The beauty of Identity

Identity is a funny thing. It starts a family and a war. It can build bridges of relationships among strangers and create a gulf unbridgeable among brothers. It rewards and tortures. It is suffered and savored. 

The world we inhabit reflects certain physical and psychological principles as the very basis of its foundation. Love of Life, survival and perpetuity are not just concepts but something we have practiced unconsciously all along. An absence of survival instinct is considered abnormal. The grossest matter to the most refined intelligence are bound by the same laws of existence. Gravity, one of the most visible laws, affects seas and mountains, capillaries and blood cells alike. 

A law is something that stands the test of experiments and gives consistently verifiable results like laws of motion. Whereas when we speak of sentiments and emotions, we have to dive into more fundamental realms. A principle comprises a number of laws governed by a conscious binding force. Based on how they are combined, they become ethics, morals or disciplines. Brotherhood, for example, includes the laws of survival, affinity, trust, territory, perpetuity - which are also impressed on our genetic material. Maternity is a fascinating occurrence. It goes against the laws of individual survival as we know how many women have died giving birth and how many have gone on to destroy themselves after a bad carriage. We call this love but it is just a label on something we do not understand entirely and it doesn’t take us any closer to the truth.

These are principles beyond sensory comprehensions where psychologists take us and thereafter philosophers. Identity is one such complex and beautiful principle. It exists in animals more prominently than plants and humans more multifariously than animals. Identity is the sign of an ascending intelligence trying to understand its own world. 

Our self-identification, derived from our emotional and spiritual strengths, reflects in all we do. It decides how we treat ourselves and others. A human being has many beings in him - the mental, the spiritual, the vital or sensational and the physical. What keeps them together? Like blades of a propeller hinged onto a central pivot, they are hinged to the identification of being one. But beyond all, identity is a tool to overcome the inertia of matter. It is a dynamic urge of blade-speed while staying hinged within and with the multidimensional propeller of society. And like all things, when identity becomes distorted and degenerate, it also becomes clinging. Hanging on and on - to meaningless relationships, unchangeable pasts, irrational ideas. This is the cause of chaos in our world, this evident denial of truth. 

There is a beautiful saying in the Buddhapurana. When a man takes a dip in one river and he emerges in another. The river has changed in every possible way in that moment, only one has to realize. That river denotes time. The saying goes on to say that the man who took a dip and the man who emerged are also two different people. Our body, mind and spirit are manifestations of energy in flux. So identity should be perpetually shaping entity, not a fixed one. Do not hang on, do not cling on. Just hinge on for now! To let go of the fixity of identity and embrace its mutability can spur profound discoveries of the self. 

And like Sri Aurobindo says ‘Rebirth is the condition of material immortality.’ Think again!

Life is an invisible canvas with visible palettes of circumstances!

The urge to express, assert life and hope of renewal amidst ever-surrounding shadows of death and decay, to reveal the alchemy that makes manifest the un-manifest and the irresistible total compulsion of it all, amuses me. 

This is not a soliloquy, this must be meaningful somewhere, some place where it will receive resonance and fulfill the ambition of its birth, this urge, this which is said, felt and withheld – all of them together like the triple point of water where it exists as solid, liquid and gas at the same time- and that presses on its agendas in speech, gestures and musings. To gather again, my initial train of thoughts, all forms of expressions fascinate me, words, images or music.

I am trying to define for myself, in vain perhaps, the pre-peripherals of my expressions, journal writing for instance. In any case, I am returning after several days and that is in no less measure helped by erratic working hours.

I had been up all night to complete developing some concepts and rewriting a screenplay. As I was settling into my bed, in the dawn, the world was waking up, bustling within like a tumbling pitcher. The sound of its clay cracking could never penetrate the deep and oblivious nescience I was readying for. After a couple of hours, Calls, alarms, messages and alerts started panting on the display of my phone and they were not going to ease till later in the night.

Can we locate at this moment, right now, where our life is happening? Is it in the mind full of anticipations, the body full of needs or the silence of the spirit? The echoes of our actions which we like to call memory are so subjective, aren't they? And yet, I am writing, a brief flash of rest, a sojourn into an expanded dimension of time. Art is a portal that opens rays of meanings into all things. Art makes whole the incomplete unwhole fragments of living. And all life is a canvas, an invisible canvas with visible palettes and living itself, an art! What a beauty!

