“My helplessly feverish views on the state of our species and world…short, semi-sweet and to the point…on life, death, international affairs, society, philosophy, human nature and social sports … funny, satirical, hard-hitting, sentimental, uplifting and self-deprecating … in short, a little bit of everything but boring.
Welcome to the abbreviated, but unfiltered musings of Diya Sethi on DiyaSethi.com.”
Of Forgery, Context, Ambiguity & Free Will
In the midst of an especially sluggish and stubbornly persistent summer time in New Delhi, India, a series of seemingly unremarkable encounters and run of the mill events had nonetheless conspired to excavate from the recesses of her habitually agitated subconscious mind, a junkyard of reflections and corresponding sentiments she thought she had definitively disposed of in former essays, which were no more than a periodic discharge of her feverish dialogue and debates with herself, in the absence of other willing interlocutors…
“I must quickly get to the end”, she had said to herself, conceding immediately to the fact that the piece of writing she was about to embark upon, to which no literary rank could be attributed, called for a ‘fast track’ service to the point, not only to justify itself, but also provide context and motive for having employed a ‘selfie’ as chaperone, which in spite of its precise and modest intentions, made her feel both painfully guilty and deeply ashamed
…
Good grief, how on earth did the innocent acquisition of knowledge go from being a simple and straightforward asset to a deceptive and convoluted liability, she asked herself, treading carefully in her mind along a bumpy trajectory of several disorganized yet perfectly coherent thoughts, pertaining to a subject that in recent months had emerged fully from the closet and was not only dominating international news, but also slowly & skillfully trespassing upon each person’s everyday life…
“I am ok; I’ve got myself”
She had said silently, yet the echo was resounding, the inaudible intonation of those words somehow choked and guttural, revealing sentiments that fluctuated wildly from being lonely and self-pitying to belligerent and combative, and then at last they steadied and became fortifying, as if she had finally permitted herself to exhale…
“Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim”
Bertrand Russell, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 17th December, 1920
Hell disguised as heaven, she whispered to herself, alighting from the airplane at Colombo airport, an all too familiar feeling of dread rising rapidly from the pit of her stomach and prying open the gates of her mind to a torrent of discordant sentiments she had never quite been able to reconcile…
The quest for a strong national identity; at what cost, and to whom? Were India and her people better or worse off 40 years ago, than they are today?
She had never felt so ill at ease, uncomfortable in her skin and at the sound of her own voice, or to put it more precisely, accent; to essentially be the same, yet feel and sound so different was awkward, cumbersome and far more difficult to negotiate than being unequivocally different, a foreigner or outsider in a foreign country…
“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher” – Socrates…
Hashtag #‘Friends like Family’; a perfect oxymoron … not to mention a dangerously overlooked one, of which I feel compelled to write in the first person, my thoughts & sentiments on this matter far more feverish and eminently less distant than usual…
Whatever happened to the rigorous criteria of fashion and hard-earned credentials of its designers?
Or for that matter artists, writers, chefs, political commentators, spiritual guides and so on and so forth…