Nowhere to Go but the Horizon

Everybody feels a sense of coming back to home while reading anything written by one’s favorite writer. And The Namesake ironically, is a novel about coming back to one’s home or more precisely , one’s roots. Having read it after The Lowland , Jhumpa Lahiri’s true to self description of the Bengali way of Life and of Kolkata, and how these two mingle and make thier way into the households Bengalis living in the States, was not a surprise. For example, how a package from homeland, after travelling thousands of miles can bear the smell still of the dominant spice of your mother’s kitchen. Jhumpa Lahiri , does not ever go straight into the life of the protagonist but goes on detailing the live of his or her family, as it is them who builds a self. But as the story goes on, and the namesake and its significance is revealed to us, the readers, it becomes evident that Ashoke was not only the person who gave Gogol his namesake, he was also the person who lent him his ”overcoat” through his life. This particular instrument which shapes the whole novel at the end is beautifully depicted in the movie adaptation of the book by Mira Nair. Gogo,l, from infancy till his thirties, did everything , he could to make his place and belong to a country he was born in , but always with a prevalent cry in the background from the two abodes of College Street and Alipore, calling him to be part of that life. The first sense of relating to the place where he was born took place with the dead people , in a graveyard.

Coming back to the context of the movie, the only difference that mattered except the small ones like changing the name of Dimitri without any cause, is that, in the movie the relationship of Gogol’s parents as a married couple was not less forced than the one in the book.

The story is not about the several journeys made by Ashoke and Ashima to Kolkata but a journey of the protagonist’s slowly coming back to his roots rather than going far away from it as he was never actually there.

Millions and millions of trees lining both sides of the very narrow street..

Millions and millions of trees lining both sides of the very narrow street,
As I open my eyes, there is nothing but darkness.
I close my eyes again, and the silhouettes reappear. With them, a buzzing ball of light as well.
But as I open my eyes, there is nothing but stillness.
I keep walking on the very narrow path, wanting it to reach its end soon. So I open my eyes, and everything turns placid again.
I close my eyes and hear echoes of laughter, mirth, and silly conversations. Was there a cry among them?
I keep treading on the very narrow path and wonder… to understand what I am saying, do you need to get inside my head?

In my own Pink World

My friend had two barbies – one wearing skirt and the other wearing trousers. She used to ask me and all our other friends which did we think was the better one . All of us would agree that it was the one in the skirts as she was dressed more like a barbie and the other one must be an imposter just looking like a barbie. We admired the houses that the barbies came in and it’s elaborate kitchen and closet spaces the size of a classroom. But never wondered how the barbies owned such luxurious houses. It never crossed our minds that to be able to afford such houses one would need money and to have money one would need to work. Another memory I cannot shake off more after watching Barbie by Greta Gerwig is how we used to put the barbies into their boxes right after playing with them so that they won’t get spoilt by dust. What was the thing that was so precious that we feared of it getting spoilt? It was the ‘perfect’ hair which was never in tangles, the ‘perfect’ skin which never had any blemishes and the ‘perfect’ potbelly less body. The heels of the feet even if the shoes were off were up , as if they were too rare to touch the floor of our arid houses. That was barbie for us, something to be kept as it is so that it could be admired forever. Greta Gerwig has very carefully taken the barbies down from the shelves of our childhood, stealthily taken them out of their boxes and put them on the silver screen.

