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? 

The Answer Is Blowing in the Wind

Is it true that tragedy chisels the best out of the good? Why is it that an Anurag Kashyap and a Franz Kafka had to have peculiar and traumatizing childhoods, which irked them to come out as avant-garde artists? Is it only the wronged and fractured who is entitled to have greatness as an attribute?

What of that normal, average Joe who wants to come out of the mould of mediocrity he’s made to fit into without being beset and hounded by tragedy and gloom? What of that person whose biggest tragedy in life is hair growing out of his derriere and chest fat accumulating to give rise to a shameful bulge? Why cannot a person with excellent parentage, jovial childhood, normal adolescence and merry adulthood be entitled to artistry of the finest class? Is it because of the prosaic and mundane nature of routine, everyday life? Is it because the tragedy of great men is itself looked upon as their greatness? Is the normal, healthy, ideal upbringing so enforced and encouraged by all forms of media, governance, textbooks and the likes only but a myth, an unachievable, impalpable average?

Why is a normally brought-up, normally grown-up, aspiring artist looked down upon with sneers that, if words had been given to them, would blare at full volume questions on the lines of “How can you create a work of art if you haven’t seen the harshness and ‘reality’ of life for yourself?”

Under these circumstances, is our Tom, Dick and Harry unjustified in inflicting tragedy upon himself? Is this the very harshness of life he is so fervently and constantly reminded by the so-called connoisseurs of art? Isn’t it the perfect, glistening example of ‘Misery seeks company’? If tragedy is so vital in character building and imparting artistic tendency, is not suicide and murder justified for an artist, someone who hasn’t been inherently bestowed with tragedy, but imposes it upon himself? Isn’t it similar to talent versus practice, of which the former is intrinsic and in-born, and the latter is gained, acquired through practical repetition and infliction? Or does it only mean that without involuntary or inborn tragedy, true artistry can never be achieved? Or is this write-up just a study in irrelevance and baseless argument?

The painter is not the art. Never commit the folly of interchanging the art and the artist, which we so often do. We talk not of the art as much as we make inroads into studying the artist. To understand Kafka’s body of work, many an interpreter choose to study his childhood. Wrong! Let the artist be independent of criticism, let his art be put to scrutiny and not himself, except, of course, when the central figure of your scrutiny is him instead of his art. The why, how and ‘under what conditions..’ are merely result of the deep rooted human trait of investigating for meaning, searching for answers, without which the mind refuses to be at rest. All human action is, when viewed from a large-enough frame of reference, genetic, pre-programmed and predictably instinctive. The inquisitiveness to find meaning in randomness, godliness in cold natural selection, reassurance and order in chaos is a result of humanness, something that unifies the most artistic and the blandest parts of us. The questions, though, still remain.

Bob Dylan’s (titular) few words have all the answers. Smell them, feel them, and grasp them if you can. I cannot, and the result is this discharge. I feel purged already.

Social Responsibility of a Film-Maker

[NOTE: One from the archives. I wrote this on Friday the 12th of November, 2010. The slight evolution in my writing style is perceptible to me when I compare this huge article to those I have written more recently, more 'offhandedly'.] 