A lover called P.K. - The love-story that deserves telling before it becomes a legend

I have loved every person I love since I have loved them with a passion constant and fervor deep, all my life. But, when it comes to conjugal love and the stories, well, I am quite ambivalent about it. I am usually a skeptic of those. A tough-nosed, rational skeptic about love-legends! Yet, as far as I remember, I have always been in love! This true story is not about me but it involves me in killing that skeptic I housed with a single terrible blow!

Here is the love-story of a man who cycled four months and three weeks from New Delhi to Gothenburg. An inconceivable feet! He pedaled through the land-locked mountains of Afghanistan, abreast Turkey – the natural bridge of the old world continents and Iran and its mysteries landscapes. Why does a man need go to such lengths? For Love and love alone! But, it is not the heart of story. The indomitable heart of man, determined in love and unshakeable in faith, is the beating heart of tale!

P.K. Mahanandia and Charlotte Von Sledvin 

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Pradyumna Kumar Mahanandia was born on 1949 in an untouchable Oriya weaver family in Kandhapada. It is one of the poorest villages in the most economically backward state in the country, Orissa. Being an Oriya myself, although born to better fortunes, I know what it means. Ordinarily, it means that P.K. was to go to a school with inept teachers, drop out before college, find work in the village or neighborhood and confine his efforts to gathering his square-meals. Although such simplicity is beautiful, this was not to be!

His father was the care-taker of the royal elephant. Pradyumna controlled the elephant. He rode it in the forests. His heart, however, was set on art. From getting inspired by his mother’s wall-art in their mud-house to being celebrated for his own art in the UN greeting cards, his journey is a curious one. Art became his worship, women his goddesses.

After opting out of art colleges because he could not pay fees and returning to his home town, P.K. was offered a scholarship by the Orissa government to study at Delhi College of arts. The struggle to survive continued as he remained homeless, walked barefoot and barely had stomachful once a day. He roamed around the Coffee House area of New Delhi which is Palika Bazar now until a friend Tariq Beg offered him a place.

Soon, he began to make portraits and his name grew. His portraits became a talking point in the national dailies. Charlotte Von Sledvin, a noble heiress in Sweden, had always been fascinated with India. She was pulled by a strange force, impelled towards India with foreshadow in mind that her destiny lies here. In 1975, barely a week after getting her driving licence, She bought a van and took the hippy trails from Sweden to New Delhi, a journey of 7000 kilometers which she covered in 22 days. It was through the same route her valiant husband would take to reach back to her, two years later.

A portrait of Charlotte by P. K. Mahanandia

Charlotte got her portrait done and paid for it. Then, she began to visit the fountain at the Connaught place where P.K. made his portraits. P.K. was a humble man, grateful for her appreciation and spoke of his affection without gestures or words. One morning, she brought him a red rose. P.K. surprised her with the question, ‘Are you a Taurian? My father practices some astrology and he has said that I will marry a westerner of Taurus Zodiac.’ Even before the exchange, they had demonstrated in silence their deep affections. In a recent interview, where they still made each other blush in their 60s, Charlotte recollects that she had been receiving signs but meeting P.K. was the culmination to all that she had felt since being a teenager. Marriage was an eventuality.  

P.K. decided to take his wife to receive the blessings of his parents. On the way, he decided to surprise her by making a stop at Sun temple of Konark where, Tagore describes, the language of stones surpasses the language of men. He blindfolded her till they reached the famous wheel. When her blindfold opened and she saw the wheel, she could not take her eyes off. A trickle of tear ran down her cheeks. It was the same image she had framed in her room in Sweden since childhood, simply out of fascination and knowing not what it was! Charlotte embraced P.K. and locked her lips with his, which P.K. describes as their first ‘spiritual kiss’.

Charlotte’s visa expired and she had to return, leaving her husband who was bound in contract to finish his studies. She offered him flight tickets to come to Sweden but he declined. He said he would come on his own, as a male principle of this simple man. But, at the end of his studies, he realized that he had all of 80 dollars. Although he couldn’t get a flight ticket, he could afford to buy a used bicycle. Then, began the trip he never turnaround from – a long odyssey of true fulfillment.

The route that P.K. took to reach Sweden. This is the same route Netaji Bose took to travel to Europe.