We see our beloved barbies walking, talking and doing everything we had imagined them doing in our games ( except kissing Ken). The Barbies on the screen too are perfect whose every day is the best day ever. They live in their own land , and we finally know(without asking) the enigma behind Barbie’s grand houses- they have professions. The barbies run the supreme court, they are doctors , writers , win Nobel Prizes and is even the President. Not only that ,they have their Kens too. The very Kens who are supposedly giving some men back in the real world some real sweats. In a movie ,for two hours Kens ( read men) are portrayed as people created solely for fulfilling the purpose of being partners to Barbies ,even if some barbies prefer to stay without partners. They cannot vote,cannot be member of the supreme court , are always ignored by barbie and have nothing to do but Beach, which is pointless unless barbie is impressed by it. The men back here cannot tolerate this degrading portrayal of their gender for two hours on a giant screen that shouts fiction. Shouldn’t women long back have been made the sole owner of offence in that area because that was the life they were living from the beginning of time? No they couldn’t because they didn’t even have proper property rights. They had to fight their way into this world to have their own Mojo Dozo Casa Houses more than Ken had to. All Ken had to do was teaching the Kens of Barbie World about Patriarchy and Horses. Like its said ,something earned in a rush , goes away in a rush. The Kens lost their Mojo Dozo Casa Houses to the Barbies who used the Kens ‘ very ego to win their rights back. They took over the supreme court and reinstated madame President . The Kens now have to earn their identity without being linked to the Barbies in Barbieland, which can take a year, years or eternity , who knows. The Barbies in the real world are still fighting for theirs , right? The Barbies won over the Kens not in a pant suit, or in one. That is significant in the movie, you can accept your Ken romantically or not, you can fight your battle wearing a four layered flayered dress or not, you can do anything and everything as long as you’re doing it because you like it and not to prove a point. As long as you see yourself in the mirror and not somebody else pretending to be you or you pretending to be someone else.

Discussions on the weird Barbie, the depressed barbies and Barbie landing in LA from barbieland and nowhere else, in the next post.

A City Thing

The girl of eighteen from a village in Andhra Pradesh always loved her life in her small village. The chaos and ennui of city life made her claustrophobic whenever she visited one.

The boy of twenty three from a viave in Bihar loved the open spaces behind his village. He loved the open sky of such places. City, for him was dull and mundane.

The woman of thirty one from a village in North Bengal tolerated the constant bickering of her relatives about her being unmarried till “this age” . She had to because a life without the tea gardens was unthinkable for her.

The man of forty four from a village in Tripura endured the mocking of other staff and his students of his school just to stay close to the Gomati River.

But one day the city seemed like a magical place to them, a place where miracles could happen. They all wanted to leave their beloved villages and run to any city they could.
Because one day they heard what they thought to be impossible was a “city thing” They, too wanted to be a part of that “city lifestyle”. The place which seemed so stifling to them suddenly seemed like an empty field where they could be free,a place of happiness.

Photo by Ricky Esquivel on Pexels.com

Marji, Mahsa and others

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel ‘Persepolis’ end with the phrase ” freedom comes with a price”. The protagonist Marji’s price was leaving her family and her homeland . Mahsa Amini , the 22 year belonging to the same homeland almost 30 years later had to pay a price to – her life. Both of them had committed the same crime, they wanted to transgress , break out of the box of rules and regulations set for them by the Islamic Republic. Marji could not bear them, she left, Mahsa on the other hand, was killed . With her death , she as if gave courage to thousands of her compatriots and fellow sisters around the world to smash the box and ask for their freedom , no matter how gruesome of a price they will be asked to pay.
The major question is not why she was killed but how was she killed. How can the morality police take the life of a person because a certain piece of her attire was not ‘proper’. Now the question of why comes – why she killed? The problem is not wearing a hijab or a head covering, it is making it a law and regulating a particular gender to dress walk and talk in a certain way. Women , if it is her will , can put anything on her head- a hijad, a crown or the entire world, but it cannot be mandatory for them to do so. The problem should not be seen from a political or religious angle but as a universal issue concerning certain social frameworks. We, living in India , ought not see this as a turmoil happening in another country , neither should we let our “media” use this to foster hatred against a particular community. It is a fight for rights, it is a worldwide fight for justice , it is a fight for freedom ( even with a price), and should be seen like that.

