Tag: The Human Condition (Page 2 of 2)

On Travelling and Connecting With a Place (Hampi)

15 February 2017 / yuganka

My fifteen hour single day trip to Hampi was memorable. Having taken an overnight bus from Bangalore, located over three hundred kilometres away, I reached Kamalapur, the nearest town from Hampi, at around five thirty in the morning, and then walked the remaining five kilometres to the ruins of this abandoned city.

In that hour long walk which commenced in complete darkness and concluded inside a small café for breakfast, I could notice the gradual emergence of certain thoughts in my head, catalysed and notably reinforced by the combined beauty of the twilight of the orange moon on one side of the road and the rising sun on the other, and the few small Protected monuments that dotted the road along the way.

By the time I had ordered my first cup of coffee, these thoughts had taken a concrete form. In fact, they form a recurring theme and arise whenever I travel, especially to places with historical, architectural, archaeological or natural beauty – how do I connect with this place?

I remember a sentence once uttered by my English teacher when we were reading Ode to the West Wind. She said the poet “…felt one with nature…”.

What a beautiful sentence.

When do you feel one with something? What does the phrase even mean?

You feel one with something when you perceive no difference between yourself and that other entity. When the duality of your existence as opposed to that of the other, of the segmentation of your thoughts between “I” and “not I” blurs out and eventually dissolves. You feel you know everything you wanted to know about that entity. Lest these words get lost in the streams of abstraction, let me retrace my steps and start again.

When I visited Hampi, I was visiting the ruins of a city that, at its zenith, was among the most prosperous cities in the world. When it was built over five centuries ago, and in the decades that followed, it was the home of thousands of people, who lived and ate and traded and prospered within the city and its surrounding areas.

As I sat on the stairs of one of these temples, I was physically touching a piece of rock on which other people had walked five hundred years back, which were carried by labourers and sculpted into their present shapes. Who knows, maybe a few cells of one of those labourers were still attached to these stones – as a subtle reminder that time never really passes? As both he and I exist in this moment, at this place, separated merely by a filter of consciousness?

Even today it is possible to find certain places in Hampi where, if you were to stand, you wouldn’t know which year you were living in. And this is the case with almost every historical place. They stand as a testament not so much to the gradual withering away of the glory of the past, as to the absurdity of the present.

The Virupaksha temple is the main shrine in all of Hampi. It is situated very close to the Tungabhadra river on its South bank. Having explored the other side of the river, known for its cafes and the natural beauty of the mountains adorned with huge boulders, it was my turn to experience the architectural, historical and mythological side of Hampi.

As I passed through the temple’s main entrance, crossing from the natural to the human element, my eyes ventured off to the left and planted themselves.

An elephant. Feeding itself sugarcanes and surrounded by a few people.

I spent all the time I had kept for exploring this particular temple, with this beautiful pachyderm. Thrice I offered it a piece of sugarcane and thrice were my offerings irreverently but playfully thrown up into the air. To the elephant’s credit though, I was allowed to pet and caress its trunk.

So I travelled two thousand kilometres to experience a place, and ended up not seeing the main shrine because I got involved with something I could possibly do even in the city I live in? What just happened?

On an objective scale, it could be argued that I probably didn’t plan my time properly. But everything cannot be measured on a scale of objectivity. There are subjective tendencies and feelings that each of us has.

When I am trying to connect with a place, I let my unconscious take over. I try not to analyse my actions or ask why I am choosing a particular alternative over the other. I just go with the flow, believing that this tendency to “flow” a certain way is driven by certain factors at work within my brain – which is trying to make sense of the place, absorb it all in, and build up some edifice that may reflect the place inside my awareness as coherently as could be expected.

I could have spent hours just sitting beside the elephant and observing it – observing how it was periodically turning towards me and looking me straight into the eye; how it was breaking the sugarcanes into two by twisting them between its mouth and the inside of the upper part of its trunk; how it smashed coconuts into the ground in order to break them and then tried to stretch its trunk and pick up those pieces that had bounced off just a little out of its reach; its hard textured skin and its greying hair; the cool wind that hit my face whenever it flapped its ears and on and on and on.

I do not think that it is simply the paucity of time that prevents us from connecting with the places we travel. Even if we had enough time, there is a certain disposition that is needed to “feel one with nature” – the “nature” of any place, including the human aspect. You need to capture the soul of the place and then see how the visible components reflect that soul, what stories they are trying to tell, and how they are linked with each other. This is no easy task and I can clearly understand what people are getting at when they say “…a lifetime is short to explore [any particular place]…”.

I always return from a trip with that inevitable sense of incompleteness, of having left something in the middle, of not having given it as much time as I wanted or needed to. Maybe this sense of loss at moving away from a place that could have given me so much more, acts as a kind of emotional bookmark which keeps reminding me about the place and what all I have left behind, thus keeping alive that yearning to return to it sometime later? Isn’t travelling, after all, at some level, also a journey where you try to find yourself? When you forget the outside world and sit staring at something for hours, in the hope that a sudden epiphany will answer your questions, that you will find what you have been seeking, and that you will know who you are and what you are meant to be and meant to do?

