If You Walk Down This Path...

Usman woke up, lazily wearing his unironed shirt, groping through his three pairs of jeans for the one that looked least dirty, and slipped them on while yawning his way to the kitchen to check if there was any food left for him to eat.

There wasn’t.

His stomach let out a protesting groan. He ignored it. Checking how much time he had left to catch the bus to college, Usman calculated whether he had time for a shower.

He didn’t.

Shrugging nonchalantly, he brushed his teeth and sprayed himself with an extra spray of deodorant. This act of benevolence always made him feel like a good Samaritan.

With the tiresome formalities out of the way, he began the part of the day he really relished. His mind finally felt awake and primed. He opened his book cabinet and surveyed the vast treasure he had amassed, searching for the book that would keep him company for the next few days. The book would determine whether he spent the next week in silent awe or disgruntled disappointment.

As it were, Fate had bigger plans for him. He chose Freud.

Putting on his oversized headphones, turning the music’s volume to the maximum, he walked with his smooth, practiced, rhythmic gait down to the bus stop, moving his feet in sync with Metallica’s drum beat. The bright Pune sun shone down on a wide, dusty street. The heat was getting oppressive and the populace was divided into two large groups on either side of the road, clustered in the shade of the trees.

Usman waited calmly, pretending not to notice the stares his appearance drew. With his large frame and thick beard, he was used to drawing the fearful glances of middle aged women and the open curiosity of school kids. The rest of them stared as well, but were practiced in the art of subtlety.

The bus came, he threw himself into the inevitable jostle to get on in time and allowed the wave of people to carry him along. Once inside the bus, he used his size to push through the crowd to get to the empty seats first. It was a tactic he had perfected over years of commuting by bus.

Once in the seat, he turned his attention away from the populace once again, letting his mind drown in the dark melodies of Erik Satie. He would not rise from his self induced reverie until he reached his destination. His college.

On reaching, he took his customary diversion from the college route to smoke a cigarette. With the combination of tobacco and music, and an ever-present bottle of Thums up, Usman trundled down the college gravel path in a tranquil state of mind, whistling and swaying to the music.

Walking into his classroom, his eyes immediately searched for that vast expanse of curly hair and fair skin that constituted his best friend. On locating her, he made his way through the maze of benches, nodding awkwardly at his classmates on the way, ignoring the teacher, who was busy spouting misinterpretations of the works of the best writers to have lived.

Usman sat down beside her, and without speaking a word, pulled out his new book and showed it off to her, gleaming with pride, with a goofy smile on his face. She smiled back, shaking her head at his childish glee. She then turned her attention back to the teacher, religiously taking notes, as he continued to behave as if the teacher did not exist and opened his book to read.

Right there, two friends, sitting right beside each other, became residents of two separate worlds.
She occupied reality, making the best of substandard teachers, taking notes knowing full well that most of her friends group depended on her for providing them with reading material for the exams. She asked questions, answered questions, compared notes, cracked jokes, laughed, yawned and sighed.

Not even a meter to her right, Usman had travelled into another world. He knew of no classroom, he hardly knew of himself. He was in the world of Sigmund Freud, immersed in cases of neuroses. Despite everyone telling him to read Freud with a pinch of salt, knowing full well that many of his theories have been disproven, Usman continued to feel that there was much more wisdom in Freud than he was given credit for.

While his teacher droned on, spewing forth from rote memory the meanings of allegories and metaphors and symbolisms, Usman’s mind pondered the immense, uncharted areas of the mind that still held so many enigmas. It always seemed to him mankind was much more comfortable exploring outwards than inwards. They’d pierce the very depths of space to uncover the universe’s secrets, but would stutter and stammer at the doorway to their own minds.
And he really could not blame them. Whatever he knew of the subconscious made it sound like a malicious entity, out of reach, out of harm’s way, and yet wreaking havoc with the world.

Usman had always had a mind for theorizing. He could never just read about a thought without implementing it and living out its implications and consequences in his mind. He was a bright boy and had read widely, and this habit of mind testing everything he read had led him to a more or less concrete view on life and living. Much more concrete and cocksure than a 23-year-old ought to be.

The bell rang, startling him out of his musings. He immediately turned to his friend, excitedly telling him of Freud’s findings and theories. She would always listen to him with a proud, almost maternal smile on her face, but today her face clouded over. Her luminous skin seemed darkened by a veil of grey fear. It disconcerted him to see her like this.

“What happened?” he asked, worried.

She shook her head, breathed a deep sigh, squeezed his hand and changed the topic.

In his classic non confrontational manner, Usman let it go as something insignificant.

With no further lectures scheduled, they made their way to the cafeteria, cracked the usual jokes, ate the usual snacks and prepared to leave their separate ways. Usman and his constant companion trouped together singing and laughing raucously till the college gate. They hugged goodbye, and Usman felt that she held on for a little longer than usual. Her behaviour in the classroom came back to him. Once again he shrugged it off, shouldering his eternal knapsack and making his way to the bus stop.