It is never an artist’s ambition to accommodate the expectations of his audience into his art form. The visual art of filmmaking is hardly any different. Commercial cinema, as it has been so branded today, is not only a sham, a façade, but also a very audacious and wounding ignominy to art forms in totality.
The first rule, as Tyler Durden oh-so famously bellowed, of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. Extending this pop-culture referencing analogy to the topic of my (self proclaimed) rant, what I mean to say here is that real, lauded, hard-hitting cinema is never for its own sake. It has the power, the boldness, and the smugness to step up, be judge and provide solutions to the very problems it poses in its 120 minutes timeframe. It can never be utterly a disconnected world of its own; in its basic emotions such as greed, happiness, joy and envy, it is very much a social statement, because no artist can undo the constant sculpting of their thoughts at the hands of their circumstances and milieu, however badly they might try to.
Let’s take A Clockwork Orange for instance. It is a film laden with ideas, brimming and at times spilling over with passionate expression and honest brutality. A visual, mental and auditory ‘kick’. A running social commentary and darkly satirical undertones is what makes the film meaningful. It is not for art for the heck of it, or for the lately much-in-use (or more aptly, abuse) ‘entertainment’ value of it.
It is hence inherent that cinema carries the responsibility of shaping up the ideas of an entire generation, given that a proper, concerted solution is also provided as an epilogue, because a satire is incomplete without providing a way out of the situation it parodies. If otherwise, then it is a satire of itself, it parodies its own impotence and futility.
They say that a pen is mightier than the sword. I propose a rather contemporary overhaul to this age-old adage. The camera has replaced the pen, and the sword is well, anything that helps impose one’s beliefs over another, be it an AK-47, be it a nuclear weapon, or be it hard cash.
We live in times dubbed as the ‘ghor kalyug’, translated to English as the clichéd ‘bad times’. In any given era we look back into, we’ve always have had that one, looming, impending danger ahead of us that hangs like the sword of Damocles overhead, a danger to humanity as a whole. In the middle 20th century, it was the fear of human race being wiped out at the hands of a third, final world-war, with big-wiggies like USA and Russia threatening to tear each other to shreds with their mammoth arsenal of nuclear warheads. As the USSR disintegrated into a dozen countries, and North Korea grew weak economically, this once-pounding fear went dormant, and is now almost unheard of. It has been, however, duly replaced by the next big impending peril, what we term as ‘global warming’.
And so, every period of humanity has its own idiosyncrasies, its own icing-on-the-cake, its own perception of lifestyle and its own whitewashed sense of sensibilities. This, in part, gets reflected in our cinema. At the time when the USA-Russia cold war was underway, we saw a dramatic shift of our cinema to subjects like espionage, double-crossing spies, and undercover secret agents, what with Ethan Hunt and James Bond leading the pack. So, in a way, a majority of movies cash in on the fear housed inside the audience’s hearts, and also inside the filmmaker’s own.
But then, there is another crop of movies, a la Fight Club, Memento, Dark City, and The Matrix that expend their own ideas rather than borrowing it from actual events. Of course, they can never be completely disconnected to our world; in fact they are more in sync with our lives’ pertinent issues than outlandish, society-borrowing films. Therefore, in order to being about a change in the society, in the social skeleton, it is a duty of the film maker to mould a film that not only is a result of its environment, but also very much a solution in itself. A problem left unsolved is merely stating the obvious, it is hence said that cinema is not just a reflection; it is how-to guide to self improvement.
It is also questionable as to what intelligence level the filmmaker holds. In times when a Hi-definition camcorder is as ubiquitous as a cell phone, any idiot armed with this device can go one making their own movies. This is exponentially dangerous when these self proclaimed flag bearers of intelligent cinema pass them off as ‘art’ films. Art cinema certainly is the ideal playfield for these pseudo-filmmakers to try and mould the minds of people they cater to. A few close-ups here, a few serious shots there, and lo, you have your average artsy film that the critics love and the audience love to hate. Hence, a film being an art film alone can never be a cent percent assurance of it being socially relevant and essential.
The audience should be as good as non-existent for a filmmaker when he’s shooting a movie. For it to be hard hitting and powerful, a film has to be no-holds-barred and relentless, without as much of a hint of cringing and whining at sensitive issues or controversial topics. Filmmaking (excellent filmmaking, that is) is always and always has been, very much a personal project, never with the accommodation of how the audience will react to it. One of the most glimmering examples to this claim is the entire career of auteur Guru Dutt, who made timeless, impeccable and not to forget, very personal films.
Many people opine that moviemaking has its own limitations when juxtaposed against book reading, which is, the pen has no precincts, no confining boundaries of the physical world. Whereas, the camera does have these confines, it is captive to the three dimensional world, with the damned Laws of Physics limiting its freedom. In today’s times, however, this once-seemingly unassailable advantage that writing a book had over making a film has, to an extent, been overcome. With cutting edge technology and a gazillion dollars at your disposal, making a movie is no longer bound to a camera shooting images. It is a computer producing these images, choreographing spectacular, out-of-the-world (literally, in some cases) scenarios and scenes. The boundaries in filmmaking have receded back in fear; the daunting fear of technology and the sinew resolution of man’s wild creativity. Truly, filmmaking has stood the test of time, and has not allowed time to bind it down just to a camera shooting movies. It has evolved from a solely optical viewing to a whole experience, a treat to all the senses, what with 3D and even 4D (as they call it) movies being made.
Also, films have a direct connect to a large bracket of audience, be it rich or poor (I myself once saw a film in a multiplex and paid in all, Rs. 30), old or young, even literate or illiterate. It thus has more power than any other medium to bring about the done to death ‘change’ we have been talking about. A film that is permanent, timeless in its portrayal, goes down into the pages of history and inspires not only one generation, but multitudes of generations to come, and I exemplify this with Charlie Chaplin’s magnum opus ‘The Great Dictator’, which released over half-a-century ago, but refuses to wither out of film lovers’ memories, standing rock-strong of the fact that one man had the guts to parody a dictator who had the whole of Europe gasping and running amok with sheer fear. And there are multiple examples to back this idea of mine, the most recent being Fahrenheit 9/11, a resounding slap at the George Bush regime and its outlook towards the War in Afghanistan.
We have arrived at a time when creativity can never touch the limitations of cinema. If you can dream it, you can film it. Therefore, in order to make a social impact, we must keep a level head and make movies with a certain responsibility, in fact as a repayment of people’s trust in you that has made you competent enough to film it in the first place. Of course, the most easily affected audience is the teenage bracket, which gets swayed by the apparent ‘coolness’ with which the actors smoke cigarette after cigarette on-screen, or how intoxicatingly beautiful does the intake of drugs look in films like Trainspotting or Requiem For A Dream. Of course, to a sensible, mature audience, these activities are see-through and they can actually read between the lines to get the real message of the film, but it the adolescent, young-adults who have this ardent desire to look cool at all times, and movies being so easily stylised, they get wooed into ill habits very easily.
But then again, this is an impediment of the audience and not the filmmaker. This is just the dormant monstrosity of our young adults, which begs to come out, and eventually does come out under the sheath of movies and cinema. It is only the fickle minded that get infatuated by every bad thing that is put to exhibition in the movies, hence the blame is not as much of the moviemaker as it is of the audience.
To conclude my ramble, I would say that films and filmmakers have quite much of a responsibility, and the first and foremost of them is, making movies to the best of their intelligence. To cheat your own self and lowering the level of intelligence (or even elevating it beyond your level of intelligence) of your films is, by my books, the biggest ‘artistic’ crime that can ever be committed. Cinema that is pretentious is the most hateable of all insults to filmmaking. Even if a film is bad, callously terrible in its execution, but completely honest in its level of interpretation of the subject, it is infinitely better than a film that is very well made but dishonest and showy.
In the end, I would like to quote the poet Vladimir Mayakovski, whose poems were as tragic as the story of his life:
 “Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.”