PEDESTAL

Independence Day. The day of freedom. For India the day is 15^th of August- the day our beloved ‘mother’ was freed from the shackles of the imperialists, the day the seat on the pedestal for women of India got a stronghold. After all a motherland has been freed, how can the ‘mothers’, ‘sisters’ and ‘daughters’ of that land be given any position below an elevated podium to sit and stare ,just like Doyamoyee was given the stature of Maa Kali by her father in law in Devi. The seat is extremely comfortable, devil may care for the women or not but definitely for the men . For they can now roam about freely without the fear of women showing the impossible will of walking alongside them. The women will only sit on the heightened stage of existence allowed to them and smile when they are asked to but not too much , act crazy sometimes but never too much . They should never cross the threshold of being the perfectly imperfect being that is prescribed in every reel and every meme throughout social media. Now, without digressing any further, let me zone in to the independence day the whole country celebrated with such magnanimity recently. On that day, quite successfully another one of the mother’s daughters was put on the pedestal . Bilkis Bano ‘s life of independence was snatched away from her maybe forever. Her rapists and murderers of her whole family were freed, felicitated and let off to roam freely so that she can never ever get back the courage of going on with her life in the world . The very decision being taken by the Gujarat Government proves that it is the state that very deliberately thrust Bilkis inside by letting the beasts outside. With her, thousands of other women should join the march of climbing the podium and take the very ‘comfortable’ seat there because in a country where the authority cannot punish the most heinous of criminals, but rather celebrate them , cannot bring justice to a mother creating life inside her , should forget feminism . They should forget feminism as, to be a part of any movement , first you need to live in a place with humans and not creatures of hell donning human masks.

Anticipation

I was never a lover of rain

I only cared for the storm before

Yet when the whole world stood awaiting its visit ,

I could not help being one of them

Each evening standing at the edge of the red clad plank of cement , I waited for it.

I thought, one day that the clouds are finally letting go all it’s been storing

But it was just the sound of a car starting

The modern world’s gulling of a romantic once again.

Then one day breaking away from its suffocating reality , it poured.

It poured into an unreal world .

A world where the smell of wet earth exists , a world where the trees mock high rises with its drunken dance .

I never cared about the rain .

Yet , I became a paramour of it.

A Knight of one’s own

Irony was a familiar word from high school days only, but it was my first semester of college in which I learnt about it in its true; vast sense , while reading Oedipus Rex. But it was my recent discovery of daily soaps of the Bengali Television that cleared every aspect of the term to me. Let me explain how.
The shows consider themselves to be the greatest propagandists of Feminism , yes they are bigger than Virginia Woolfe and her own single room. This is vast mansions in every corner of Kolkata with one bachelor always in search of a damsel in distress kind of big. The shows have one girl or woman who is either great at sports or something beyond the female reach till the last decade with ten other women who are more passive than the kid who is yet to start talking. Because how else can you show the transgression women are making in the society. There is one other necessary element ,a woman definitely whose only purpose in the show and in life , is to be the thorns of the road to the protagonist. Because feminism is all about women bringing each other down. To show the protagonist as the epitome of goodness; the vamp should have all the worst characteristics one can imagine. Now coming back to the rich businessman whose favourite age is the Medieval and whose ambition in life from infancy is to be the knight in shining armour to a heavily tortured ; confined woman. The protagonist has to meet that person either just days before her wedding or the knight’s. The weddings cannot take place, no matter what. Either of the weddings has to be stopped and the knight has to take a handful of Vermillion and spread it all over the heroine’s forehead BECAUSE what on Earth is even consent! Moreover without the knight and the damsel’s marriage, the latter’s dream of transgression can never be fulfilled. But naturally after the wedding; the woman has more important battles to fight now. She just does not have to please her boss or coach or any relevant authorities but also her sister-in-law, mother-in-law and heaven knows how many in laws in queue. Her choice suddenly is mummed or totally ignored for some days until she makes a place in her “new ‘home then ,of course comes the secondary thing of making a place in the world.
Hence, I realised how Wolfestonecraft missed so many tenets in her vindication , so many important ones.

A Knight of one’s own

THE TRAGEDY OF W.W

It was during the fifth season of Breaking Bad, that it struck me that it is a Tragedy. A tragedy not in the non-academic meaning, but one with elements both from the Aristotelian definition and the Arthur Miller definition. The story is after all Walter White’s gradual journey towards doom and death because of his hamartia ( tragic flaw) ie, his over ambition, greed and inability to stop because of these two. But the plot also follows Miller, as Walter was nothing but a common man. Discarding the rules that a tragic hero has to be noble born, this modern tragedy creates a protagonist who is a high school chemistry teacher.