He checked the time, he had twenty minutes to kill before his bus arrived. He seated himself upon a high wall near the bus stop from where he could see the numbers of the approaching buses, pulled out his headphones, made himself comfortable, and drowned himself in the world of psychoanalysis once again.

However, he was soon distracted by a commotion on the street in front of him. There was a massive traffic jam, spanning the entire length of the street, which was normal for this time of the day. However the commotion was all concentrated at a point directly in front of Usman. An ambulance was stuck right in the center of the jam, with its siren wailing out a hopeless lament, pleading the cars in front to allow it room to pass. A man lay inside, his life depending on whether the traffic could and would do so. People from the street frantically ran up and down shouting at cars to go this way or that, adding to the confusion. Every man in the jam wanted to get out of the way, but there was simply no room. This would take a good twenty minutes under the best of circumstances, and the desperation of the ambulance driver made it clear that the patient did not have that much time.

Buses went by unnoticed by mortified onlookers as they saw a man’s life drain out along with the sands of time before their very eyes. A mother clamped her child to herself, turning his eyes away from the spectacle. A college girl broke into hysterical tears. Men hurriedly formed mini gatherings, trying to think up some solution to this mishap waiting to happen.
Everywhere, humanity united in its dismay to solve this problem, and the more they willed its solution in unity, the more convoluted and confused their actions got. Twenty minutes later some of the traffic had moved, but the throngs that had gathered were still obstructing traffic in their attempts to help.

Usman saw all this without moving a muscle. He felt unaffected, unperturbed, calm. He saw the self created chaos of the crowd trying to “Do the right thing”, and the complete ineffectiveness of their endeavours, the hopelessness of it all. He saw the man driving the ambulance, face drenched in sweat, screaming and gesturing frantically to save this stranger’s life. He would soon be transporting his corpse. He saw all this and he began to giggle.

His reaction surprised himself, but on reflection it made sense to him. Everything in life was, after all, a farce, wasn’t it? Life was one long Theatre of the Absurd. He had read somewhere that life is tragic for those who feel and comic for those who think. He could not have agreed more. Viewed in a larger context, every single action becomes insignificant, meaningless, purposeless. There are no ideals, no goals, no objectives, everything is merely on its way to annihilation.

The farce was exacerbated by the fact that everyone around him had the absolute opposite reaction. Whilst they experienced horror, panic and dismay, Usman chuckled. His chuckle grew louder and louder and pretty soon he was laughing so hard that it began ringing in his own ears. He paused to catch his breath, but it continued to echo in him, sounding strange and foreign to himself and yet also somewhat familiar. It was then that he realized he was not alone. Just a couple of meters to his left he saw a man looking on the same spectacle with an identical reaction. That man too, was in fits of laughter at the predicament of the ambulance.

As Usman took in the man’s appearance, the laughter froze on his face and then slowly replaced itself with a look of wonderment mingled with fear. The man was one of the many homeless people who roam the streets of Pune. His hair was dishevelled and matted with dust. His face was covered with soot and made his teeth seem all the more garishly yellow in contrast as he wildly cackled. His clothes were in tatters, carelessly strewn over his body as on a man who no longer has society in his sphere of priorities. His emaciated structure underlined the squalor that he spent his life in. He wore a long, torn robe that he had left untied and was held together by mere strands. He wore nothing underneath, leaving diseased genitals open for the world to view. However, none of this was what shocked Usman. What stopped his laughter dead in its tracks was that this man was clinically insane.

Suddenly a flurry of words, conversations, moments, indications and forebodings flooded his brain. He remembered being bemused at the fact that two of his favourite authors had ended up in asylums. He remembered identifying with the Duchess of Malfi when she exclaimed that only through insanity could she feel sane in this insane world. He remembered feeling a weird alienation and reaction contrary to whatever the majority of mankind was exhibiting. He always felt like he was struggling against the current, and often wondered what would happen if he let go. After all, he may one day decide the struggle is too hard.

Freud's words rang back to him. "Everybody is neurotic".

Looking at the insane man, he noticed how the man’s unkempt attire was merely an exaggeration, an extreme example of his own kind of thinking. His own shabby sense of dressing came from a similar disregard of what society thought of him. The mad man’s laughter too, seemed like a mere exaggeration of the chuckle that had started from the depths of Usman’s belly.
The echoing of laughter in his ear, and the familiarity of his laugh now struck home.

Suddenly, the secret behind his friends’ concerned expression earlier in class today, the cause of the darkness behind her concern became clear to him. She could see what he was seeing now. She could see the path that he was walking and where it led to. She knew what lay in store if he continued viewing the world through his morbidity stained goggles.

