Art, Nation and Memory

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far, far from it: at the same time, he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

- Picasso in an interview with Simone Tery, March 24, 1945


“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.” Art is a form of personal expression, which goes beyond having a purpose, for no artist is a success or a failure, as he creates to speak the only way he can: by creating more art. However, sometimes art takes such a form that it has the ability to encompass the complexities of life and the travails of humanity, where the brush strokes are made, keeping in mind the conscience of a nation. When nations go through turbulent times, it’s often art that brings out the spirit and the struggle of the people. It is then used simultaneously as a weapon and as a support system, to inflict and heal wounds at the same time. There is an undying quality about art which allows it to be timeless, and for the discerning reader, it offers a multitude of reflections. It’s a harbinger of learning’s for the future, and memories of the past are evoked.

The past and the future together create the present, for it is impossible for the present to exist without the cognizance of the past or a vision for the future. It is only natural that nations rely on their past and history to define and identify themselves. It gives them the legitimacy to carry on with their ideas and present it to the future generations to come. However, how does a nation confront its past when it has been a victim of the mistakes of its own people? Is it prudent to forget such a past, glossing over it and covering up the mistakes done by its people? Or should the nation be constantly reminded of the wrong road once taken, to ensure that the same path is never trodden again. This is where precisely art comes in, as it does not allow people to forget, the follies of God’s greatest creation.

When nations are under conflict, along with war and the loss of their identity, many things have been confiscated from the people: not only their homes and their possessions but also their memory. It’s an invisible loss which one fails to see in the state of misery and obvious losses. However, it is a loss which is far more important, for it exists in the realm of the mind, a territory often considered difficult to access. Moreover, war by its nature is made to be a human condition which encourages amnesia, which leads us to a situation where we erase one memory and construct a new one – we are forever in a state of enforced amnesia and enforced remembrance.

But most importantly, the arts intend to explore the critical questions: What is history and what is memory, what is personal and what is collective memory? Collective memory arises out of the consciousness of the personal memory of people. However, collective memory can be erased and rewritten, constructed and reconstructed, confiscated and confiscated and deemed politically correct or incorrect. The constant struggle for the territory of collective memory is the reason behind the political and power struggle. So while the world mourns the losses the nation incurred, one must not forget that the misfortune of others is free and does not hurt. We may sympathize and pity, but it will be forever hard for us to comprehend the actual truth, to truly understand and comprehend the losses of the people. Collective memory is one such loss, which being multifaceted and complex could be grasped only by the people who have been victims. It could be safely said that while the nation intends to construct a new collective memory, through its art, a reconfestication of the lost collective memory is warranted.

Wanderings of a Bookaholic

A long wait like this has to be broken on an instinct. The blog has been lying dormant ever since I returned, so I thought the best way to get things rolling would be to talk about something which has been on my mind ever since I picked up Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse. Having read him earlier, I had an inkling of what I could expect, knowing his inclination towards eastern mysticism, but the book delivered much more than I expected. Fiction does not catch my imaginations as much as non fiction does, but once in a while I come across an author who completely blows me away.

And in the recent past, I have managed to find three such masters, about one of whom fera says has an effect of making the reader go back to the themes, all the time, it’s like being in the eye of the tornado. The greatest quality about these people, is not their ability to hold your interest, which is a difficult job in itself, but its their ability to make you realize, with each passing moment, that these men have far surpassed their craft, are beyond setting benchmarks for others to achieve, gone beyond scratching the surface and revealing the undercurrents, those swirling mystical designs, intriguing and captivating and sometimes thoroughly confusing. What they have managed to achieve is transporting the reader into a universe, not created by them, but created by the reader himself. I have hardly seen my imagination firing all cylinders until I stumbled upon them.

The experience so reminds me of rivulets, the tiny off shoots of rivers, who branch away from the main river only to rejoin in the end. During their existence, they have a semi fluous identity, one governed by the obstacles it finds in its path, and yet governed by the mother river, because its course has also been decided by the mother. As one delves into the writings of these men, you feel like a rivulet. They completely overpower your senses and make you float in an ephemeral world, but the joy this ephemeral submission to their thoughts is long enough to keep your head spinning in and out of consciousness. Your identity in those fleeting moments is not identified by who you are but with the way the author decides to play with your mind. You end up playing a mind game in which you don’t have an identity of your own, just like the rivulet, is made up of this contradicting duality, one fighting to deny the truth, the other meekly acquiescing to the very obvious.