But unlike the modern ones, the predominance of fate from the Aristotelian Tragedy and free will from the Shakespearean Tragedy, are what drives the entire plot of the show , as well as Walter’s actions. Fate brought him cancer which grew or reincarnated in him his desperation for money and the excessive ambition for it. He went on the path because of his cancer and to secure his family’s future, without taking a single penny from his friends , which can be interpreted as his excess of pride or Hubris. But he followed his free will and went deeper and deeper into that path. In this (what-seemed-to-be ) a never ending feud between fate and free will throughout the seasons of the show, it seemed that fate finally won when Walter’s cancer was back. But the last episode changed it all with Walter’s last conversation with Skyler about how he did everything because he loved to and dying by his own bullets before giving up to either the DEA or the cancer.

The other factors like the hero being not entirely good or bad gave a whole another direction, as Walter seemed to be the epitome of goodness at first who only did good things. But then he started doing things a common man will not even think of doing for very good reasons. As for the catharsis, the fear definitely arose inside every viewer and for the pity part, one had to wait for Walter’s bloody hands to slide down the silver equipment and him lying dead with the perfectness of ‘Baby Blue’ playing at the backdrop.

THOUGHTS ABOUT ‘EKUSHE PAA’

I started reading Ekushe Paa for a reason which almost everybody around me thought to be stupid. I asked my sister one day last year after finishing a book that what I should read next from her and my grandmother’s enormous, never-ending book paradise. She suggested Ekushe Paa , but the maniac that I am , I saved it to read just before my 21st birthday and so I did. I read the lines printed at the back of the novel and feared only one thing, i.e., diving into one of those movie scripts many people call novels by Chetan Bhagat. But as I started reading it , within the first few chapters only , I knew I would love it and so I did and here I am writing about it. The novel is set in the 90s and was written in the middle of that decade as well. Two things that stuck me the most. First is the nostalgia it gave me about my mid-way forbidden college days and the second is how surprisingly ahead of its time the narrative is.

Bani Basu caught every aspect of a typical Kolkata College life and students , from politics to political discussions, from never ending wait for classes to end to the eternal wait for the classes to actually take place some days, from that first immature love turned the worst mistake of your life , from the introverts to the extroverts and introvert turned extroverts, no corner of those three golden years has been missed. Mithu, Ujjaini , Venkat, Ritu , Emon, Gautam, Tanmoy, Vishnupriya, Rajeswari and their dual existence as students of a single college and as newly emerged adult for the world and for their families filled the narrative with unputdownable turns and twists. Sometimes, I felt myself wanting to be there and gave my piece of advice and let them how much our lives are relatable.

As mentioned before, the second thing that left a mark on my mind is how Bani Basu ended the novel like I did not think she would. I was certain that , like popular culture arts of the 90s, specially the movies , end with the females ending up the man of their choice or with any man for that matter, because you know, that is the “happy ending” . Given the fact that there were almost similar number of males and females in the narrative, I was sitting there; ready to be disappointed. But boy was I surprised! The author gave a cliffhanger ending to the love lives of the characters only leaving hints. The cliffhanger ending is also applicable for most of their careers and academic lives as well, indicating that end of college is just another beginning – the beginning of LIFE.

I AM HAPPY

I am happy. 

And this time I am not misunderstood. 

This time, I am scared, but happy. 

I see leaves fluttering and knocking on my window pane, I am happy. 

I hear the sounds of praying all around me in symphony every day, I am happy. 

I see thousands of words together inside a quadrangle, waiting to be devoured, I am happy.  

I feel the crisp winter breeze on my face, reminding me of things of the previous winter, I am happy.  

I am scared of this happiness slipping away, but I am happy because the key to finding it again lies with me.  

This time I am happy because I found it within myself.