Even as he thought of that moment, his friend passed before his eyes.
 She was driving her car, looking radiant, smiling to herself about something, driving, oblivious to him mere feet away from her.
And here he sat, contemplating his own ruin. Seeing his future being played out before himself, and being mortified by what he saw, and yet no less determined to follow the self same path nonetheless.

Once again, separated by a mere nothingness in terms of space, Usman felt that his friend and he lived in separate, perhaps parallel universes.

And as he saw her drive past, it seemed to him that there was a glow, a halo, an aura of whiteness around her. It was as if she dropped a little sunshine wherever she went. The world seemed fairer, cleaner, brighter, more conducive to hope and dreaming, just when she passed by. But then she was gone and the darkness closed back in again.

She turned a corner and was gone. Usman looked at the madman, then looked at himself.

Deep in his belly, another uncontrollable chuckle began to rumble as the manic tunes of Beethoven raged into his ears.

The Birth of a Cynic

Dark days, dark deeds, dark destinies, descend!
He has seen much light, pay him back his dividend
What! Lookst thou for meaning in thine meek life?
Seek out his light, bring it to an untimely end
Thus, and only thus, may man life comprehend!

Light memories, light passions, light dreams, abate!
He has seen much light, let him now dark contemplate
What! Thinkest thou deeds are rewarded in just measure?
Seek out his brightness, My Divine bloodlust satiate
He is no cynic yet! Introduce him to the cruelty of Fate.

Extinguish, exterminate, obliterate his bliss
Things that went well shall now all go amiss
What! Dreamest thou that goodness overcometh grief?
Seek out his radiance, Lucifer, My faithful accomplice,
Let him not love again till he has felt Death's kiss.

Silenced

I listened as the orator spoke
Words of faith, wrath and fury
Of lies and deceit, fire and smoke
Whatever worked to sway the jury

I watched as the mindless millions marched
Protesting causes they never knew
Shrieking slogans from throats parched
Sweeping briskly aside the silent few

I wept as the Wisdom House’s pages
To crisp ashes were nonchalantly burnt
Guitars may have wept through the ages
But Mankind’s lessons were never learnt

I seethed as I witnessed ignorance en masse
Comfortably residing in both pupil and master
If this was the state of the educated class
Our kind was fated, surely, only for disaster?

I listened, I watched, I wept, I seethed,
Silent I pleaded, I hoped and I prayed
But putrescent was now the air I breathed
My senses revolted and beat a retreat dismayed

Branded into my heart those words shine bright
I alone could cure this malaise of violence
But I possess not weapons for this sort of fight
I possess only brains, and so am condemned to silence

Confession

I write today in hale and hearty mood, though the strain will be melancholy.

I once discussed with my dear friend the effects of hard drugs and the pros and cons. We spoke of the addict's highs and lows and whether they experienced life more than us and we merely misunderstood what happiness is. And whether the fact that they experienced everything so much more is the real happiness. I didn’t really subscribe to that, but it was worth discussing at least.

The way I see it, in any given connection, be it to an entity living or non living, the key judging criteria for me is whether one derives more joy from them than pain. It's simple. And with the non living it is a remarkably astute scale of judgement. I have lived my life by it and it hasn’t let me down.

With the living, however, the matter becomes infinitely more complicated. The equation if constant, would provide no huge intelligence to judge, however, people being so open to change as they are, the equation is much like quantum physics, the best we can hope for is a general assumption as to their whereabouts, accuracy is impossible.

But, since I am no quantum physicist, I find myself hopelessly inadequate in the matter of judging my connections to people. My history is common knowledge to you, and need not be repeated (though I assume it would be amusing if I did).

And so, in that oafish simplicity that is my lot when it comes to interpersonal relationships, I find myself falling back on the same scale. Do I derive more happiness than misery from my association with this person? Yes? Continue then. No? Then he/she must go.

It has been the reason I continued talking to many people who were frankly not at all my cup of tea. But they were entertaining, and couldn’t really harm me even if they tried, and so they were allowed to stay on.

You, however, are a whole different matter. I have fallen for you, hard. I allowed you in to a point where I myself didn’t often go. Every thought you speak, which as I have said often, you speak most beautifully and with immense profundity, I absorb and start applying, consciously or subconsciously, doesn’t really matter. I moulded my art around comments you made, my thinking around observations you made, not because of any other reason than that I saw wisdom in them.
And that, more than anything else, proves at least to myself just what a towering beacon of light you were and how much I have come to respect you.

And as far as my emotions go, I believe I have made them clear to you a million times. I love you. Our meteoric beginning is nothing I ever have or believe I ever will experience again. However, meteors are notorious for burning through huge amounts of matter with all the disregard of a Genghis-led Mongolian raid.