Of sexual pleasure, emancipation and God

In orgasm lies a bizarre epiphany, a realization of the burlesque of emotions that we ostentatiously want to exhibit and be offended at the lack of from others. In the split second of having an ejaculation, one can clearly see how his or her emotions are merely skin-deep and paper thin, while at the core of the human bosom lies unadulterated nothingness: an unexpected apathy and lack of inward sensitivity towards anyone but its own self. It is in the succeeding moments of the ultimate activity of pleasure that we can see how superficial our motivations and self-justifications have been. It is akin to the moment of weightlessness and void one experiences on bungee-jumping from atop a sky-scraping cliff, where the immensely downcast feeling of void immediately follows that of paramount pleasure, only to be replaced the next second by the latter. I believe it is this split-second void of worldly emotions and awareness of one's own shallowness of idealistic rationale and moral uprightness that people refer to as 'Godliness'.

Matrimony: A Blind Acceptance of Antiquity

[Foreword: this marks my return to sermonizing by means of an article. I request you not to drop dead of boredom while you're reading this. All the best, and may you reach the bottom!]

 “Whatever was to be said has been said. It is only in expression and eloquence that writing evolves, not in fabric.”

Man has been one to forge relationships and bondages for itself since time immemorial, which is why it is not very much off the bull’s eye to call it a social being: a product of nature incapable of sustenance without community and group dwelling.

