Senses

What does it mean to be human? Without asking questions regarding the soul (unanswerable for me really, philosophically and scientifically speaking - and not something that deserves quick dissembling and late night digressions, it’s kind of more vital than that). We are our wants and needs, emotions and actions, clothed in terribly fragile skin and ego and held together by sinews and family. I don't quite know how I function. I mean I know what my triggers are, what makes me want something and as often, what makes me not want something. But what scares me, in a way, is that there is no internal trigger as such for me. There is no overarching narrative that I want, in the sense of seeking something. No creative urge except to try and understand myself and my role in the world. Most of my triggers are external (does that actually makes me sane?) and they tend to affect me quite a bit (not in the way of taking action really but in the form of making me think - which is a form of action that is not only default to me, it is more like I am irretrievably stuck in that mode). The basic question of motivation is something that interests me quite a bit – which factor is primary in determining our actions, is it family, society, religion, nation? Or are we ultimately simpler in that we tend to do the thing that just makes us feel good? And are we all the same (I don’t quite believe that - variations will exist in a species, even in this basic level). Anyway – I re-read Night (and again became numb for a bit, and I guess that book kind of answers my question, that we do all react to external stimuli after all and there are thresholds to each kind of stimuli beyond which our responses and actions change) and I have been meaning to read this. I guess I am looking for sense in books of a certain kind.

Anyway, I digress. I started this post with a different sort-of plan. I was thinking about the senses, the senses that we all share (genetic errors and misfortunes aside) and that we share in some form or the other with animals as well. Sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. I had one of my occasional eye issues (sometimes one or both of them go blurry – something I guess I have adjusted to in a way) and I was weirdly woozy for a while – my balance was shot (and yes, while I could never audition anyway for Cirque du Soleil but this was major trippy toes slapstick territory). And then as the eye (it was one this time) cleared up, the balance came back. It’s weird isn’t it, how the sprockets and the gears fit inside, making the machine run – we inhabit a physical world and interpret it through our physical interactions. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. If we were allowed to imagine, and who’s to say we aren’t, we could very well think of our primary interfaces with the outside world being through other forces and senses. Slight tugs indicating the lines of the magnetic fields, sound waves eliciting brilliant images in our brains which in turn would be wired quite differently, with rhizoidal magnetite veins to carry the signals for instance. One limit on our imagination is obviously the one placed by our knowledge and our understanding of the world. Our scientific minds will attempt to predict the possibilities through our current interpretation of the natural laws. But might there be universes which obey completely altogether different laws? That would be interesting, wouldn’t it? That’s sci-fi territory obviously. The interesting thing is that while I didn’t really follow the genre while young (thinking it to be too fantastic and juvenile, without any real knowledge), now I am more interested in it. The past couple of years I read quite a few ‘sci-fi’ books which were thought provoking, none more so than Ted Chiang (and the movie is good but the book is great) and various sub-genres (such as this (space opera), this (dystopian with a loud nerd-alert) and this (military interstellar missions with aspects of consciousness transfer)). And I am not even talking about the established classics here. What I am trying to say is apart from individual literary merits (and they can be quite uneven), they do obviously encourage you to think and question the various possibilities and permutations of human existence which is always interesting.

And we are so immutably bound to our senses, aren’t we? They are the triggers for our memories and the switches for our emotions. Sunrises and bird-songs, petrichor and tang. All our memories have these sensations as their cornerstones, the indescribable touch of warm blankets, the taste of fingers dipped in honey jars, the goosebumps from the slightest touch. We live our lives, accumulating these inputs and tagging some of them with red post-its, marking them as special. I like the smell of old books, past letters from my grandma will make me melancholic even now and I still think that the best college lunches were the ones at Putiram (the ones we finished with rabdi, obviously, followed by a sherbet at Paramount). And they are all linked too, the feeling of the sleeper berths, with the rolling lullaby of a train and the faint whisper of the night-time air mixed with the rusted smell of the brown coloured grills looking vaguely sinister in a 5w tungsten bulb. That’s a train journey for me. Every memory can be similarly distilled into the combination of the unique sensations they evoked. And it weird how, even as I get older, the same 5 senses with their incredible acuity, can combine to give me new memories each day.