The way I see it, my relationship to you was like that of an addict to cocaine. I have no qualms admitting I was addicted to you. I never did experience life the same way after I met you (I of course, mean figuratively meeting you). Every high was a different kind of high, I felt like the much plagiarized winged creature from your poem, soaring above and looking down with unparalleled condescension at everything beneath me. And then in the lows, which every volatile relationship must have, I would gaze in wonder at the lowly specks of dust that seemed like Himalayan barriers on all sides.

I experienced both a lot. And the highs were made more beautiful by the fact that I had risen from those lows to experience them. But there was one point which was key. There were always way more highs than there were lows. The lows would be a blip, an insignificant stain on the royal cloth that was our relationship.

However, as is the case with most of my clothes, (and for that matter, most druggy addictions also), they fade out and they are not so royal and regal anymore. I find myself struggling to even remember the last time I soared. However I can, off the tip of my fingers count out the last ten lows. in fact they might as well have been one single long low. So I am now in the position of the requiem for a dream addict. I know it is harmful, I know the highs are a thing of the past, nevertheless I remain hopelessly attached and in love with it.

It is new for me, I will not lie. I never allow things to get to me. I remove them from my life way before they can reach that stage, then they may negatively affect me from without, but they'll never touch my extra fortified interiors. However, I did not do so with you. You remained within, and in a gloriously similar way to Napoleon's generals, the havoc was wreaked not by the armies without, but with the artery most closely connected to the heart.

But you know I love Nietzsche as much as I love you. And you know Nietzsche's edict. Strength is all. One cannot allow ropes to tie him down, no matter how dear the ropes are. These ropes are possibly the dearest to me and will remain unsurpassed in life. However, true to their nature, they remain ropes and must be cast off.

I have crossed the point where the joys of our association outweighed the woes. It may or may not be the same with you. (I suspect it was so long before for you) But I shall cast myself adrift now. I will bear the withdrawal symptoms, but I shall be the addict no more.

We may call this the end of our relationship. Eight months and Seventeen days after that fateful friends request that took birth from an innocent online joke.

What happens after, I do not know. I will, as is my usual MO, leave that to you. If you wish to remain friends with me, I would be honoured to maintain our correspondence, such as it is. If however, you bear ill will, or conversely feel I will provide more misery than joy, or for whatever reason you see fit, you wish not to, I hope you will be kind enough to reply to this mail to let me know how it stands.

Thank you for every little pearl of wisdom you have let fall into my grasp. Thank you for smashing down any pillars of my soul that were rotten on the inside. Thank you for making me feel love at unprecedented levels. And most of all, thank you for moving me to write the best stuff I have ever written. I have told you before, I will say it one last time, I would never have done it without you.

Goodbye.

In Contemplation of Youthful Yawning

When I was a young boy, I was taught what was proper and what was improper, what was decent and what was indecent, what was good and what was evil. I was taught all the codes of conduct, the manners and mannerisms, the morals I was expected to uphold and display. All the variations in the vast expanse of “public decency” were taught to me with patient and determined endeavour on the part of my parents. No stone was left unturned. All the methods that could have been tried, were tried, and it resulted in a boy who, no matter what his other faults, had impeccable manners. For a while, at least.

Adulthood brought the inevitable deviation from the expected norm, the distancing of the man from his childhood self, a self rebellion of sorts. In many a way, as is usually the case, the teenage years marked the seismic shift from the quiet, shy boy to the boisterous, overconfident, belligerent young man. But no matter how much one changes, one can never (and this is one of those rare cases where there are no exceptions) escape from the effects of one’s upbringing. I am no different. Looking back with an objective eye, I can see clearly all the effects that are still in me, residual or dominant, that to this day dictate my actions and reactions to living experience. Even my widest “Deviations” or “Rebellions” from the path that had been set out for me can be viewed as the direct reaction of my mind against walking a predestined path without having any say in it. In some cases it was merely rebellion for rebellion’s sake.

But the problem is, so many of these issues are ingrained so early, that they lose all significance in the conscious mind and merely fester and grow roots in that dreaded underworld of the mind, the subconscious. Even someone as self obsessed and someone as prone to self examination as myself took 23 years to realize that a lot of the tinted windows that I viewed the world through had not been put there by me but by the creators of me. I speak not only of my biological creators but everyone who ever influenced or moulded my brain in any particular way. And in this context, authors of a distant past must share the blame equally if not more than those who are my kin.

Coming back to my childhood and methods used to teach me manners, I had been taught quite early on that it is rude to yawn in public. One must always cover one’s mouth if a yawn can’t be stifled. Fair enough. But as kids will be kids, a mere dictat is rarely enough for them to obey it. There needs to be a justification. The one given to me was a religious one. “If you yawn without covering your mouth, Satan will enter through your mouth and make you have evil thoughts.” It was a simple explanation, a terrific one that my childish, yet imaginative mind clasped onto instantly. I immediately began viewing Satan as this sneaky voyeur who just waited around for you to leave your mouth open unprotected and snuck in and perverted your mind. I immediately resolved never to allow him the chance. So, you could say the explanation served its purpose, a child now consciously avoided something that is considered improper. And you would be right in saying this, had the thought ended just there.