Even when in one of our initial psychology lessons the heading ‘Psychology As A Social Science’ came up, our teacher started off by establishing  and taking for granted that human existence is impossible in isolation; that the whole purpose of humanity is to collaborate and then go on to observe other duties. Bombarded with such univocal ideas, I set out to ponder on the lines of ‘Why is a social obligation, say matrimony, a social obligation?’ Why is it that at every level, as humans we are expected to take part in social ties and bind ourselves down in accordance with a set of ancient rules laid down by wizened old men in their time of leisure?

Has ‘societal evolution’ hit a proverbial full stop in this sense, and any effort to expose this fallacy is looked down with a wince and a clicking of the tongue, all in the name of demolition of our age-old culture and old school of thought? Why is it that religion is so influential a force in our times that it assumes the role of social restriction and clouds the way we would otherwise have behaved and functioned socially? Why is there a Paigambar Mohammed, Confucius, or Mahabharat to remind me how to live my life in a social setup? Why can I not be a believer unless I have to accept a certain ‘way of life’ that defines my actions and dominates my thinking? Why does an institution such as matrimony exist, wherein one has to have legal and social sanction in order to raise a legitimate offspring? I am afraid my questions will remain unanswered as long as they are, well, unanswered.

Many a men (and women, before you jump the gun to label me male-chauvinistic) have been attackingly vocal in their notion that marriage is a pointless and character-diminishing social commitment, which the sooner is done away with, the better will it be for all of humanity.  Franz Kafka, one of the founding avant-garde writers of 20^th Century, has famously and in my view, very rightly said, “I must be alone a great deal. What I accomplished was only the result of being alone.”

 I can quote many others in this regard who further my and Kafka’s point, but I will not delve into their wise words for the retention of my own way of expression, something I have touched upon in the opening quotation.

Matrimony is considered an institution of deep reverence and fidelity, something that to me is a red herring in the masquerade of which people fornicate, or, in keeping with the parlance of our times, fuck the individual of their choice and legitimize it in the eye of the society and its constituting persons by calling it a pact. What is even more disarming is how matrimony in its status quo continues to be an open, socially boisterous and publicly exhorting event. Of course, it is but a choice of the one being hitched to decide whether the event has to be public or not, but for me, marriage remains a queer notion that I am yet to come to terms with (if that is what you call adolescence, I am your perfect specimen).

Individuality is a trait that is (in a flipside to community living) inextinguishably basic and primeval in humans (I am afraid my very limited biological knowledge will not let me safely extend this assumption to all living beings). Wherever there breeds man, breeds in it the urge to be free, unrestrained in thought and action, elusive of any contact with another human: in short, individuality. While fifth grade moral science taught all of us that an extreme of any and everything is undesirable, sometimes this bottled, pent-up, dormant individuality spurts out in one-off cases.

One worthy example of my claim would be Christopher McCandless, famously known under his self-conferred pseudonym Alex Supertramp, who gave up a financially and socially secure life to run off (literally) and live in the company of nothing except the greens, all in a desperate search of himself. Even though he met a tragic end in the hinterlands of Alaska due to acute starvation, his gleaming beacon-of-an-example provide us with profound insight into the dormant and blazingly individual nature of man, raring and restless to come to the hilt, bustling to be expressed and lived with. To douse this streak of the inherent human emotion would be akin to an assault on the very substance of the human soul, akin to asphyxiating to death a full-fledged personificated individual that is individuality. Matrimony does exactly this.

In what I see as a very patriarchal social set-up, marriage is another nail in the coffin for all proponents of individualism in humans in general and the women in particular. In the Indian society, it is an accepted norm that the representative of the fairer sex in matrimony is subject to numerous negatives as opposed to what I will call the ‘unfairer’ sex. However noble and well intentioned may have been the initial ideas behind their inception, the marital code we have given to ourselves has been interpreted grotesquely and ignobly in ways more than one of late. My explaining the ills of dowry, property inheritance laws (post-marriage) and the general sense of entitlement that the family of the groom expects to have over the bride will be entirely futile, for they are widely and ubiquitously known. Also, in my convoluted view, to have even a fraction of feeling of prerogative over another individual requires the complete willingness of the individual over which this liberty is being shrouded. It is in entirety the choice of the bride to not be a bride and never have an eye raised over her raising a child with someone who is not what society would call her husband; the same stands true for a male, in case you take me for a feminist and not a humanist.