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Songs I have been listening to (not really)

1. Deep Purple - When a Blind Man Cries - Well this is a song I really liked when I was an angsty teen. I am not really a Purple-head (snigger) though they have an extensive catalog of classics, but I liked this song for what I perceived as meaning that when some people complain its more notable (cause they usually don't). And cause I have issues with being blind too (but that's neither here nor there).

 2. Groove Armada - Think Twice - I think its a classic. And I usually end up having multiple songs from them in whichever playlist I am making. I love a dance band, who knew (and I also simultaneously agree completely with David Mitchell here).

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Ceteris paribus (but then nothing is really) 

Heroes

And no, I am not going to be talking about that 2006 series that initially raised sweet, sweet hopes with an original plotline, a deliciously twisted supervillain and a wonderfully bonkers tagline that went "Save the cheerleader, save the world". Though it does seem in a way appropriate as a metaphor for this year, a year when drowning of great hopes seemed to be fate's favorite trick and when absurdities became hyper-real.

Can we agree that the previous centuries greatest cultural flourishes all came in the period upto the 1980s? That would be true for my generation at least (a generation that came of age in the 1990s), in a time when cultural appropriations took 2-3 years to travel from west to east. We have lived through some momentous years which have led to an incredible co-option of western mores as our own at a speed which would make Space Ghost blink behind his mask. The history that we were reading in our schools, even modern history (which usually ended with the establishment of the non-aligned movement and hardly ventured to the years after independence), was supplemented by that slow awareness of the modern world which peeked and did not yet intrude beyond the household curtains. I was (and am still) proud of my local history, but that seems foolish and bloody-minded in view of the changes that are happening and at a greater pace than ever.

This is then a lament for the past, of a time when heroes were good and they strode like giants across culture consciousness. This is about a time of black and white front pages and about when I cried on hearing about Mother Teresa's death. This is when Mom returned from work and told me that Diana had died and then we watched the memorial service on a flickering TV screen (an Oscar purchased in 1988, since you ask). What I am trying to say is that these people and therefore their deaths mattered. Maybe it was because we had so few domestic icons to really speak of or because these people really mattered in a way very few people now do. And as I get older (yeah yeah), these icons, some of which I discovered after moving out of my house, in my dissolute and curious youth, are going away. As we become more integrated (another word for homogeneous maybe and therefore not the best thing I sometimes think), we react faster and more intensely and at the same time with less consequence. Thanks to pop-news and info-screens, the importance of inconsequential (to my eyes) things are magnified and at the very same time, social-media provides a vent to the masses which expectedly rants and proselytizes and trolls and then heads back to the pods for harvesting by advertisers. This must that dystopian sci-fi novel that got refused by so many publishers and will be discovered in 50 years and then be declared as the most prescient work ever (goodbye Jules Verne).

Anyway, I console myself thinking that it's but time that treats us so. Woodstock and Vietnam, Thatcher-era Britain, the Bangladesh war and the settlement of refugees, they will happen again, in other guises and in other places maybe, but most of history is remarkably similar isn't it. Triumphs and falls. Occasional heroes and geniuses, misfits and philanthropists - all marking years and decades. Ingenuous and beautiful, firebrands and peace-seekers. And sometimes a beautiful poetic turn. I couldn't believe it when MJ died (and we are ignoring what he became later but choosing to focus on his music) and when Robin Williams did. I guess it's the human cycle and the real ask is that the chain doesn't break and that we don't become culturally vacuous and morally bankrupt. The creative output that these people shared will always exist and maybe we choose to remember and appreciate that. To take courage and inspiration from them is what we can do and to not do that is perhaps the silliest thing to do. So I ask you to read that book and listen to that album and watch that film. There is immense joy to be had in savoring those moments. When the future is unknown, the past can provide succour. And maybe you'll create something in turn which will pay it all forward. Somebody else might need it someday.

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This has been a sad year.

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