P.K. never knew that Charlotte was the daughter of Swedish lord. They hadn’t ever discussed the status of their families! Charlotte recalls the day - May 20^th, 1977 when P.K. showed up at the Swedish border. The immigration officials found P.K.’s version incredulous. Although he showed the photographs of their wedding, It baffled their imagination to comprehend that a dark ragged man who has made his trip through a bicycle is married to a noble heiress. They decided to verify for themselves. Charlotte not just confirmed their wedlock but she came all the way to the border to welcome her husband with love and respect while the officials remained struck in awe and bemusement.

Charlotte’s parents knew and were prepared for it.  They were touched by the courage and dedication of this man.  “A traditional written law has it that black people are not permitted to stay where nobility stays. This means they had to break the racial rule to make space for me in the family, which they did gracefully for their daughter,” Mahanandia says. They got married through traditional Swedish royal ceremony in 1979 and have two children, Siddhartha and Emily.

The swedish ceremony

Today, he is the only Indian with voting rights in the Nobel Prize committee. He is a celebrated artist whose paintings have been honored in UN greeting cards. To the Swedish government, he serves as art and cultural advisor and has a government commissioned documentary in his honor. Several biographies in Swedish has been written and translated to other European languages. He comes to his village in Orissa every year to share his message on art and love. He hasn’t stepped into the Jagannath Temple, the lord who inspires him, because his wife, being a foreigner, is forbidden into the premises.

In his own words: "My tribe worshipped the forces of nature - fire, air, water - but we did not personify them. My blues are the real sky, my greens are nature as she is. To my mother´s people the sun is the highest God, the God of creation and life. The faces? Faces fascinate me. In every face there are a million different faces, a million different expressions. I want to penetrate this mystery - why are there all these expressions? What is the true nature of man? Art can reveal it to us."

From the family album with their children

Sociophobia - Judged left and right

Everyone who owns a pair of working brains judges. Anyone who can add a couple of digits judges. In more than one way, Judgment is the byword of the society and keyword of our survival. It is primitive and cardinal.

Interestingly, the urban youth has a growing phobia of being judged. One can clearly see the hysteria. They shy away or cocoon themselves if necessary, from the sleet of judgements.  It is problematic when a generation does want to confront itself. It prefers drowning itself in metallic noise, gibberish slogans and deafening loudness of everything. ‘Do not judge me!’ it asks the society. Now, this ailment has begun a part of a pseudo-responsible parenthood and in doing so, they do not allow the child to grow its immunity, evolve its strengths and be aware, however painful the realization, of the imperfections he embodies. Sometimes, we do need to step back from identifying with the judgment of society but we should never shut ourselves against self-judgement. More than anything, this causes sociophobia!

When each man had to gather for himself, once upon a time, he was much in alignment with nature. He just instinctively knew to find and fend for himself.  A baby knows how to breathe without being taught. This is Nature. Further, he will learn the tricks of breath. That’s Mind. The toddler intrinsically knows well to wail and call for mother’s attention. Nature. It will learn to sing beautiful songs, make plenty of sounds, imitate and act, render through his voices, sounds ancient and new, of men and gods. Mind. It has soft limbs that helped him survive within the womb, wrapped by fluid where the body maintained itself in a beautiful osmotic state. Nature. He shall gain vigor and strength, enlarge and grow. He may choose to make himself flexible like a gymnast or steely like wrestler. Mind.

The cost of mental growth is dissociation and distance from nature. While it has helped man overcome nature’s many whims and tyrannies (and what a glorious tyrant can it be!), it has also diminished the gifts he did enjoy in its association. When hunting, more than his physical senses, his strategy and caution took over. This was the individualization of his mental principles in a non-moral sense (Nietzsche invoked). Judgement is an evolutionary gift in the rung of growth.

Judgment is not evil. It is a reminder of our imperfections. Although we live in an Archies era where imperfections are charming and perfection boring, let us humbly agree that there definitely exists, one or two areas of our being, which each one might be better off attending to. Mira Alfassa says that our imperfections represent our possibilities, like a great shadow of a terrible light. The depth of our flaw signifies the possible summit of our virtue.

The mind ticks without rest. Even with all our inanities and efforts to desensitize it, inure ourselves against self-reflection, the mind still ticks ceaselessly. When we binge, it protests against the abuse of the body. When we flare up, it protests against the abuse of life. When we overcome obstacles, it rewards us with pride. When we make sacrifices, it fills us with purpose. A part of our mind doesn’t participate in any action. It is pure and just judges us on the merit of our actions.