It enrages me to see a man or woman being called promiscuous and characterless if they have been in and out of relationships like one would switch between morning and evening attires. Of course, I am not one to support what we call ‘double timing’, for that would be clubbed under cheating and treachery in general, something I try not to indulge in myself and despise to any given extent. However, when it comes to being in a live-in relationship, the society tends to label those in it to be commitment-phobic and emotionally incapable of maintaining a happy and fulfilling association, something that I again disregard and sideline as social bullshit. Forging ties and cutting them off is an inalienable right of man, it is not anyone else’s business to monitor and police a couple’s intermingling and look down to their relationship merely because they choose not to give it social sanction by calling it marriage. I am dead against the notion that a healthy marriage is reflective of the mental stability and normalcy of its constituents.

All said and done, I must make the confession that I do not have a plausible hypothetical set-up of the society that would alternate the one we have today. The idea of a family itself would not have been cradled and given shape, were it not for the institution I so strongly rally against in this write-up. I propose nothing in place of the nuclear family skeleton that we base our life on. I might not have all the answers but I do get the satiation one gets on asking pertinent questions and raising sustainable doubts over the way things exist today. I am but a fragment of the time I live in, no more no less, but still willing to be time-independent and society-independent in terms of ideology and existence. Alas, there are none (in general knowledge, anyway) who have escaped their affixed places in time and space physically, but to be an escapee in thought and mental awareness is the trait of the great. The condescending eye within me that longs for this escape and enlightenment sees (or at least pretends to see) matrimony as a damnable social evil, something which I do not have the answer to, but over which I can raise many a doubt and question.

“All the world's a stage, And all men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances…”

-William Shakespeare

How i interpret Inception

[Originally published and hosted at http://passionforcinema.com/.]

Christopher Nolan has been (since his initial college short-film Doodlebug), apart from all other things that he has been, a talented film maker endowed with the mastery to produce art which is open to endless interpretations and discussions. It has been his track record to amaze and at many places, outwit his audience with twist endings, blink-and-you-miss-it direction, and the consistency that even someone as great as Steven Spielberg cannot offer. His work is not comparable to what stuff like Michael Gondry and Charlie Kaufman produce, but more likely to, say, Stanley Kubrick’s body of work.
What comes as a latest (and disputably, the best) addition to this list is the Leonardo Dicaprio-starrer ‘Inception’. Within the opening minutes of the film, you can see the signature ‘Nolan’ style taking over: grand location, a hard-to-follow story, and a staggeringly original plot. Cutting without a moment’s delay to the chase, let me reach the central motive of my writing this piece.
Many film pundits have presented utterly outlandish explanations of the movie, which to the best of my knowledge, are merely results of over analysis. What I got out of the movie was not technical plot details and crooked metaphors, instead the basic, emotional message that the filmmaker has tried to voice. It is, at many places, a taunt to the smart-alecs who believe it is their responsibility to act as a mouthpiece for the whole human race. What I present in the following paragraphs is not a definitive, quintessential guide to unlocking the genius of Inception; it is not the final word. It is just a straightforward, personal explanation of what I gather out of the film’s proceedings. In an age where the critic is more ubiquitous than the audience, what I want to write is a non-critical, rather appreciative perspective of the film.