But one of the greatest tragedies of human education is that the educator rarely realizes what impact his words are having or in what manner it is impacting the pupil. The educator can do everything right, yet the innate disposition of the pupil will determine whether the message is received in the manner intended or taken in a wholly different manner altogether. My mother gave me a straighforward answer, invoking God and Satan and my fear of both of them to prevent me from doing something that was frowned upon. It was impossible to explain to me at that age the importance of public decorum and man’s responsibility as a public citizen. Even today I struggle to understand much of what is expected of me by society. A six year old version of me stood no chance. But the explanation had an effect no one could have foreseen.

Yawns were now intimately associated with evil thoughts in my mind. Once I yawned for about half a second before my hand leaped to cover my mouth. My mind went into a fear fuelled overdrive. When you are desperately trying to avoid thinking about something, your mind will ensure that that is all you can think about. I was fearful that my half second delay had let Satan into me, did this mean I would think evil thoughts? Right on cue, all that constituted evil in a six year old’s brain began flashing in front of my eyes like a powerpoint presentation. Where before I would have yawned a huge yawn five seconds long without the least consideration towards how it affected my train of thought, I was now engaged in an unwinnable battle with my brain to rid itself of the thoughts Satan brought into it. Of course, at the time I attributed this to Satan him(or her)self, not to the human brain’s often vindictive behaviour.

It took almost two decades for this behaviour trait ingrained deep in my childhood to surface once again in conscious light. Last week I yawned, and being much more comfortable with obnoxious behaviour as an adult than I was as a child, I did not bother to cover my mouth. If society did not like the look of my innards then they could look elsewhere. But almost immediately my mind filled with a train of thought whose perversity shocked even myself. “Where did that come from,” I wondered at myself. And then it hit me, that childhood story had never left me. I had long since given up any fear of, or indeed belief in Satan, but the reaction to yawning without covering my mouth, that never left me. Eighteen years later, my mind still clung to the belief that an unabashed yawn brought evil into one’s mind. I wonder now, what is a bigger crime. Yawning in public, or having to deal with the guilt of thinking uncharacteristically perverse thoughts every time one yawned for eighteen years. Which one made one feel more unclean, more unworthy?

The contrast between the innocence and the simplicity of the explanation offered to me as a child and the adverse psychological effect it had on me, made me ponder the topic in depth and at great length. And eventually my mind moved on to generalities. Who decided what was good and what was evil? Public welfare is generally considered to be the standard, but is there any such thing? Is there anything that can ever be equally good for everyone? Does every good for someone not have a flipside for someone else?

And, as a logical counterpart to the above questions, came the question of who decided what evil was. A lot of what seemed to be considered evil today seemed ridiculous to me. And the standards kept changing arbitrarily, usually decided by the dominant religion or culture of the area, only giving me further proof that there was no innate ideal goodness or evilness, just our conception of it. Very well then, if that were the case, why would man go through the trouble of creating these concepts at all? What was the way of mankind before these concepts came into existence?

The way was simple and pure. The will to power.

Before good and evil existed as concepts, before man had progressed (or regressed depending how you look at it) as far as that, the simple factor that decided each action was the strength of the perpetrator in relation to the subject of the action. Whoever was stronger, decided the course of events using his strength, and the sole aim was the propagation of his species. Survival of the fittest in the truest and purest form. Even in the primeval civilizations, the strongest of the tribe, clan, group or gathering always claimed the best shelter, the best females, the lion’s share of the food for himself. He did not bother to think of the handicapped child who was not getting enough to eat, it was none of his concern. He was the best of the species and his responsibility was to protect and enhance his genes. The other’s must take care of themselves or die in the process.

But then came the big upheaval. Ironically, it was with the arrival of “reason” that this most unreasonable of errors was introduced permanently into human civilization. The concept of equality, the concept of charity, the concept of goodness were introduced. How else were a mediocre mass of people to control the exceptional individual? It is no coincidence that most of what constitutes “good” in all of today’s leading moralities is the controlling of one’s urges or refraining from indulging in one’s pleasures. It has its origins in a concept that had been devised to prevent the strong from exercising their strength. Of course, no human dictats would have been adhered to, the Gods must necessarily be invoked. And thus, Gods that were previously viewed as distant, intangible, indecipherable beings that were distant and uninterested and merely existed and caused all to exist, suddenly transformed into Gods who were minutely interested in every single action of every single person and dealt swift and harsh retribution whenever man fell out of line. God took on the role of a moralizer and man (even the best of whom is regularly fallible) was now subjected to a constant torrent of inner guilt. It proved an efficient deterrent, and one of incredible cunning.