Judgment and self-reflection is in our subconscious and conscious and rather than being afraid of it, we must look at perfecting it. It is the timidity and clever corruption of the human mind that makes it shrink from the better powers of its own. It is a bright sun-flame and ascertainment of intelligence-this ability to judge- that can save us a lot of groping in the dark.

Our inherent assumption always is: we are better than our actions. Why should that be? It is just delusional, a device of self-defense that serves our insecurities and shelters our cowardice. Our inabilities murkily hide behind these shadows and creep through the quarters of our hearts. Most of us are intimidated by judgment.  We are intimidated by what we project into the world. Ironically, we are enslaved to the judgment of the other person, quietly pleading for mercy in our own languages. We cultivate this slowly through our childhood and eventually offer the game to the subconscious as we do with several of our habits, where the dark emerald creepers may thrive. Why we do it is a primal and curious thing but first we must understand the ‘what’.

Until now, however, we have employed it to a great detriment and personal suffering. When a puppy fractures itself, it will cut down its running and wait till it is back on its feet. What I will do is agonize on the things I could have done if I wasn’t tied to the bed. That is more acutely painful than the fracture itself.

Generally, we crave for the company of people who do not judge like parents, close companions or even pets. Pets do not judge. Parents do judge. Close friends judge closely. People  do not pronounce. They often do not see it profitable to express and make peace with your errors. Or at least their judgment doesn’t translate into words or actions till it hurts them. That is just clever! Sentimentality is one of the most dissipative forces in the world that has man fettered to its misery. It must be soundly differentiated from emotions and its brighter offshoots such as compassion and love. Sentimentality is nothing but blind love of the false-self. It is like demon-worship where the priest doesn’t know he will be dispensed away with when he has run out of utility.

The power to judge ourselves and others is human mind’s ability to turn its inward eyes and look at itself. It is a miracle if we compare it with the rest of the life in the planet. A constantly self-aware mind noting its thoughts and actions every second! Truly splendid! Although it is the judgment of the heart that is precious, it may not be timely and can put us in precarious situations. Sometimes, it may come muffled or not at all.  A sound judgment, untainted by sentimentality and protected by reason, is an art.  Lets not be afraid of being judged, let us just hope we judge ourselves right!

Life - I love, I love not

My efforts to regularize my penning of days have been in vain. Perhaps, there is some inspiration missing but yet I am compelled to write. Perhaps, I am drifting from page to page, back and forth in this giant corpus of life, unable to comprehend its epic scale. I love and loathe, fight and ride the drift at the same time. Perhaps, life is pointless like Kafka says. Or Perhaps, life is divine like Sri Aurobindo sang.

Who are we and what does nature want from us?  Are we just its plaything, swung from ecstasy to tragedy to amuse itself? It just struck me, in the midst of a conversation with a dear friend that we are never able to return the same amount of affection (or labour of love) that our parents are prepared to endow on us. I am not being sentimental here. Consider it a matter of fact. Your mother will always be more protective of you than her mother and so will you be more protective of your next than before. Why should that happen? Nature has been truly careful in selection of human traits. After a close study, I realize that its principal goal, its truly uncompromising objective, is survival and multiplicity of life.

When man becomes contemplative, all life seems utterly meaningless or completely meaningful, at once, for a very short time, threatening the scheme of nature. For if life is all so meaningless, one contemplates terminating natural instincts. And if life is all so meaningful, one contemplates abandoning them.

Everyone, left alone for a few days, is visited by these eternal twins more often than we admit. Those who live in cities are on a treadmill, hopping from one assignment to another, unanchored from one shaft and anchored to other, so much so that they do not have any real time to reflect. City is a machinery to keep one connected with this treadmill, this unceasing movement, uncontrollable drift. They spend their youth getting weary, day after day. They spend their days, shallow and unreflective and are cruelly harnessed by nature in its great purpose of perpetuity.

Shallow men dread solitude. They cannot muster the courage to go within. It is a dangerous thing for them. It makes them suicidal, doubtless. While such a thing (feeling lonely without company or amusement) is considered much normal by all alike in the society, it truly is just collective cowardice and denial of human condition.  While we think we have built cities and walled nature, we have certainly curtailed its physical dominance on us, but handed over the psychological reins to it. For nature, a fair trade.  

In ancient times, the empires that sustained are the ones that kept the common folks entertained, gave them an engagement, a distraction to waste their free hours so that they may not rise up to understand the true and iniquitous reality of the empires. Men were the beasts of burden who carried the glorious empire on their shoulders day after day.

