At the very outset I must warn the serious reader that this is not a philosophical treatise on human nature nor a serious attempt at biological classification of certain groups of people. I was never any good at naming things, least of all write-ups. The dilemma usually got worse when I happened to have penned the wretched thing down, in an hour or so of fruitless labour. An hour, did I say? Yes, I forgot, dear reader, to mention that I am indescribably lazy, which also accounts for my generic disdain towards toiling for those extra minutes to write a sufficiently readable piece. What with the soft bed beckoning me with its arms wide open, once every five minutes. The temptation is too much to resist. Then of course there are games of cards and chess and music to light up the remainder of an otherwise futile day, supposedly spent in doing so-called high end research! O and what ground breaking 'research' this dilatory soul must have engaged in over the last few years! Anyway, I suppose I have held the door ajar long enough for the perspicacious reader to get a sneak peek into my inadequacies. Time to shut that door and open other windows.
One of the first works on science fiction that managed to see its last page (and every other preceding page) read by me was 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'. Professor Pierre Aronnax's description of marine life fascinated me. The way he named phylum, species and genus of some of the plants and animals he saw through the windows of Captain Nemo's Nautilus was overwhelming. I could only try and visualize these creatures from their physical descriptions to the best of my imagination (which is not ponderable either!). Later on, in high school biology text books, I had the good fortune of finding some of their pictorial similitudes. Though impressive even with a dimension reduced, I still had that insatiable desire to touch some of these marvellous organisms, being the three dimensional entity that I was (not really, that's not the only reason!). That came too. On a trip to the Lakshadweep islands, I actually came across families of planktons under water and some dead sea cucumbers on the sea bed. Not to be satisfied by cadaverous remnants, I was very keen on adding the temporal aspect to the three dimensions so as to enable quantification of motion. But, I was not sure that this wish would materialize any time soon. I was soon surprised, not very pleasantly though.
Who on earth had ever anticipated that these creatures could conjure up a trick so devious as to befuddle even the wisest of us. Not that I am clever, but at least I had this feeling that I could tell apples from oranges. So when some of these marine creatures (and their terrestrial counterparts) revealed themselves in human form before my eyes, I was rather taken aback. Or was I? I had assumed that they were humans and tried exchanging such courtesies as are to be expected by a human from another. Little did I know that the apocalyptic depictions of 'Men In Black' had long since begun!
Yes my dear reader, they were there. All around me. Please do not make the mistake of assuming that I am paranoid. That's what the psychiatrist, I visited in this matter, first told me. It turned out that her brain was the size of a pea and therefore she was probably a reptile! How, one may ask, did I chance upon this great cerebral discovery? Well, it so happened that while explaining my predicament to her, I noticed that she was browsing the net to find a cure to my ailment. Then it happened! She held before me the wikipedia link to 'paranoia' and tried to convince me that the surest sign of my condition was the fact that I considered others to be a serious threat to my intellectual growth. 'The pea is not the smallest thing that can be likened to a human brain...' I walked off!
My next encounter of the dangerous kind happened while I was preparing for a programme we had planned to stage on one of those innumerable occasions when people from a certain eastern state of India feel like showcasing their intellectual superiority over others. There I met a monster! How I still live to tell the tale is indeed a mystery, or perhaps a supreme example of the divine handiwork which is often attributed to that elusive entity, Mr. G. Perhaps even the legendary Loch Ness monster would tremble at the very mention of this cannibal. This creature (once again of the feminine kind; my apologies to all the women who have had the misfortune of swallowing this bit of chauvinism) walked up to me to inquire about the duration of the poem I was about to recite. Upon learning that her poem took a while longer than mine to be recited, this she-monster was so relieved that she could not convince her lips to agree upon hiding those blood thirsty rows of canine dentition, ever ready to suck the life force out of any virile male. I was reminded of a species of wild boar... or maybe crocodiles?
A third category reared its head when I was charged with the responsibility of collecting write-ups for a vernacular annual magazine that supposedly stirs the creative spirits of certain linguistically gifted individuals. Here I got one of the shocks of my life! There were poems that none (poets themselves included) could make any head or tail of and stories that ended even before they began because the reader was more interested in exploring the cognitive skills of the latest recipient of the prestigious 'O. Henry Award for Twist in the Tale/Tail'. There were essays that sent a shiver down the spine of the toughest nut, who had been brought up on a healthy diet of 'Saw' franchise, on account of the brutal and grotesque ravishing of grammar in general and spellings in particular. In a nutshell, the whole situation made you want to throw up. But that was not the worst bit. When you wanted to break the heart breaking news of rejection to these simple souls in as sympathetic a manner as is not unbecoming, the look of disbelief on their faces made you feel like the Germans who murdered six million Jews unabashedly. They were the martyrs and you were a rapist, a pillager, a plunderer, a murderer, an atheist, an adulterer and a sociopath all rolled into one! Yet amidst all this you could not miss the bovine aspect, try as you may. If only I had carried a bag of grass for each author I had met then! Alas, Wimbledon might have been played on Clay Court today. Sorry Rafa! It is still Roger for me...
The last category that I am going to talk about reminded me of the coelenterates. This happened while I was up on stage trying to put up some semblance of a histrionic performance for a play. Starting with the organisers right up to certain sections of the audience and some local intellectual doyens in between, everyone seemed to have an opinion regarding how things ought to be done, why we should not be able to run the show, why we are destined to fail, why the audience can choose to play god during the play, and what kind of play ought to be staged etc. Lost within this labyrinth of words, I found myself caught up in a mesh of intellectual bankruptcy. Not willing to give up, we went ahead nevertheless. There were words everywhere, like that precious stuff emanating from the holy cow's wrong end on some holy alley of Benaras. Unfortunately, even an excessive volume of this pristine material did not manage to disinfect the environment (implies getting rid of germs such as us). We marched on and thrived without paying much heed to the neophytes' ancient knowledge even as the holy faeces poured down like manna from heaven. The good lord be praised! If only He had designed these people to have multiple perforations, the foul stench of those stinking words would not have convinced us of their uselessness, beyond any iota of doubt.
