Ayn Rand, Shaitan & Blurred Belief ....

Two things happened today.

I revisited Ayn Rand after years. I’m part of a Book Club that decided to do Night of the January 16^th this month.

The only popular Ayn Rand book I hadn’t read. And no, surprisingly, age hasn’t lessened her appeal for me.

I’ve heard this from many friends. While you go through an Ayn Rand phase in college, later, as life edges you towards a smoother whisky, u dodge ur edges and, a need for radical philosophy.

Unfortunately, doesn’t hold true for me.

Loved it then. Love it now.

Never really had the gumption to follow it totally though.

Individualistic thought to the point of self destruction, I guess, was too radical for even me.

Incidentally, I also began today with a movie that has been the talk of discerning movie goers most of the last few months.

Missed it in the hall, and ended up planning so much to take time out for an orchestrated movie experience at home that, finally ended up doing a morning quickie today.

6 am..Shaitan..me and my AC rajaaii J

I didn’t like Shaitan… it may be the face of today’s moneyed youth but I’m sorry I don’t get it.

By the way I love the genre..I’m all for experimentative cinema…..I don’t think that’s what it was though..it was contrived cinema.

Coming back to how this connects with the book…Ayn Rand is also contrived…she speaks of ideology that is beyond us.

Aspirational, superbly crafted, yet, illusionary.

However, the difference is there is philosophical truth that is exaggerated to enunciate.

Shaitan was a lot of enunciation, bereft of any connect but the obvious.

There are afew lines in the book that could sum up the philosophical premise of Shaitan beautifully..let me give them to u :

Flint : Now, tell us, didn’t Mr Faulkner have a clear conception of the difference between right and wrong?

Karen : Bjorn never thought of things as right or wrong. To him, it was only u can or u can’t. he always could.

I kept waiting for something like this in the movie..powerful, the obvious, direct.

So we did the drugs, and the sassy dialogues, the indulgent khoya khoya chand which u could have replaced with any old song sung in the same style and, we would have still lapped it up…but u forgot the damn soul.

When every Ayn Rand hero/heroine speaks of “belief in nothing but own pleasure”, the mind creates a context.

When the same hero then prefers to destroy the ideal he/she has created to not do injustice to it, I believe. Even though its not something I endorse.

I missed that in Shaitan.

The core belief.

I’ve realized that I love experiences that make me go back to my beliefs, evaluate the distance I’ve traversed in the years that I’ve led.

I could write loads on another book that made me change overnight – 40 Rules of Love….but that’s for another time, another post.

Love, anyway, is worth more than a passing mention …

Acceptance

Friends who chance upon this blog have always told me that I seem to straddle different paradigms in terms of personality profiles.

While my writing is grey bordering on black, my real world social interactions are anything but.
I don't really find this reading surprising.

For all my social avataar, I am pretty much a recluse..and, happy being so. I can spend days without venturing out of the house, just entertaining myself with books, my programs, cooking. I accept.

Its been some time since I actually applied myself to writing.

The plan is to reclaim some of the black on white and, gift myself a book..poetry comes easy so will start with that...all my publisher and reader friends tell me I've lost the battle before the war by choosing poems as my weapon of choice...what the heck...even if they aren't published, they will be read.

Whats the point of having a social avataar if it can't give forum to a recluse's fancy :)..

I'm back..this time to stay.

Status Quo !

I've never been fascinated by butterflies.
I should have understood then, that what usually fascinates one, is the inability to be or to have.
The freedom, the voice, the wings, the colour I grew up with and, took for granted. And, still do.
However, what fascinates me is the sky they say no to, to perch on a bunch of flowers so obviously not theirs and, the nerve they show, in putting themselves in the same position, over and over again....

Irreverence

Irreverence has little
to do with me and,
a lot
to do with the life I've led...
I stand, distantly pitched
in shadowed angst
even that,
has little to do with me,
a lot
to do with the lives i've held...
I try not to seek the moon's arc on a full moon night,
irreverence it is,
that makes me find it .
stuck by its crooked end,
hung like a rope, a ladder,
an arc that i can lose or find as i move my thumb..
in tandem,
with that wild vein on the right whisper of my neck.
irreverence it is
that makes me climb those rickety steps,
to bathe myself in lit silver glory..
wondering, why i seem to be saddling a full orb
when i had always been promised
the sweet soul pang of an edge,
just about toppling into
irreverence........