On the surface, retrospectively, Gladiator games look like an unnecessary form of violence to create entertainment and the Italian colosseum that hosted them in their central arena still presents a glaring metaphor of how common public loves its ringside cheering more than being in the centre. But, it could not be otherwise. A common man is afraid of taking the centrestage and he loves his ringside chair. What a definitive symbol of human life! The arena is set, gladiator foced but ready. The beast that is shackled inside is waiting to express its rage. The gladiator has to invoke its inner rage, draw like an actor from memory, to lunge with all his power at the beast. Because, his best chance is the first strike. The beast doesn’t tire easily, the human does. That is the thrill of the game too - an unequal physical combat played till one of them is mortally wounded. The emperor keeps the show running, creating heroes to celebrated, competitions to be ruminated and legends to be composed.

The meaninglessness of life wins here.

On the other extreme, life can seem truly meaningful, every aspect, every atom. The glorious design of the universe, arrangement of its planes and substrates and baffling imagination at work – all bound by a law, a discipline. Diamond is a complex and intricate arrangement of carbon atoms, a very beautiful, non-random, poetic arrangement. Just as the medium of poetry is mind, is there a supermind, a mind above minds, which is behind the diamond? There is a pseudo-scientific argument that the combination is a chance event, discrediting the beautiful poetry behind it. But, is it not like saying that if all the words in the dictionary were to be cast into a computer, we might get compositions like that of Shakespeare, Milton and Dante! It does sound ridiculous when taken in context. At least, it hasn’t happened until now. Even with all its strength of calculations, arrangement and flawless computations, a computer will stand to be defeated in poetry by an 8-year old! What is the factor here? A mind! Perhaps, now we may put into perspective Einstein’s iconic quote: ‘I want to know the mind of god.’

We see that beauty has a precise geometry that a painter must understand to render it. Leonardo Da Vinci, a genius of tallest order, saw it and created Vitruvian man. The Vitruvian man is not just a drawing of geometry but a window into the truth of human construct. In the drawing, he demonstrates how our body can be expressed in relationship to our very fingers. Indeed, a beautiful study! He illuminated for human understanding, the intelligent principles of design that govern the physical body.  So, there is a governing intelligence.

In the Vedas, there is a very innocent and wise seeking of truth such as: Why should fire behave the same way, irrespective of its origin, as if bound in duty to an unseen law? Fire is just an atomic arrangement, governed by a principle that assigns it a consequence. And why should water and earth, our constituent elements follow the same laws?  

To me, It appears that there a creator and keeper of laws. And although described variously, he could very easily be the same being!

Voila! Life is meaningful again!

My recent Workshop on Filmmaking – Part 1

Earlier last month, I returned as a short film expert at Sharda University at Greater Noida to conduct a workshop. The goal was to introduce the students to the basic know-how of short film-making in 2 days! Those innocent faces looking up to you for inspiration and drive makes you feel responsible, at once. And yes, the clock was against us, it daunted me, especially since I had been away from academia for a couple of years.

I wear responsibility well, I believe.

And so it started. Students poured in. It was a class of 20. I usually spend some time getting familiar, knowing a little bit about every one, winnowing in the mind, the trite to the remarkable. Here, I found almost nothing unexpected. To call it spade, I found a collective passivity, a lack of urge, at first. Then the jokes began. And, the group started lighting up. At one point, I had questions competing for attention. I realized that the class had truly begun!

I showed the class my recent documentary on Dilip Bam, the first man to have crossed the Sahara Desert on a motorbike. It struck a chord with the assembly. We then decided to make a film, a short one minute film.

Now, we went through conceptualizing, scripting, dialogues and drama. I usually interlace my lectures with anecdotes and personal plus imaginary experiences. Stories are the easiest way to remember a concept, we storytellers know it! I drew wild tangents into literature and theatre but seeing the audience befuddled, returned to reality at the speed of light.

Ideas were thrown it. Most of them threw a hat into the ring. Some of them were imaginative and sounded like genuinely worthy of consideration. However, we were short of scope and time, which was turning out to be an advantage since it made us approach the subject of short filmmaking with a tunnel vision, no meanderings at all, except of course lunch breaks and some snappy occasional, intentional digressions for obvious reasons.

We spent the day on theory, setting up the stage for next day where we dive into some action!