One of the first works on science fiction that managed to see its last page (and every other preceding page) read by me was 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'. Professor Pierre Aronnax's description of marine life fascinated me. The way he named phylum, species and genus of some of the plants and animals he saw through the windows of Captain Nemo's Nautilus was overwhelming. I could only try and visualize these creatures from their physical descriptions to the best of my imagination (which is not ponderable either!). Later on, in high school biology text books, I had the good fortune of finding some of their pictorial similitudes. Though impressive even with a dimension reduced, I still had that insatiable desire to touch some of these marvellous organisms, being the three dimensional entity that I was (not really, that's not the only reason!). That came too. On a trip to the Lakshadweep islands, I actually came across families of planktons under water and some dead sea cucumbers on the sea bed. Not to be satisfied by cadaverous remnants, I was very keen on adding the temporal aspect to the three dimensions so as to enable quantification of motion. But, I was not sure that this wish would materialize any time soon. I was soon surprised, not very pleasantly though.
Who on earth had ever anticipated that these creatures could conjure up a trick so devious as to befuddle even the wisest of us. Not that I am clever, but at least I had this feeling that I could tell apples from oranges. So when some of these marine creatures (and their terrestrial counterparts) revealed themselves in human form before my eyes, I was rather taken aback. Or was I? I had assumed that they were humans and tried exchanging such courtesies as are to be expected by a human from another. Little did I know that the apocalyptic depictions of 'Men In Black' had long since begun!
Yes my dear reader, they were there. All around me. Please do not make the mistake of assuming that I am paranoid. That's what the psychiatrist, I visited in this matter, first told me. It turned out that her brain was the size of a pea and therefore she was probably a reptile! How, one may ask, did I chance upon this great cerebral discovery? Well, it so happened that while explaining my predicament to her, I noticed that she was browsing the net to find a cure to my ailment. Then it happened! She held before me the wikipedia link to 'paranoia' and tried to convince me that the surest sign of my condition was the fact that I considered others to be a serious threat to my intellectual growth. 'The pea is not the smallest thing that can be likened to a human brain...' I walked off!
My next encounter of the dangerous kind happened while I was preparing for a programme we had planned to stage on one of those innumerable occasions when people from a certain eastern state of India feel like showcasing their intellectual superiority over others. There I met a monster! How I still live to tell the tale is indeed a mystery, or perhaps a supreme example of the divine handiwork which is often attributed to that elusive entity, Mr. G. Perhaps even the legendary Loch Ness monster would tremble at the very mention of this cannibal. This creature (once again of the feminine kind; my apologies to all the women who have had the misfortune of swallowing this bit of chauvinism) walked up to me to inquire about the duration of the poem I was about to recite. Upon learning that her poem took a while longer than mine to be recited, this she-monster was so relieved that she could not convince her lips to agree upon hiding those blood thirsty rows of canine dentition, ever ready to suck the life force out of any virile male. I was reminded of a species of wild boar... or maybe crocodiles?
A third category reared its head when I was charged with the responsibility of collecting write-ups for a vernacular annual magazine that supposedly stirs the creative spirits of certain linguistically gifted individuals. Here I got one of the shocks of my life! There were poems that none (poets themselves included) could make any head or tail of and stories that ended even before they began because the reader was more interested in exploring the cognitive skills of the latest recipient of the prestigious 'O. Henry Award for Twist in the Tale/Tail'. There were essays that sent a shiver down the spine of the toughest nut, who had been brought up on a healthy diet of 'Saw' franchise, on account of the brutal and grotesque ravishing of grammar in general and spellings in particular. In a nutshell, the whole situation made you want to throw up. But that was not the worst bit. When you wanted to break the heart breaking news of rejection to these simple souls in as sympathetic a manner as is not unbecoming, the look of disbelief on their faces made you feel like the Germans who murdered six million Jews unabashedly. They were the martyrs and you were a rapist, a pillager, a plunderer, a murderer, an atheist, an adulterer and a sociopath all rolled into one! Yet amidst all this you could not miss the bovine aspect, try as you may. If only I had carried a bag of grass for each author I had met then! Alas, Wimbledon might have been played on Clay Court today. Sorry Rafa! It is still Roger for me...
The last category that I am going to talk about reminded me of the coelenterates. This happened while I was up on stage trying to put up some semblance of a histrionic performance for a play. Starting with the organisers right up to certain sections of the audience and some local intellectual doyens in between, everyone seemed to have an opinion regarding how things ought to be done, why we should not be able to run the show, why we are destined to fail, why the audience can choose to play god during the play, and what kind of play ought to be staged etc. Lost within this labyrinth of words, I found myself caught up in a mesh of intellectual bankruptcy. Not willing to give up, we went ahead nevertheless. There were words everywhere, like that precious stuff emanating from the holy cow's wrong end on some holy alley of Benaras. Unfortunately, even an excessive volume of this pristine material did not manage to disinfect the environment (implies getting rid of germs such as us). We marched on and thrived without paying much heed to the neophytes' ancient knowledge even as the holy faeces poured down like manna from heaven. The good lord be praised! If only He had designed these people to have multiple perforations, the foul stench of those stinking words would not have convinced us of their uselessness, beyond any iota of doubt.
welcome post! this place hopes to see more of u!
ReplyDeleteand I'd be indebted to this place for suffering my tantrums...
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