Spectate

 

Someone told me recently about a fun activity they were about to do. I remarked that I had just seen it happen in a movie the previous day. They responded that they were living life while I was watching it. I think they felt the weight of their words immediately because the conversation switched instantly. But they are right. Life is passing me by. I am trying to cling on to a sense that I too am living, primarily by reading and watching movies. I am, at some level, trying to live vicariously through art. It is my way to see the world, my way to imagine a life less miserable, my way to imagine happiness. Not that all my happiness is imagined. There is a line that United fans put on their flags and banners: “If I had not seen such riches I could live with being poor”. That is how this year has felt. A glimpse, nay even a taste, of happiness that was offered to me, only to have it taken away with no path to recover it.

For half a year – but especially in the past month – I have been waiting for the day I can just home, take a shower and kick back with a cup of tea. Go ‘home’, here, barely exists outside the world of ideas. When I do imagine it, however, I am thinking of my room in the Hague. The only place I have inhabited that I also attempted to populate with a semblance of personality. There was even a gavel I meant to bring there; it did not arrive in time before the last time I left India. A minor one in a string of unfulfilled desires I left that country with. Everything I came to love in my time there has become indefinitely inaccessible. I cannot step out onto the canal and read a book again. There is no filmhouse that will show Donald Sutherland’s best works when he dies. I cannot so much as enjoy a walk without being fully aware of my surroundings and worrying about being poisoned by the air breathe. Worst of all, I do not even get to not feel like an outsider; that might have made some of this mean something.  

Preserve

 

What merits expression? The only person who used to read these with any sort of regularity and tell me about it was my sister. Now they are in jail. Nothing I do seems to be enough to get them out in post-rule-of-law India. It has always been beyond me what motivates them to consistently put themselves in harm’s way fully aware that this is state is by design hostile to people like them.

What is the point of writing anything at all? I have spent most of this year looking for something to look forward to. The closest I have got is looking forward to Wafi getting out of jail; they were already not in jail to begin with. Even prospective joy is about restoring status quo ante, not improvement in any real sense. On the contrary, even after they are out, things will not be as they are before. Like I’ve said in previous blogs, the wrong kinds of documents will now follow them, and follow them for a long time.

Running around trying to find empathy in a city predisposed to rudeness and hostility is not how I expected to be ending this year. That while breathing poison. If I were to take stock of this year, if 2024 me were to meet 2025 me, I think he would shoot me. In all honesty, I would not be disinclined to make sure he aimed at my temple.

I watched ‘The 400 Blows’ Today. The movie is an incredibly sincere look at the alienating experience of childhood, an experience exacerbated by the wanton disregard with which every adult Antoine interacts with treats him. It reminded me – apart from my own childhood – of reading Catcher in the Rye. It also reminded me of The Holdovers, a movie I watched on Christmas Eve a couple of years ago (and will probably do so again this year). There’s a line that has continued to follow me: “You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?” I don’t think I can. There is hardly a worse feeling than articulating a desire and never getting it. It is safer not to want, not to hope, to accept that you’re someone life happens to, and try not to militate against it at the expense of your well-being. But Wafi is not like that; they refuse to take wrongs sitting down. Freezing for a few weeks in the hard prison floors is a price they are prepared to pay. They turn the wheels of history; I might be lucky enough to read about it one day. Or luckier still, 2024 me might be waiting around the corner.  

Rain

 

I read a few weeks ago about this plot to engineer rain in Delhi to reduce level of air pollution. It made me think of the phrase about allowing yourself to feel the rain on your skin. The idea is about letting your guard down – allowing yourself to simply exist in nature without trying to protect yourself from it. What if the rain is engineered? When I step out it is not rain that envelops me but a scary mix of smoke and dust. I am preoccupied with covering as much of my skin as is conceivable. The rain they were speaking of is from a different world.