Mankind today exists in an unceasing, unrelenting state of continuous self loathing. The noblest of men, the purest of heart, even they have moments in their past that they are secretly ashamed of. Even if it never comes to be acted upon, a single unseemly thought can haunt a mind for years if not for a lifetime. And herein lay the double masterstroke of the masses.

Firstly, the greater the scope of a man’s actions, the greater his potential for guilt. A man who never did anything of significance in his life probably would not have much on his conscience either.

Secondly, the state of self loathing was one already common to the layman. It is natural for the inferior to feel chagrin at his inferiority. The great, however, were not used to such considerations. They were unused to guilt. And now they found it shackled to their every deed. The concept of evil was tailor made to fit the deeds of the strong that the weak could not hope to match or perform. And by contrast, every act of mediocrity became exalted as the good. Thus in time pride, once considered the noblest of emotions, is now considered a vice while humility, once viewed as a manifestation of cowardice, is now hailed as a great virtue.

Religion fine-tuned itself, perfected its methods, absorbed human psychology and historical knowledge into itself and has today become the most ruthless, efficient means of killing an individual and creating a pliant, submissive cog. Wherever one finds disrespect of geniuses, one will not have to look very far to find religion.

All this I gained from reflecting on a yawn in my childhood.

Only this and nothing more.

Shakespeare and his Relevance Today

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
                                                                                   - Sonnet 55, Shakespeare


Shakespeare and his Relevance Today

The release of the Vishal Bhardwaj movie, Haider(2014), brought back into the spotlight a fact that has been well documented. Shakespeare, plying his craft over four centuries ago, still retains the ability to fling universal truths at us no matter how much time has passed. Thematically, he hit pretty much every subject that stays constant in human intraspecies communications. Love, greed, ambition, revenge, lust. One can safely assume that these qualities or weaknesses are and will remain innate in humans as long as they exist.

 But if that were the only reason for Shakespeare’s timelessness, then we would have a much larger list of timeless authors to discuss today. These themes, after all, are hardly exclusive to Shakespeare.  But where Shakespeare’s work stands head and shoulders above the rest is its ability to evolve, to morph, to transmute, to create for itself a new meaning in every subsequent generation and yet to suffer no damage or perversion to its origin.

Haider is the perfect example to demonstrate this. Vishal Bhardwaj deserves great credit for pulling off such a challenging endeavor; however the fact remains that he was able to place the play (Hamlet) in contemporary Kashmir and address all the issues that ravage the modern Kashmir, while still remaining largely true to the original play by Shakespeare. While the director’s effort was no mean feat, that of the writer’s is almost criminally exceptional.

The characters in the movie have been created with great care and obviously after a lot of research and input from some insightful locals. Anyone who has stayed in Kashmir for an extended period of time would easily recognize most of them.

 The son who starts out with innocence, but is seduced into a life of violence by propaganda and perversions of truth by one and all around him. The mother who, desperate to prevent her son from straying too far, threatens him ironically with more violence (to herself), thus entering herself into the vicious circle of morbidity that life over there constitutes; the over protective older brother, the stubborn, slightly spoilt antics of the younger daughter, the political intrigues of Kay Kay Menon on his path to power, even the morbid humor of the gravediggers.

Each of these characters will resonate with a Kashmiri, or someone familiar with Kashmiris. And yet, take a step back and each of them is still very much a character from Hamlet.

This is what Shakespeare offers us that probably no other writer can. He did not scribble out vague general characters that may or may not be identified with, depending on your perception of it. He created characters that were complex, complete, intricate and most importantly, they were flawed. Perfect characters can exist only in literature, flawed characters come bursting into real life, and that is where its relevance is really measured.

He had the ability to look inside the mind of Hamlet, to perceive the turmoil that must have taken place when he beheld his mother wedded to his uncle not very long after his father’s death under circumstances that were suspect at best. Add to that all the political intrigues that take place around him and his conduct throughout the play is almost completely justified. Hamlet’s behavior is erratic, at times lunatic, but that is precisely what makes us identify with him. Under such duress, very few minds, let alone one as emotional as Hamlet’s (or Haider’s) would be expected to bear themselves with equanimity.

He had the understanding of human psychology deep enough to understand that a person engaged in an occupation such as grave digging, with his constant exposure to death and the oftentimes horrific stories behind it, would necessarily resort to black and morbid humor as a coping mechanism. And he also gives them their fair share of wisdom, for those who see the darker sides of life often have fewer veils before their eyes in their perception of it.

 The conduct of Gertrude may be seen as simply the wish for stability. The King had died, the enemies of the state were conniving and contriving to attack, the whole country was in a state of unrest. Her marriage to Claudius, whether regarded as incestuous or not, was at the very least an attempt to restore some form of stability to her life that had undergone massive upheaval. And that wish for a stable home is still as cherished a dream for most homemaker’s today as it was in the early 1600’s.