Burn

I try really hard to think of some non angsty stuff to write about.
Zilch.
If you meet me you would never take me to be this edgy, melancholic, sometimes black writer.
I'm happy, buoyant and completely over the top. I don't think much. I never ever impose my moods on others. I'm just the shoulder for the job.
What the fuck happens here ????
And no, don't tell me this is the person I really am cause that would be really aggravating.
And don't tell me, sometimes I need to be heard too...I have friends who have always been more than ready to be there and do that.
I've never really had a problem blending both but I do sometimes wonder which one I really am.......

The Need for Need !!

I somehow come back to this space whenever I feel the need to. Thats rare in itself. We don't really need anything nowadays do we? Or is it just me? 38 knocking on my window pane and i have stopped needing..fairly early to give in to life I say.

But then, I don't even see kids engaging with that emotion, the raw longingness of need.
U want, u get...rather anti climactic, i would say.

At least I had a childhood where need was not artificially created by my parents...today, I make a conscious effort not to give everything my son's heart desires so that he can feel the want becoming a need, slow and steady...

I felt like coming back to this place today because for the last few days I can see that need building up in him. His eyes shine, theres a fervour in the way he speaks....
theres a course that Wharton or Stanford has started on Harry Potter & the Future of Illusion....he asked me how to get there.
I smiled..you know one of those secret motherly quirky twist of the lips which just indicates 'caught u'.....

so now, I have a 'needy' kid, willing to give studies his best shot while he searches the net for Potter's wand....he has a globe on one side and google on the other...the two biggest warriors of this century I would say.

And, I have my need..at near 38...to give him the magic he deserves.....

Its amazing how we fool ourselves into believing that the reason we don’t do anything is because we don’t know it is happening.

Bull.

Give urselves some credit guys and, heaps of guts too.

We don’t do it because we know, we understand and we take a conscious decision not to disturb the balance.
We don’t do it because we know, we understand and we are a part of the reality that makes it happen.
We also don’t do it because it is so much easier to be happy and blind and part of an unidentifiable mass than a lone crusading upstart voice.

And all of these reasons are OK. Its OK to be any or all of these. As long as u “know”.

One maddeningly, ambitious, greedy man bent an already broken system to build an industry out of nothing. Many sat and, watched him doing it. Hated his style and ofcourse, his guts. Used his power all the same.

This one man allegedly made pots of money for himself and, ah what a kind good family guy, for his family too. This went on for afew years,,about the same time our robust investigative news channels were airing how murky the world of saas bahu and saazish has gotten. Really entertaining, because the needle of suspicion was not pointing at this one guy at all…he was so clean u see..so these amazingly super investigative zealots of the media world had no reason to investigate him…the saas looked deadlier. And anyway, he was so subtle in approach…almost looked gandhian.
And now ofcourse, we know what he did…..greedy greedy man..he made so much money…ya so what if others did too…one man …we are a humane socialist bunch of village idiots u know…that’s Indian..we’re so true to our roots…we choose such people to govern us…and we never once doubt them…all of them are true descendants of gandhi and buddha.

While we have proven time and again how beautifully inconsistent we are with our loyalties and, so hugely dependant on our ignorance to bail us through most anything in life…I am happy that this one man is so consistently full of himself that he is going down guns blazing.

In the only way he knows how.

Read something really cool on someone's fb status update about "surrender".

The whole game in life is about either surrendering to a bigger, more powerful reality or working towards making it surrender towards urs.

Anyway, have decided to give the soul searching , angsty me a rest...have plain freakin exhausted and out thought myself...so i choose to surrender...see.
.

True to promise I'm back.
I think busy is also a state of heart. Like happiness.

I've never been busier than I am right now. Every night I fall asleep exhausted and dead. My
sugars pumping again so that is possibly a great contributor to the dead bit. Nah, am not being flippant..just can't get over the fact that after so many years of being called sweetie and hating it, I am now officially that horrible word.

The point is, even with so much happening, why am I not busy enuf to be so exhausted that I can think of nothing else but this.
Busy at heart........

Its summer too soon this year.
Have decided to write more frequently again.
Maintains equilibrium.

And no headings to my posts…why should I have to commit to a strong underlying theme for any of the stuff I write ?

I choose to be unspecific!

Tripping on ghazals again nowadays.

I have this strong mental image of myself sitting behind an old wood study table writing a book. I look really intellectual, glasses perched high on my perfectly done up hair (just to sort of digress, I comb every weekend..like the just out of bed look or so I have convinced myself) and wearing one of those fab india type of sarees, kohl rimmed eyes…smoky…oooh…

My son seems as old as I am now in that vision so I guess I have a long way to go…

Till then, this is me…carefree

Not careless, just carefree.

Liar !