I read another quote from Adorno today, one to the effect of saying that in many of our lives, the only true moment of freedom (or happiness) is the moment of realisation that freedom (or happiness) is not our lot. That one instant of liberation, of being able to breathe out without the unbearable weight of hope, is all most people can expect. “Theirs but to do and die”. We read books and we watch movies and we hear stories about lives more fantastic, peaceful, and dignified than ours, fully aware that it does not behove us to even dream of such chance. An incredible characteristic I see of people in Delhi is that everyone knows their place. Everyone has their own share of people they will suffer disrespect from, and they will dole it out to. I think that is why everyone is so willing to take it; there is always someone below them to perpetuate the cycle of abuse. As Ambedkar said, “the class consists of the lower and lowerer” and the lower cannot combine with the lowerer for fear of losing his ‘high’ position.  

at home

 

“It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home” – Theodor Adorno

“He smiled, "Why, you will go home and then you will find that home is not home anymore. Then you will really be in trouble. As long as you stay here, you can always think: One day I will go home." He played with my thumb and grinned.

"Beautiful logic," I said. "You mean I have a home to go to as long as I don't go there?"”– Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin

These lines have little to do with each other. They approach the idea of home from very different contexts. Adorno is demanding at interrogation of the comfort and security of having one’s own home, and how it comes at the expense of the privation of many others. In Giovanni’s room, the idea of a home that exists only as long you do not go there is expressed with respect to someone who has been living on the wrong side of the Atlantic for long enough that any ‘home’ he returns to will not be what he left. He remains a perpetual outsider in France and will return to America having lost the ability to call it home.

My father left Kerala over thirty years ago. Having spent his formative years in the state and taken pains to stay connected to his roots all this while, he remains ‘of Kerala’ even in 2025. I still think that when he does return, he will return to a home that is not really his. However, unlike Baldwin’s protagonist, it will remain his home even after he returns. My sisters and I grew up away from this ‘home’. In 2010, when we had a housewarming for the house my parents had built in Kerala, we had a home in a country we had never lived in, and would not for another decade. I cannot internalize how that country, that village, and that real and tangible piece of immovable property is something I must call home. The characters I refer to above lose their ‘home’ because they have removed themselves from it at a real point in history. My home is fiction; it is constructed. It is a stone’s throw away from where my father went to school, and plane ticket and visa barriers away from where I did. Neighbours and relatives know Mujib’s son; they have seen me posted on his Facebook. In a sense significantly more superficial than Adorno meant, I am naturally not at home in my home.

We have each chosen to cope with in wildly different ways. I try to run away. A undergraduate degree in the state farthest from Kerala, a master degree in another continent, and repeated attempts since to remove myself from these ‘roots’. One sister who has embraced this country like they have never known anything else. Another who, as she comes of age, also angles to make a home of her own elsewhere. Our stories are not unique, and in a world where displacement is mostly involuntary, hardly tragic. I know, at least, where to point fingers for being raised as part of a generation that do not have a place to be ‘from’. My little trick to “where are you from?” is to start the response with “my parents are from…” and hope it conveys that I still feel the Arabian Sea separating me from ‘home.’  

Pagliacci

 

I read in a Letterboxd review that life always leaves room for two things: a laugh and a drink. There is always room for a laugh. Like that Simpsons screenshot about this only being the worst day of your life ‘so far.’ A similar wildly popular scene I don’t really care for is Peter Griffin talking about the Godfather. Of course it insists upon itself – anything made with sufficient sincerity does. Your gripe with it should at least address whether it is a piece of art that merits asking you to suffer it insisting upon itself. It reads as very fair criticism of something like Deadpool. I think we would all benefit from more radical sincerity. Me especially because it would allow me to take even more advantage of deadpan delivery – which is how I get to express myself while compromising myself as little as possible. The concept of losing aura – something that always been present in our consciousness even if using different vocabulary – comes at the expense of the realisation that little can be achieved without putting aura on the line. The risk of sounding stupid, vulnerable, or like some variant of irredeemable loser is perhaps one of the most humanising experiences in the world. I read The Idiot recently, thinking often about the how much of the author’s vulnerable stream of consciousness is expressed through The Prince. The person he has been in love with for most of the story finds herself unable to digest the sincerity with which the Idiot makes an idiot of himself, often responding caustically with deliberate intention of causing hurt. She is, nevertheless, moved despite herself to feel the innate humanity in the poor consumptive. I had a phase where I was obsessed with watching cat reels on Instagram, which at some point made way for baby reels, and then into nothing in particular as I stopped scrolling.