And, importantly, his understanding ran so deep as to have developed the whole story of Hamlet along the lines of the Oedipus Complex which, of course was not discovered until much later (Freud 1910). The procrastination in the murder of Claudius is an eerie precursor to the subsequent theory of Oedipus complex under which Claudius has carried out the actions which Hamlet himself subconsciously wanted to carry out (i.e. killing the father and having relations with the mother). It is to the eternal credit of Shakespeare’s writing that the dynamic between Hamlet and Gertrude remains potent and original even in the wake of such seismic shifts in the understanding of the human mind.

Each of the characters described above are from the original play, and yet, as shown by Haider, they hold true and are easily recognizable in today’s society.

Governmental intrigues, the mentality of oppressed masses, the mental state of an emotional soul whose life is riddled by betrayals, the undying emotion of two souls in love, the amoralistic ambition of a man who lusts only for power, all these characters have been explored to unprecedented depths by arguably the greatest writer in the English Language. And their continued relevance today makes one wonder whether humans have evolved at all or remain the same bestial caveman underneath while donning a more sophisticated exterior.

That could be a part of the answer, but nevertheless the skill of the author in creating timeless characters, not once but over and over, of exploring themes that encompass all of human existence, of establishing moral precedents and cultural trends for centuries to come, and (an often underestimated fact) to do so while also entertaining the contemporaneous crowds is a feat that must not, and thankfully is not underestimated.

Any observer of the film or theater culture today will be aware of the difficulty of creating a movie that appeals to the masses without sacrificing any of its artistic integrity. There appears to be a choice that necessarily needs to be made. Either make a movie of artistic merit OR make one to please the masses. Shakespeare holds the distinction of changing that “OR” into an “AND”.

And that too, is a big reason why his plays and poetry are still prescribed in every course and enjoyed by all students of literature. Somehow he has managed to retain the entertainment value of his plays while creating works that bear no comparison. The staging of a Shakespeare play (or a movie based on his play) is as much a successful commercial venture today as it was in his time.

And so we have the necessary ingredients. Eternal themes, impeccable command of language, deep, almost omniscient insight into the human psyche, shrewd discernment of interpersonal relationships and the related dynamics, vivid and lofty imagination, tinged with a realistic, often morbid take on life. Put all these together and you have a writer whose works not only survive, but grow in importance as the years roll on. Put all these together and you can make yourself another Shakespeare.

Until that time, we may return joyfully to the Bard of Avon. 

Peace and its Follies

How shall I find the help I need?
Shall here a thousand volumes teach me only
That men, self tortured, everywhere must bleed
And here and there one happy man sits lonely?
                                                                               - Goethe


Peace and its Follies

World Peace. It rolls off the tongue nicely. Celebrities, politicians, in fact, public figures of any kind have bandied this phrase about so much that it has rendered it meaningless, valueless. But let us not judge the term by the perversion it has undergone. Let us go back to the basics and examine the concept as it was in its original state.

Is World Peace attainable? And if so, is that necessarily a good thing?

Let us begin by addressing the first question.

World Peace is put forward as a utopia. A world where every human being gets along and prospers without harming his fellow human being. Where one can attain greatness without leaving the other in the dust, where all of mankind walks hand in hand from glory to glory. This, then, is the goal. Very well, how are we to go about it.

Race, gender, nationality, physicality, sexuality, cultural hegemony, historical prejudice, religion, culture and economics. These are just a few terms that can be named off the top of one’s head when considering just how many things divide mankind. Can all of these be overcome? The problem we face today is, we see these issues as individual issues needing individual solutions, or at best, problems that are interrelated. No one sees these issues as a single tree that has branched out from a single overwhelming factor. Evolution.

A certain Charles Darwin put forth a certain theory that subsequently went on to be proven. Darwin himself must not have imagined how vast the scope of his theory was. What the “survival of the fittest” means, what the existence of the survival instinct means is that every creature, given the chance to help its own cause, even at the cost of the other, will act to help itself or its kind survive. This is an animal instinct, and humans like to believe they have risen above it, but it is prevalent, if not dominant, throughout mankind. Fierce education mingled with fierce determination of will has produced exceptions. We have all heard stories of selfless sacrifice, if there is such a thing. However, the fact remains, the vast majority of mankind, or any other species on earth, has no qualms going to any extent to get a headstart in the rat race that is survival.

Now, seen through this light, one begins to perceive all the above mentioned terms of differentiation as mere tools. The British used “The mission of civilizing a Barbarian country” as a tool to drain India of its wealth of resources. We were called barbarians, and we believed it. And we merrily played along while they stole out the backdoor carrying our treasure. The white man called the black man a lower form of human being, and united the Western world in this belief, until a whole continent of people were enslaved. Hitler used the Jewish Race as the scapegoat to unite Germany in retaliation to French excesses. America used Islamophobia to justify attacks on Arabian countries.

