Essays

 

“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 …

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players” …

… A citation that needs no introduction, and even while William Shakespeare was making metaphorical reference to the transient nature of life, she couldn’t help but find in those words, a striking appositeness to the artificiality …

“No one has the right to tell us what we can and cannot do with our own bodies,” her friends bellowed in near perfect unison, the moment she voiced her ambivalence toward the possibility of the illegalization of abortion in the United States, yet another expression of a fast-growing trend of draconian measures being imposed on people by democratically elected governments and supreme courts …

(“I feel, therefore I am”)

“Me, Me, Me, I, I, I”;
the biggest ever obstacle to a happy life … Not to mention a respectable one, she thought out loud, reflecting upon the various people she knew, herself included, who periodically availed of the services of one or another new age self-help or spiritual ‘guru’ …

“Relax, it’s ok to want to kill most people; it’s just not ok to actually do it”… famous last words, spoken in a semi sober condition at one of the many evenings of forced merriment …

Whatever happened to those little girls Maurice Chevalier sang of in Gigi, who “grew up in the most delightful way”?

‘Simplicity is the ultimate (form of) sophistication’ … famously said by 16th century painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor and architect, Leonardo da Vinci, for whom one might reasonably assume that simplicity was an elusive quality …

… and thus, she woke up with a start, the sounds of “jaldi, jaldi, niklo niklo” (‘quickly, quickly, get out, get out’) ringing wildly in her ears, visions of being forcibly ushered out of two of the holiest temples in India dancing before her eyes, and in their wake, bringing forth a deluge of tears of laughter that emptied her of the last vestiges of existential angst, which she had been struggling to evict for many years …

She hadn’t realized she was staring, until he looked up and caught her gaze with his own, his eyes deathly pale and still, almost perfectly consonant with the expressionless face onto which they appeared to have been sculpted, yet somehow alive and alight …

It was at the end of a debut post-pandemic revival of her legendary sit down dinner parties, for which she had earned a peculiarly strapping social identity in the upper echelons of New Delhi society …

As 2022 Nobel prize winning French female author Annie Ernaux wrote in her book ‘Les Annees’, i.e. ‘The Years’, prior to the 1960’s, the matter of identity pertained to a simple identification card tucked away inside a wallet. Thereafter, she writes, it became central to the navigation of life, something one had to ‘possess, discover, conquer, affirm and express’ …

She had often heard it said, and even more frequently read it in writing, that India is a land of contradiction, and for a long time felt convinced the appraisal was a fair one, up until the day she began to contemplate the essence of the word contradiction …

Even the symbolic heart has defected, she thought to herself, its alliance with ‘like’ far more prevalent today, in what is incontestably the age of Instagram, that most disquieting of all social media platforms …