But beyond all this, the one single thing which puts them into a different league altogether is their ability to jolt you out of your lives, the times when you thought the whole world would pause and ponder over the words of these masters, and try to assimilate an infinitesimally small bit of it into your own self. But what is even more fascinating is that all three of them do it in starkly different ways, each so brilliant in their own way. It does make me think of a question asked millions of times in the past, what is the right way to reach God? But again isn’t God another way which asks you to look within, something which stimulates your thoughts, makes you think about things which normally don’t merit a second look or conveniently forget. So if three of god’s own creations themselves manage to do so in entirely different ways, I already have my answer for the right path to reach Him. The right path is always the one you choose.

This post was supposed to be a review of the above mentioned book, and yet again, they have managed to play mind games with me, and I end up writing something which I never intended to.

Shantaram: Writings and Beyond

Just finished reading Shantaram. In case you know me or have stumbled upon my blog from somewhere on the net, I’ll let you know that I love reading, to the point of being crazy about it. But very few books have so brilliantly, subtly and mysteriously intrigued me to the point that I am writing this at 3 am in the night. I don’t want to review the book or tell you about its plot, which you can anyways find here. What I felt like writing about are the beautiful quotes in the book. Reading them I felt as if he has packed his life's experiences, his pain, his love, his musings and most importantly his learning’s in so few words. The insight shown in these quotes is not something one can pick up so easily; it probably requires one to go through a lot of things which we don’t like or through events which unexpectedly define the course of our life. We all ultimately want to think that we are the river, cutting across different terrains and making its own way, its own path and probably its own destination. But we ultimately end up being nothing more than a cascade, natural yet governed , important yet short lived, beautiful yet perishable, the contrast only too natural to see; yet never so visible to us, though its dancing stark naked, shouting at the top of its voice trying to be as conspicuous as possible. The most obvious things in the world are the ones most often missed. We fail to see things in retrospect, forgetting the value of experience, or again, perhaps not wanting to look back, for what we see in our past, are failures and sorrows. This brings me to a point where I feel I need to share with you some lines from this masterpiece of a book.

Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny precious wisdom they give to us, even those dreaded and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.

Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears. In the end that's all there is: love and its duty, sorrow and its truth. In the end that's all we have - to hold on tight until the dawn

Come to think of it, whatever we achieve and whatever we don’t are actually equally important to us. The victory is a kind of hope that good things happen, not by a twist of fate, but by conscious effort. The defeats are things which we ought to learn from, the wise, harsh teacher. Hope and wisdom are like unidentical twins; the pedigree being the same, yet a mutated gene is all that makes them different. Wisdom brings about hope, and hope allows us to stay foolish, and its this foolishness that keeps us going. Under the surface, if one scratches a little, one can find the connection too evident to see.

Sorrow is something I believe that everyman should face. We only count our blessings when all is lost, and it’s only possible for the cruelest of emotions to force man to think about his blessings. Only in the most depressing times, when one lays low and feels a churning in his stomach so strong that the feeling of being even something evades you totally, we just thank our stars for having people who love us, around us. We are essentially a thankless species. Period.

If fate doesn't make you laugh, you just don't get the joke

Fate’s way of beating us in a fair fight is to give us warnings that we hear, but never heed.

Fate always gives you two choices, the one you should take, and the one you do.

Every human heartbeat is a universe of possibilities. And it seemed to me that I finally understood exactly what he’d meant. He’d been trying to tell me that every human will has the power to transform its fate. I’d always thought that fate was something unchangeable: fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of stars. But I suddenly realized that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter now good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love

I don’t want to spoil these words by giving you any interpretations. Just think about major turning points in your life and you will get the brutal and honest meanings of these lines. I just feel that accept some things as they are and try to change your fate. We sometimes adopt a to defeatist attitude towards life. Some things are not meant to be. Some things are meant to be only if we have the courage and the conviction to pursue them. The only difference between the two is the effort one puts in.

Personality and person identity are in some ways like co-ordinates on the street map drawn by intersecting relationships. We know who we are and we define what we are by references to the people we love and our reasons for loving them.

Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them.

This is how important people are in our lives. There is not one word in these lines that I will not give my right arm for. I truly believe that I exist because of the people around me.

And for people who take life too seriously

The real trick in life is to want nothing, and succeed in getting it.

Truth is a bully we all pretend to like

The fully mature man or woman has about two seconds left to live.

If you make your heart into a weapon, you always end up using it on yourself.

And to understand what Mumbai or in general India is, the best of them all

I’m a Jew, French, criminal and gay; Bombay is the only city in the world that allows me to be all four at once - Dider Levy (A character in the book)

To top it all

The facts of life are very simple. In the beginning we feared everything - animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky - everything except each other. Now we fear each other and almost nothing else. No one knows why anyone does anything. no one tells the truth. No one is happy. No one is safe. In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you could do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is the dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a god who cares about its fate.