Those serene moments of silence, in the hope of feeling one with that place, and then finding yourself in that unity.

On Friendship

11 December 2016 / yuganka

The movie Dil Chahta Hai came out in the year 2001. It followed the lives of three young people right from their college days, to the time when they each chose a different path in life, got separated, and then, as fate would have it, got reunited, driven on account of the presence of similar forces in their lives. In between, it depicted all the lazy pleasures associated with living and growing up together.

I do not remember when I first saw this movie. In hindsight it seems like a thing that had no beginning, and which gradually emerged as I grew up. It eventually became a part of who I was, and affected my understanding of what human bonds meant. For better or for worse this movie planted the seeds that emerged as the idea of friendship in my mind.

But that was almost fourteen years ago. And today, fourteen years is a lifetime.

Times have changed a lot, even during my (relatively) short life.

The young people of today can only meet during the weekends, they always have pending work which demands their time, their work has instilled in them a sense of value to be given to time that was absent just half a generation ago. This striving for productivity, efficiency, round-the-clock availability and strict deadlines has robbed us of the simple pleasures of life. Each passing day, we are getting more and more alienated from the people we love, from the moments we wish to live, and from the places we yearn to go to.

But the crowning glory of this human calamity has been that those very people have an unquestioning belief that this change is right, that it ought to be right, and that it couldn’t not be right. What worries me is not the validity of this belief, but the validity of this unquestioning attitude. Is a faster life really better for all of us?

Man was never meant to be a machine, so how did it find itself in such a predicament? That question deserves reflection on a line that is slightly tangential to what I wish to talk about here, and which, therefore, should be taken up some other time, for my focus, insofar as this piece is concerned, is on its effects on an individual in general and, somewhat narcissistically, on me in particular.

One of the tragedies of the modern man is that he is born in the twenty first century. Before the apparent tautological nature of the statement makes you miss the wood for the trees, let me clarify.

Today, the difference in the worlds that a modern human lives in during his childhood, his adolescence and his adulthood is too great. When I was in class three, nobody I knew had a mobile phone, and today, in just eighteen years, I do not know anyone who doesn’t have a mobile phone. This change isn’t just about the penetration of mobile devices, in fact it is symptomatic of something far wider in scope – the technological revolution.

I haven’t checked the facts, but I am sure at no other point in the history of mankind has one generation witnessed so much change, and I am not even necessarily referring to technological changes here.

But I am digressing. And yet I am not!

The ideas I grew up cherishing had already become out-dated by the time I entered my mid-twenties. I would have laughed them off otherwise, and maybe that is the only option I have, but the irony isn’t lost on me.

Today, people don’t have time to sit and talk, don’t have time to share your silences, don’t have time to really immerse themselves in something, for they already have something else in their minds – maybe an upcoming meeting, or an incomplete presentation, or a client’s call and what not. They have adapted and learnt to live in these changing times, sometimes driven by a sense of duty to their work and sometimes by choice. But I ask them, what is your duty towards yourself, towards the voice within you?

The choices people make reflect the priorities they give to different things in their life. Even among your friends, you will find all kinds of people, each with a different life journey. Then what binds them to you? That is a very difficult question, but an answer to which may be found, I am sure, in the realm of feelings and thoughts.

I may spend years trying to find a reflection of Dil Chahta Hai in my life, and never find it. But should this fact disappoint me?

Well, we all have our share of disappointments. And in these times, a fashionable solution has emerged – a solution as brilliant as it is misleading. “Stop expecting”. It is brilliant because it makes us genuinely believe that we have found the solution, and misleading because it doesn’t tell us the price we have unwittingly paid for this solution.

Here is the actual answer you needed to know.

Your expectations from a person have to be a function of the person’s personality and his life journey. For example, you may expect, with success, that a friend who likes art will accompany you to an art gallery. Or that a friend who is an avid reader will go to the Lit Fest in your city. But you’ll be damned if you switch these expectations, and then you will end up accepting some stranger’s words on the internet who will say, sagaciously, that you should “stop expecting”. And lo and behold, you will have robbed yourself of all the things which you had a right to expect, and the somewhat assured possibility of actually living and experiencing. Sigh.

By all means, expect. And expect more. But remember that this right to expect demands a duty to give understanding. Give understanding that their life journey and personality could be very different from yours. And this understanding will, in turn, provide you with wisdom – of what to expect, and from whom.

I will wait for my friends. Till the time I either find a reflection of Dil Chahta Hai in my life, or I understand what their Dil Chahta Hai is, what their heart really desires. What do they really want, when they are all disrobed from their worldly cloaks. When I can talk to them in complete honesty. When I can know them and really feel one with them.

