough. FUCK THIS HURTS!
---
Read Chapter Two.

An extended introduction

I have been toying with the idea of penning down a coherent story with a plausible science fiction plot, for my literary and cinematic inspirations have predominantly been those who delve in this genre; be it Asimov, Douglas Adams, Tarkovsky, Andrew Niccol, Kubrick or Duncan Jones. I have also been wanting to dream up a plot where, through the use of many staples of this genre, I could explore themes of human imperfection, ethical issues of scientific advancement, and the paradoxes that might crop up in a fictional near-future due to the clash of morality and human curiosity.

In this hope, and after having seen the superlative ‘The Truman Show’ for the tenth time, I sat down and started writing what was intended to be short story, but has turned out to be an episodic novella of sorts. A long story or a short novel is how I would describe this currently incomplete work. Infact it is so incomplete that I’m stil in two minds whether or not to go on with my new, crazy style of writing wherein I have given up on literary adornment and ‘grandiloquence’, as one of my friends puts it (you better be reading this!). In return, I have started writing longer and faster and more spontaneously than ever before, the end result being that my writing is less voluminous and more, shall we say, reader-friendly.

My next post will be the first chapter of this exciting new story titled ‘Stunted’. I want feedback from you guys to tell me whether it is any worthy of being continued, for I am yet to write all of it. Make them as acerbic and critical as you want to, but please be honest. Thanks in advance to my nearly non-existent readers, hope you like it. START FROM HERE

Saintly words at the Devil's hour

[Thoughts that saunter in at 3am, penned (with shamelessly ripped off words from 'Home' by Daughtry)...]

If life and time allowed for but once

To go back to revisit, that which is done,

To step back in sepia-toned memories,

To re-witness the good, the bad and the mundane all over again,

What would I do?

Into the faithful world of what ‘was’ from the insecure clutches of what ‘is’,

If only could I transcend,

Would I be as belligerent, as convinced, as univocal as now?

Or is it a question of being careful of what I wish for,

In case I just might get it all,

And then some I don’t want.

If only Physics allowed, I would venture into antiquity,

Slip into comatose, an island full of compartmented people,

People, each in their assigned walled rooms,

Faithfully one-dimensional, yet completely my own to keep,

More me than who they themselves be.

Or is it unripe, still, to populate it with people,

For leagues and leagues wait to be befriended,

And yet many more to be antagonized.

How to tell when it is just enough?

How to tell the rolling stone when not to roll and gather no moss anymore,

For the wanderlusts, the itinerants, are never men of content.

Having toyed about a while with the fantastic thought,

A thought in vain, a thought worth naught,

I think I’d rather do without this skeletal limbo,

Of unspoken lies, of undone deeds,

of half-dead dreams, of untouched realms,

Of half-cooked relationships, of fractured pleasantries,

Of capitalized ramblings, but unengaged action.

The Hopelessness of Imminence

[NOTE: Completely impromptu, result of a 5-minute experiment. Please comment on ideas contained herein, and not on rhyme scheme and figures of speech and other flowery terms adamant on divorcing poetry from truthfulness.]

Sometimes somethings, like snowcaps in a frozen time,

Inertia-stricken; by change, are never plagued.

Why then do others, change at will,

Why, like portraits never unfinished or finished,

With brush strokes wild and dabs of creativity,

Get washed off and go, never to return.

Like leaves in autumn, shriveled, haggard and gangly,

Frail and hinging, auburn and yellow,

Taken in the stride of the daunting wind,

To fly, fly and soar, away from home,

Away from innocence, from what was once one’s own.

The damning waves approach and come and never fucking go,

Annihilate, ravage, level, plunder and corrode,

Like dreams caught up in an unannounced quicksand,

The sand castle of men made sometime somewhere.

The charming adolescence of thought and reveries,

And beautiful, unassuming, unpretentious words of heart.

Matriculate into malevolence, blind faith and vanity.

Oh world, big world, thou art too mighty,

Keep to yourself your corruption, your gangrenous articulations.

Let me grow old and die without the imposed albatross around my neck.

Isaac Asimov: an Ode to the Grandmaster of Modern-Day Science Fiction

[NOTE: Wrote this appreciative piece on Asimov, in an Asimov-would-have-approved-if-alive style for a school assignment. It is the least esoteric and whimsical of my writings for obvious (and aforementioned) reasons. Also, it misses out on a lot of his other important works like the Bailey trilogy and End of Eternity. Just overlook and read on...]

"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right."

In an era when science fiction writing was confined to pathos-intended robot stories, antagonistic tales of rebelling humanoids and daunting visions of robot-invasions being penned by authors grappling with a genre in its infancy, Isaac Asimov truly stood apart with his assemblage of short stories and novels, written over an illustrious career spanning more than 50 years.

Many admirers describe Asimov’s vast body of work as highly instrumental  in chiseling out science fiction writing as a viable and exciting genre for daring authors, making him probably the only writer in the field to have achieved the same stature as HG Wells, who, for all practical reasons, ‘invented’ the genre itself. Just as Shakespeare contributed to English language by adding more than a thousand words to it, (‘advertising, ‘submerge’ and ‘outbreak’ to name a few), Asimov’s contribution to scientific vocabulary was coining the word ‘robotics’ and using it for the first time in his works. ‘Robotics’ as a scientific term continues to be a part of common parlance in our times.

Counting the feathers in an individual’s cap in not enough; I must take it on myself to explain why and how each and every last one of them landed in his cap. What is it that makes Asimov’s body of work so seminal in the light of contemporary times and advancements? What exactly makes him the Grandmaster of Science Fiction and no less?