Everywhere, every propaganda, every justification is a thinly veiled attempt at superiority, or a desperate cry for survival. Humans have it ingrained in them to step on corpses on the way to progress. No civilization in all of mankind’s history has prospered without having terrific violence in its past. It is, simply, the way it is.

Let us assume for arguments sake (though we would be wrong) that the survival of the fittest was not the root cause. Let us take each of the terms of differentiation as a problem in its own right, interlinked with the other problems intricately, but a separate entity nonetheless. Even so, can such a plethora of differences ever be overcome? When, in the same country (ironically enough, a democratic country), there can exist a journalist who doesn’t blink twice before flinging insult in the face of a religious figurehead in the name of freedom of speech, and an extremist who believes any insult to his religion is justification enough to carry out an act of terrorism; which naïve creature could even hope that peace could prevail even for a little while on a global scale?

There can never be a solution to man’s fear of the unknown. And the world is too large, mankind too diverse, for differences not to exist. Education proves inadequate to fight the instinctual reaction of man to shun or destroy that which seems foreign to himself rather than insquisitively learn about it before he judges it. Man will remain a man, and violence will remain an integral part of him.

"Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty – this is my proposition; the ‘wild beast’ has not been laid to rest at all, it lives, it flourishes, it has merely become – deified." – Friedrich Nietzsche



Now to address the second question. Is World Peace a good thing?

The first answer to come to one’s mind would be, “Yes, obviously.”

But the first thing that comes to one’s mind usually does not have a lot of thought behind it.

Friedrich Nietzsche postulated that war, conflict, dissent, dissatisfaction, revolt, revolution and cruelty were all necessary cogs in the machinations of human progress. It is almost a form of purgation in the Aristotelian manner that he professes works to the good of mankind. If one glances through history ( a worthwhile endeavor) one will find that the greatest leaps that man has made progress wise have come from times of tumult and warfare. The might of American Space programs relies heavily on Nazi science. The slavery question prompted concerted research into human psychology and race to investigate if one is really inferior to the other or is merely believed to be so. The oppression of Germany by France through the Treaty of Versailles ended up providing the impetus for uniting the whole of Bavaria with such an excess of fervor that they held the rest of Europe in a tyrannical grip of terror for almost a decade. Mankind has a wonderful habit of blooming to its full potential when under duress. And Nietzsche’s argument is that for this very reason, evil is needed, if only to spur the good on to greater heights.

A world at peace would have stagnated. There would be hesitations before every step forward. Everytime progress could be made, it would be weighed against its possible side effects and collateral damage and ultimately given up. That the whole species of man will advance in unison is a vain dream with no attachment to reality. In the real world, you always need a pioneer to light the way before the rest of the masses follow. But right there comes a divide. The pioneer’s task is the toughest, must his reward also not be correspondingly the greatest? If yes, then he is at a position more elevated than the rest, which distorts equality, and there can be no peace without equality. And if no, then we fall back into Karl Marx’s argument, and a simple google search will give you the disastrous consequences that any attempt at large scale Marxism has brought upon mankind.

Incidentally, in case the above remark misleads you into believing this article is pro-democracy, the very concept of democracy itself is flawed. And in the context of equality, this becomes all the more dangerous. In a democracy, all men are proclaimed equal, right at the outset, this leads us to a contradiction. According to the “logic” of democracy, the opinion of an educated, trained professor of Economics and of an uneducated, ignorant old villager carry the same weightage when deciding who is to be elected Finance minister. Democracy treats people as equals, when they are not. This results either in oppression of the masses or of oppression of the intellect. And none of the scenarios are pleasant ones.

This same thinking overflows into the wishful concept of World Peace. As mentioned before, peace cannot exist until there is complete equality in mankind. A man, seeing another above him, will necessarily wish to rise to his level rather than remain below. It is only natural, only fair, and indeed this aspiration is the reason we have advanced so far from our caveman days. But aspiration is a short step away from ambition and ambition can be squarely blamed for 80% of our world’s issues today.

These arguments do not even delve into the practical consequences of world peace. How is one to control overpopulation? How is one to control the already overaccelerated usage of our resources. And most importantly, what will then provide the impetus for humans to move forward?

The choice, in the end seems to be this. Peace at the cost of progress, resulting in stagnation, or progress while accepting collateral damage as a necessary cost that must be paid. The delicate task of mankind is to keep alive its repugnance for barbarianism while recognizing and accepting that barbarianism is still and always will be an integral part of the human psyche.



In conclusion, Peace is a noble objective to keep before oneself, but it is an erroneous one. To revert back to Nietzsche, “Life is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of the strange and weaker, suppression, severity, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and, at the least and mildest, exploitation.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

This, seen objectively, is what life constitutes. The choice of accepting it or spending one’s life fighting against it, remains a personal one.