Nolan has always been fond of setting up and establishing an environment with his own set of rules in the two-and-a-half hours of the movie. Be it the bleak, sleety, chilly landscape of Alaska where the sun never sets in Insomnia, or be it the dark, brooding city of Gotham with lawlessness and corruption at an unending fist-fight with the heroic vigilantism of the ‘Masked Crusader’ in Batman Begins and Dark Knight, Nolan loves to set up boundaries and challenges for himself as a filmmaker. And so it is with Inception; you have an entirely imagined world of dreams and artificiality, what with its own sets of defining laws and precincts, limiting factors and demarcated boundaries of play. Nolan is a very angular artist, one who, instead of focusing more on the emotional and flawed aspects of humanity, wants to have rational and rule-bound storytelling, something at once unequivocal and yet open to several interpretations.
Whenever we think of dreams, what comes to our mind are vague recollections of vivid imagery, half-remembered and half-forgotten, but never as well-formed and constructed and detailed as portrayed in the film in reckoning. To see it in a structured, skeletal form is tad incredible, and this is where many critics believe Inception has failed: in its very basic assumption of seeing dreams as a taut, technical, rule-based dimension.
But then, my point is, to the kind of crafty, shrewd and thoroughly professional characters portrayed in the movie, whose very bread thrives on the interception and manipulation of dreams and dreamers, it cannot be afforded that dreams be set up without any rules. These men and women are trained, practiced fabricators and architects of dreams; they have set up these laws because without them, their very profession is at risk of being thwarted by a vague but powerful counter-thought. There is no margin for any kind of ambiguity in the kind of occupation they are engaged in, they need to have a preset network of defining conditions in their dream space. It can be compared to a bunch of real-life conmen who plan their con to the last detail, but the moment they get on with it, earth loses its gravity and they start floating in the air like balloons, all plans of a con thwarted. Hence, the dreams we dream are very different from the chiseled, mechanical dreams of the architects in Inception, and hence we cannot complain Nolan of portraying dreams unrealistically (pun intended).
Coming to my last point, I found the ambiguity of the climactic sequence the USP of the film: the overcooked, feel-good track, the inspirational music (which is perhaps the best song in the soundtrack, ‘Time’) overlaying the perfect-frame close up of Leonardo Dicaprio as he regains consciousness in slow motion, the equivocal stance of the immigration agent, and finally the wobbly top, all make for the ideal finish. Where many interpreters (movie-coroners, I call them) believe that this overly-jovial final track is indicative of and furthers the idea that the movie is still being played out in a dream, I neither agree nor disagree on that point.

Time by Hans Zimmer

On Wikipedia, Nolan is quoted saying that Cobb walking away from the top, indifferent of it collapsing or continuing its spin is the main thing, and not its actual fall or prolonged rotation. I believe the same so too; even if the top did keep spinning, it is of little consequence for Cobb. It is just like he’s given up on what’s illusion and what’s real, because what he has today is something he had always wished for (that is, his being united with his family), so it doesn’t really make a difference even if he were in a dream. It could be that he is dreaming all this up like the attic-full of old men Yousef takes him too, but Cobb is ignorant of everything, and still is very much in bliss.
In a way, Cobb no longer cares. And through this little trick, Nolan wants to tell us audience to give the analysis a rest and let the film be a film for its sake. He slips in this feathery rap-on-the-back-of-the-head for those very smart-alecs I talked of in the beginning, as if snubbing them off saying, ‘even Cobb’s happy with it being/not being a dream, why’re you guys so damn prying?’
Then again, it’s just my opinion. All said and done, Inception is Christopher Nolan’s stand-out masterpiece, one which had been long overdue after the flawless Memento. I salute and immensely revere this auteur of a film-maker who keeps a level head and churns out one great film after another, each better than the last.

निशाचर

[I don't want much of a foreword for this, its just an impulsive piece without any pre-planning whatsoever. Just the night and me and a pen and a paper.]

काली इस रात की कालिख जैसा, 

धुंआ उड़ाता जाता हूँ|

या है ये किसी आईने जैसा, 

खुद में ही जो मैं झांकता हूँ||

ये निशा का जादू सर चढ़ता, 

मैं झूम-झूम आवारा हूँ|

जो सुबह सुनहरा सपना था,

इस अंधियारे में समा गया||

हूँ मैं, बस मैं, सब बिछड़ गए, 

सारा जग-जग है सोया|

सब छोड़-छाड़, विधियाँ-विधान, 

मैं आशिक अंधियारे का||

ना मधुशाला, ना प्रेम किया,

है नहीं कोई अब साथी|

इकलौता मैं, इकलौता पथ, 

दोनों की मंजिल अनजानी||

टिकती यहाँ है दुनियादारी,

है लगन यहाँ एक बीमारी|

जो एक बार दिल की करे, 

बन जाता है वो भिखारी||

इस रात में, बस अंधाधुंध, 

कुछ खुद से ही गुनगुनाता हूँ|

दुनिया चले या दुनिया थमे,

बस धुंआ उड़ाता जाता हूँ...