Let me start by naming my favorite and most-read work of Asimov, of which I shall be talking the most in the following paragraphs: The Foundation Series. The Foundation saga comprises seven episodic novels telling the story of an adventurous odyssey of scientists on a mission to reduce the period of imminent ruination facing an Intergalactic Empire in a distant future, by following a path lighted by their ‘prescient’ mentor-scientist, Hari Seldon. The saga deals with a variety of themes and attempts to raise very fundamental questions pertaining to human emotion, action and limited human understanding of the universe through the medium of science fiction. What is truly remarkable of Asimov’s Foundation is that he takes enthralling science fiction storytelling devices (which make up for today’s staples in the genre) and effortlessly intertwines them with what we know as his sprawling, rip-roaringly individual ‘voice’: the light-hearted reflection of basic, unadulterated humanity found in the most unlikely of places.

With sharp wit and warm, seamless and simplistic use of language by his side, Asimov creates a peeping hole into the very heart of human consciousness, rightfully promulgating in his exemplary writings that there is hope in the bleakest, darkest corners of the world (correction, the universe!) as long as human will and wit remains intact. In many of his short episodic stories in the Foundation series, the seemingly inevitable perils that threaten to wipe out humanity from the universe are sidestepped and evaded by the unexpectedly simple use of uncommon common sense by one or more of the unlikely protagonists that Asimov created. After having read most of the short stories penned by him, I find them to be akin to detective conundrums, waiting to be cracked by the readers before the author spills the beans.

In fact Asimov did dabble briefly in detective fiction in his short-story series ‘Black Widowers’, wherein a group of laid-back armchair intellectuals invite a unique guest over for a homely dinner, and question them for any unexplained or out-of-the-ordinary event that might have taken place in their lives, usually resulting in the affirmative, going on to clear the air by eliminating implausible explanations by way of rigorous, logical in-arguments.

Another commendable truth about Asimov’s writings is his choice of characters that go on to be protagonist. In most of his works, especially the Foundation series, the archetypical ‘hero’ (or ‘heroine’) of the narrative is usually someone very resolute on a few binding principles and ideals, which he or she puts to practical use in the final phase of the story by acting on them when they seem the least likely to be upheld in the seriousness of the situation. For example, one of the initial central characters in the Foundation Saga, Salvor Hardin, (under whose name Asimov wrote the introductory quotation with which I began the article) abides by a handful of axioms that govern his actions, even though the reader is on the brink of believing that conforming to them would not yield any desirable outcome. In this fashion, Asimov loves to chalk out the boundaries for his characters’ field of play, and plays them out according to these guiding set of ‘sensibilities’, which I think would have been as much fun to him to write as they are for the readers to read.

It would be criminally unjust on my part if I leave out Asimov’s Robot stories out of the scope of the article, for ‘Robot-fiction’ is not just incomplete, but ill-formed without keeping in view the Grandmaster’s works on the topic. Asimov’s love for machines transcended more than hundreds of his short stories and novels, so much so that it is very surprising as to why there is minimal robotic action in the whole of Foundation series (except for Prelude to Foundation, which is a sort-of bridge to his earlier works on Robot-Human love-hate relationships). ‘I,Robot’, another of his pivotal short works on the genre essentially comprises stories of human interaction with experimental robots, and how robotics as a scientific discipline graduates from infancy to adulthood under the able watchfulness of the many brilliant scientists who act as protagonists of the narratives. While developing robots, Asimov employed the use of the celebrated (albeit fictitious) Three Laws of Robotics, which are as follows:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

The stories revolve around the minute logical fallacies ingrained in the apparently flawless Three Laws, and how scientific forerunners think of a way around the laws to wire the robots in a manner conducive to human society, and not otherwise. Again, it is to be underlined that the stories have a very basic logical and rational premise; almost in the same way as real-life scientist would approach real-life problems. It is in this realistic, minimalistic and clear writing that Asimov succeeds, and succeeds big time.

What truly distinguishes Isaac Asimov’s writings from those that came before, after or in his time is not in ‘how’ he wrote, but ‘what’ he wrote.  Most authors of yore such as Shakespeare, Dickens and Hawthorne have made their expressive writing their mainstay, their claim to fame. However, in Asimov’s case, it was his own belief that minimal ornamentation and embellishment is required in writing if the content is solid enough. My admiration for his writing springs from this very feature of them: high ideas are packaged in the neatest and simplest of words, minus the ostentation of big words and flowery expression. If not from his word, one may surely and safely conclude from his prolific works that there was much more than a little truth in what he meant when he said the following words:-

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

Self, justified

I pray not to anyone, but myself,

I bow down to none, but my conscience.

I stand sans morals, outcast, abject

My hand at work, my brain at rest.

Debauch, I turn; to love, I forget

Mechanically to and fro, my limb vibrates

Organ I fondle, orgasm I seek,

Eyes half-closed; of malice, I reek.

The hour of love has long since passed,

The draught of pure emotion, flushed,

Still, my inertia-struck, addicted muscle,

Conforming to nothing, keeps up the jostle.

Still, I do what I do not without sanction,

What inner broodings be when pure is action?

Self-infliction, anyway, is but no crime,

Who, pray, except in thought, do I malign? 

Does clandestine thought add up to more

Than visible, palpable acts of offense?

Doesn’t outward goodness demand corruption

of innards and thoughts and mental abomination?

A question to all who shirk with deprecation,

Isn’t life all about dark, veiled obsessions?

Don’t all of us, inside our scaly shells,

Mask long-forgotten relics of our shady selves?