This week I completed the lengthy and lustrous Vikram Seth’s master work of literature ‘A suitable Boy.’ The book is of such toned and doyen layers of life hidden in the mundane and meaningless. The literature is at question here? Do we understand the coveted sense for romanticism in its true and core sense? Do we understand culture? Do we understand ourselves enough to allude to the culture that is so so and very much ours? There is a political vortex that is being unfurled beneath all the disarray and bedlam. It tries to cover everything in it’s time to complete this vast sense of understanding. The mosaic of understanding is at question here…Is the idea of time a myth taking with it the core of sciences or is the story irrelevant that it takes with it the arts, further life.
सब जाम-ब-कफ़ बैठे ही रहे हम पी भी गए छलका भी गए- मजाज़ लखनवी
While reading this tiring but equally satisfying piece of art it kept me alive with one thought that is the idea of poets, and artists living in the jazz filled, poetry stricken, lustful era of the 50s and further in 21st century. The idea that generations coming are going to have attained a poetical sense of achievement because of reading them, and while with the development of that process they’ll have to contradict these great poets of the 20th century because the world does not think like them now. The world has had to change and with that it has changed its poets, and artists. This feels egregious, perhaps because outside this moral chimera, poetry written within centuries from Ghalib to Pash everything was just sets of jumbled words put together so that groups of depressed, joyful, angry motherfuckers can come together in all solidarity to masturbate to an idea, further a rhythm.
Consumption of art in an eloquent manner is harmful, it stretches up to you. Makes your eyes feel tired. Many time I’ve with my essays tried to be faux-poetic including vulgarity and profundity to terrorize the reader of their intellectual extent, and then throwing them back to reality cause it (my essays) has no escape velocity. But that with time became allure for some readers and some readers became flippant, to say “Fuck you” to mail me “Fuck that” What a wonderful time to write.
I’ve wanted to be me more than anyone wanted to be themselves. I’ve carried film characters within me until they all just become a moral threshold, until they all become figures of speech in my head and not characters. I’ve often thought about restructuring my existence after ‘after-tastes’ of art. Perception is fatiguing. And to expect it from cinema is equally so. To be so vehemently present in something that perception than just becomes altered-escapism. Knowing that consumption eventually will yield feelings, in the end.
I’ve understood explorations of mediums of art while reading this novel. It has thrown me into past and made me remember every book that I’ve read, every film that I’ve saw…It has made me introspect the book that I’m writing, it has made me introspect the film that I made. I’ve not completely explored these mediums not literature nor cinema. The afterness which is the dark & bleak void of not having anything to turn to metamorphoses into comprehension. How Pan Nalin’s Camera is enough for me to absorb into the environment, the frames become more important, Visuals became salient than the verbal chaos.
“Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.” Herzog
The vast knowledge of culture, cinema and politics instantly becomes part of a superficial identity that gets created. But then you must live with it. You know what you have became is exactly what you wanted to be. If that is the case than you must live with it, with pleasure, with love, with devotion. I’ll remember who I’ve grown reading, who I’m growing reading and who I’m growing watching. So when the film ends I can name all of them. Because these are the people who I watch and read and learn. Because these are the people who teach me to say “Fuck you” and move on, to make films and write literature. These are important people and I’ve learnt that I must not forget them. And listen before I go …Fuck you.