Waiting nervously outside courtrooms recently, I have rediscovered the habit of mindless scrolling. It is incredible how much content is out there. The room for a drink remains empty, but shot after shot of laughter is being supplied via my bottomless cup. But doctor…

resignation

 

resignation as sorrow

resignation as joy

resignation as meaning

resignation as suffering

resignation in making peace

resignation with my lot

resignation in tempering want

resignation as my wont

i can consign myself to history

 

Will you please let us know?

 

I watched two incredible movies in the past couple of days. Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink. Freddie is a man who cannot serve a master, but seems to want nothing more than to be able to do this. His wildly violent reactions to any criticism levelled at the master stands in contrast to his own frustrations with his methods. Barton Fink’s insincerity to his craft presents a powerful critique of the emptiness of producing art under capitalism. His common-man tourism proceeds while actively refusing to listen to the only common-man he knows. That he came to know him only because the man took kindly to Fink’s noise complaint highlights the writer’s disconnect from the subject he wants to exalt above all others.

Someone who “hates small talk” asked me the other day where I thought meaning came from. It reminded me of Marx’s quote about men making their own history without being able to do so as they please. The tradition of dead generations weighs most certainly like a nightmare on the brains of the living. What traditions weigh on me? I am not even in touch with all of them. My passport, driving license, and voter ID all have me down as being from a nothing village in the north of Kerala. There are traditions here I am well across, and ones I have never heard of. My history is inflicted on me in a way I am almost unaware, let alone having bargained for. It is hardly a tragedy, but as Emile Cioran once said, each of us do consider ourselves an unrecognised Job. So where does meaning come from? Calvin’s dad believes suffering builds character. Of course, this characterisation implies that one can be both with and without character, instead of the idea that character inheres in a person and can be subject to critique. What does it mean to be of sound character? Does it mean coming across well? Giving a good account of yourself? I love catching a sunrise. On a bright sunny day, I love the incredible explosion of colour that you see in this nothing town. When I am alone, I let most bugs scurry or flutter across the room. The bug spray is for when someone else is bothered. Is there meaning in letting a spider as big as my fist live in the bathroom?

I have been using this time of relative ease to immerse myself in other people’s creativity – primarily through cinema and literature. There is something extraordinarily meaningful in reading about lives lived incomprehensibly far away from you –in time and in space – and seeing yourself in their sorrows, worries, joys, and irrational frustrations. Wanting to curse at people who do not understand that there is a time and a place is apparently a sensation as old as time.

Is it the search for meaning that pushes people to join cults? Freddie moves from master to master in search of meaning, exiting in fantastic incidents of self-destruction. I do not think I can say he finds meaning in the end, but he does as he does, and he appears not unhappy. There is but one thing that makes sense to him, and one occasion where he knows what he is doing. I know not what to make of it except to say he seems to have figured at least one more thing than me.

I, too, cannot deny the charge of looking for meaning just about anywhere. Even an elusive search for the right combination of hairstyle and beard is in some way an attempt to find me, my essence. Easy for me to say I am more than the different specificities that I present. I am, however, also not less than their sum. It reminds me of the occasional query about why I go by Mishal over Mohammad. It was not really my choice, as most people know, but I would never switch. Mohammad carries with it all the historical baggage of a name that I have spent twenty-five years not being. I prefer a two-syllable name too. Mohammad is, perhaps, a rather loaded name for this exercise; one that lends itself to deliberate overlooking. Nevertheless, I do not think I would be the same person if I had lived my twenty-five years as Mohammad and not Mishal. Mohammad is a part of what makes me, but it is even more a part of what makes ‘not me.’ Mohammad, I think, would be serving a different master. Not that I know the master I serve now; I have nothing to report, nothing to let you know.