April 10, 2012
William Faulkner wrote, "I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 O'clock every morning." Though nowhere near Faulkner's dedicated habit (and genius) I have surprised myself by managing to stick around with this note writing thingie for 250 editions now! What started off as updates of a continuously surprised back-home expatriate, these have taken on the forms of travelogue, news summary, literature, movie and event review and general verbal diarrhea.
Though I have rather pretentiously called these notes a public diary in the blog format, obviously they do not possess the intimacy and honesty traditional diary writing entails. And by traditional diary writing, I have in mind the diaries of Sophia Tolstory. Her jottings about living with that grandmaster of literature and philsophic inspiration of even Gandhi, the great Leo Tolstoy, are powerful jolts that crumble the public persona that Tolstory so arduously cultivated throughout his life.
She wishes deeply in its pages that the man, who analysed all possible complexities of human emotions through his incredible characters, had the capacity to see the neglect she and their children were enduring. "In his diaries, I searched greedily for the word love. I am consumed by insecurity. I cannot see anything clearly," she wrote.
The initial purpose of the notes were to compile perceptible changes in my home town, the beautiful Thiruvananthapuram. Infrastructure and population-wise much seems to have changed here. Yesterday during power-cut, while pacing up and down the street post dinner, Leny chechi asked if I knew what new car neighbors three doors down had bought. Since almost all the houses in the colony were designed to have a single car garage, half of them are forced to park their second car out on the street.
When Leny chechi's dad had built their house back in the 1970s, he didn't even consider a garage necessary. As the city expands in the direction beyond Technopark towards the north and to Vizhinjam harbor towards the south, two car households are growing by the day.
There are two major changes from the 90s that have been personally noteworthy. Firstly, and immensely thankfully, a whopping majority of public events start on time now. This is a seismic shift in the societal attitude towards time. And it is a change that bespeaks so many underlying changes.
Secondly, though there are orders of magnitude more schools, colleges, tuition and coaching centers and students of all ages are visible perpetually on the move from classroom to classroom throughout the week, there is a distinct air of nonchalance about them. I wouldn't venture to call it a sense of confidence but the look in their eyes resembles more what I have seen among American youth than what I can remember from school days peers.
Read yesterday about a couple of past incidents from northern Kerala. An eight year old girl had used a domestic broom to beat her father in front of guests because he had changed channels from her favorite show to news. A fifteen year old boy had silently walked out of the house and hung himself to death from a tree after his parents refused him permission to watch TV.
Stephen King reportedly writes ten pages a week, even on holidays. On hot, stuffy, indoor days with dry business stuff swallowing life, for me, it is a struggle to come up with even two pages. Yet, I think if anywhere, it will be in this city of 'Bright Infinite Word Mind' that any and all writer's blocs can hope to be cured.
'Bright Infinite Word Mind' is my interpretation of Travancore's presiding deity, the immensely rich ($22B and counting) 'Anantha-Pada-mana-abha' (Infinite-Word-Mind-Brightness). It suits better the god of a city that has always valued learning and placed supreme importance to education. 'Anandapadmanabha' may currently be projected onto a idol with a 'Padma' (lotus) coming out of his 'Nabhi' (navel), but I believe the thousand tongued snake that forms his mattress again signals towards languages and words.
Vaikkom Mohamed Basheer used to write about the infinite amount of time that is available only in Allah's treasury and not at the disposal of humans. A scintillating supermind of infinite vocabulary is comparably beautiful, a treasury of all the words in all the languages, past, present and future.
In the beginning, John remind us in his first verse, there was the 'logos'.
We may or may not choose to belive that about the beginning, but in the end, obviously, words are all we will be left with and all that we can leave behind.
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