Till the time these feelings don’t come out in the form of verses, these few words shall remain my ode to friendship.

Why I Read

12 November 2016 / yuganka

I distinctly remember three of the earliest books that my mother bought for me when I was small. They were The Ugly Duckling, Jack and the Beanstalk and a third book the name of which I don’t remember. But I remember the third book because it had a handle. Yes, a book with a handle. A tiny briefcase appropriate for the small hands that were meant to hold it.

Then followed a hiatus of an appreciable duration, the reasons of which I neither remember nor feel important enough to go into at this point. I was mainly occupied with John Grisham, Khaled Hosseini, Dan Brown and a couple of others during these years, with a singular spurt for Rowling in the months preceding the release of Half Blood Prince.

All of a sudden, I find I have turned 16 and my interest has started to lean towards cosmology. I read Brian Greene, Michio Kaku and a bit of Paul Davies during this time.

A chance visit to a roadside bookstall in 2008, with my parents in tow, refuelled the hunger for books within me, and I bought five of them, among them The Agony and the Ecstasy. And, in a visit to a bookshop the following year, I bought Crime and Punishment.

These two books, along with All Quite on the Western Front, an early 70s edition of which I had borrowed from a friend, had a tremendous impact on me, the nature of which deserves and demands another post of its own. But suffice it to say, they completely transformed my beliefs about what was possible to be achieved through writing, what I expected from the books I read after that, and my general perception of the power of the written word.

In the next few years I read a variety of authors from varied genres, and Dostoyevsky receded into my subconscious and unconscious.

And then one fine day, I asked myself the question – “How exactly did the words of Dostoyesvky effect this transformation in me?”.

And lo and behold. I realised I remembered nothing of importance.

I distinctly remembered the name Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov – the kind of eventful name only dementia can make you forget; I vaguely remembered the names of the other characters, and I only remembered the plot from an eagle’s view.

What was happening? I remember reading somewhere that the books we read are like the food we eat – we cannot pinpoint which part of the body stored the nutrients we got from a particular meal we had at some point in the past, but the energy of that meal was absorbed by our body, and some part of it lives on in our muscles and bones.

This is a beautiful romanticised way of looking at what we read. The books live on within us through their afterglow, a glow that instils warmth in our mind and soul. Their remnants are vague memories, memories that became the changes they effected. This is the transformative power – the words we read are not mere words, they are forces and their nature changes depending on what they interact with. The unlucky soul who could not experience the love of his parents will look at Harry Potter as, more than anything else, an orphan who searches throughout his life for emotional stability. To someone else who could never go to a good school, Harry Potter may be a source of envy, for he had such good teachers and mentors throughout his seven years at Hogwarts.

Books transform into a reflection of how the reader looks at the world. And since each reader holds a different prism in his hand, a given book could take on innumerable interpretations, in fact as many different ones as the number of people who read it. The only dimension of the human condition that comes so close to such a fragrant diversity of perceivable forms is the world of art, literature included.

I was born in the last decade of the twentieth century. Millennia of human history had already played out before me. Why does this fact not bother me? Why does it not overwhelm me with a feeling of being disjointed from that history?

Why do I feel so at-ease since my childhood days?

In other words, why does an understanding of the sheer magnitude of the quantity of information relating with the history of mankind not unnerve me, and how do I, so effortlessly, take my place in the scheme of things, taking all of that information to be self-evident?

Where did I imbibe all of this?

Each successive generation has access to more information about its past. Before the invention of writing, all of this information was passed on orally, and this is in fact how the myths and legends, prevalent in virtually all cultures around the world, formed. And this is also why we know almost nothing of that period, except through archaeological remains, or in ancient treatises that mention them.

The written word is the storehouse of mankind’s knowledge. It is the sum total of all we know, what we think about the things we know, and what are the next things we could possibly come to know. It stores the past, and shapes our future.

I did not grow up to become a cosmologist, but Stephen Hawking did. And he told me about black holes.

I did not grow up to be a neurologist, but Oliver Sacks did. And he told me about visual agnosia.

I did not grow up to be a philosopher, but Immanuel Kant did. And he told me about the relation between things as they actually are, and things as they appear to us.

Need more?

I did not grow up to be a musician, but John Powell did. And he told me what an arpeggio really is.

I did not grow up to be a mathematician, but Ian Stewart did. And he told me about the Riemann Hypothesis.

I did not grow up to be a poet, but Thomas Campbell did. And he told me about Lord Ullin’s Daughter.

I did not grow to be an X, but Y did. And he told me about Z.

I can fill anything I want into X, and find a corresponding Y. And Y will, then, lead me to a Z.

A new Z each time I read. What else can I want from my life!

And that is why I read.

On Travelling and Connecting With a Place (Hampi)

On Friendship

Why I Read

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