Spherics

Inflating Virtues of Work is a Political Gimmick and your Parents are involved.

2008-03-20T03:35:00.000-07:00

A few things one should not do in order to live a comfortable life. First is not to work hard else you might end up complaining chest pain. And a chest pain is not overtly comfortable.

Secondly, never think that getting ready-food back home after work, cooked by your mom or your wife is better alternative than eating meal on wheels. You might better afford buying food than living with a woman.

And above adventures I have already done. I am working and have got a mom back home. Two places I feel fucked up viz. home and office and these are the places where I go while I am conscious or awake.

Today I was feeling sick, so I decided not to visit the goddamn office. Happily I was listening music, lying on bed till ‘the mother’ came and told me that food, which I don’t practically want to eat at the wee hours, is ready. I told her "I am not going to the office today, it’s a no work situation". And man! She got angry. And here I am in office, unwilling, sick and full of angst.

‘Mothers are supposed to be divine sweet’ is a farce. And I am the beguiled kid of civilization with that notion.

Motivating the juvenile for work is Nationalist propaganda (remember ‘work is worship’ cliché). Parents are in the employment of the government and they are positioned as spies and ponces procuring cheap labour to the State. Leisure is precious for individuals and since whenever it occurs labour is hampered and hence the productivity, therefore national income and that is the reason the State is always whining about work.

Single Serving Acquaintances

2008-02-04T23:53:00.000-08:00

It is all so crazy…….socializing.
You meet someone through someone at a Hard Rock Café, and voila! You are friends in the cyber space.
I made a lot of house-fly friends in that manner.

Cocooning!

My friends, all of them aspire to be future cool guys, all to get laid for the last. Some smoke pot and they deify that, others are sports-cool, some both, watching two alien football clubs fighting in the fields and then getting touchy about it, most of them don’t know shit about the game and they do not really even have a craving for that, all imposed taste, to be acceptable in the cool, their own social acceptability norm.

Natural selection in the pseudo-supra world!

Some appreciate art and culture of past especially which flourished in Europe and elsewhere, in a phony elite manner. Girls, they want to be either ladies as England once taught their servile predecessors or if they are not hot enough, the bohemian intellectual, talking boisterously about existentialism, the state, or as for as art is concerned cubism, the de stijl, minimalism; Boy! You talk about theatre Oh! Dada, the surrealists, the absurdists, don’t forget Bertolt Brecht’s (and Kurt Weill's) the Three penny Opera.

The Whores of Mensa! One dinner a throw.

Yeah! And there are beatniks too, drifters. Ask them any thing, mundane questions like “do you have ‘x’s phone number? I have to make a call to x” And the wannabe drifter answers that “I am somewhere in hills smoking a “J”,” while he is necessarily not doing so and even if he is, the interrogator doesn’t want to know details. But in cyber space a response like that means that this answer is not a particular answer of a specific question, rather the initial question becomes just a piece of induction to disseminate the boring and unwanted information to the larger populace sharing the common cyber space; your question is reduced to a pretext; just a fucking pretext.
Dude! Fuck you! Who is interested in knowing what the hell are you doing with whatever, wherever, when one only wants to know a little phone number.

Mercy! On the Road!

Then there are these girls. They might be very intelligent, rocking in studies, excelling everywhere in every class, armed with astronomical grades, getting the best fucking jobs in the biggest corporate, media or whatever, but Dude! They always are mesmerized by their boy friends, no matter how big a loser he is.
Boy! They are impressed.
One of my senior students, one of those Babas at my otherwise splendid alma matter (a provincial University, where sons of small peasants from the Indo Gangetic Plains come to become corrupt Civil Servants or something of that sort, if not the same) once told me that “Guru! Ladkiyan to paida huin hain impress hone ke liye.”. “Girls are born to be impressed of guys” is what he meant.
At that time I could not get him; I did not know many girls, unlike that Baba who was a great womanizer. Later that Baba became a Sales Tax Officer, though he never looked like one interested in Tax matters of the state.
Then, Hindi poet Raghuveer Sahay’s poems; I thought of the Baba’s statement and these poems as male chauvinist reactions. But in Delhi I came to realize those profound statements when I met, all mesmerized women of their sex-dolls.
Dude! After all their mental capabilities in cracking problems, photographic memories (that’s really helpful in Delhi University), straight forwardness towards academic matters; no compromise in studies (especially examinations) they were always looking forward to get laid and therefore being impressed with whatever piece of shit they are going to sleep with was a comfortable pretext.

Local anesthesia before a painful operation!

Now these potheads; smoking pot has been an ancient tradition in daily wage earners at construction sites, rickshaw pullers, dharma bums (not what Kerouac describes). Marijuana plant is an ordinary site in villages. Along the sugar cane fields of eastern U.P. these plants may be seen, forlorn and shabby in appearance. Except on the occasion of a Shiva Pooja, they are not considered important at all, gloomy shrub of no use from the standards of an average villager. Addicts, who are richer use alcohol or shoot Heroin.

But Dude! You should see an average pothead in Delhi University sans rickshaw pullers. They smoke worst quality weed, a total dog shit as a matter of fact, which will never give you a high unless you are pretentious enough. Some times it is not even weed, that’s some greenish soil mixed with some cheap shit medico-tranquilizer, used for operating small cysts up one’s ass or something.
And yeah! You roam around the North Campus of D.U. you will catch up a glance of wannabe Mary Pranksters (all ‘off the bus’ kids), though lacking a Ken Kesey while full of Mountain Girls and Cassadies and Dude! This country is not even waging a fucking war on some shitty country up there in the East Asia so why this self-imposed reaction.

Circumscribing a failed counterculture; no hip of any use!

And apart from the above observations of yours, one day you realize that the girl you adored is getting hooked up to a guy who is a hot-shot, unlike you. That she is getting married to this shithouse very soon. That she made you go ‘blush’ one summer night while you were confiding/convincing her about your deep, down your throat feelings. That she turned you down also on the basis of lack of manliness at that very moment of your confession. That she informed you about your being a timid piece of paranoid shit. That she made you also realize about your being an incestuous bastard. That she used the word ‘scope’ instead of ‘possibility’ to describe something about your being extraordinarily ambitious, as for as your thinking of her, as your girl was concerned.

Symptoms of terminal illness!

Meditation kills ergo Dance

2007-10-23T03:00:00.001-07:00

Like pollen grains on water
Like a sunbeam crossing
Little wholes in the thatch roof,
Or the greedy anxious believer
Of chance over money
Stumbling, stuck, kicked
Exponential these moves uncanny

Classes, teaching metaphysics
Or those with the bent for analysis situs
Or when we run, run, run and run
When we play, when we laugh
And we go hip or dance
While we win when we toss
And we move on the train while this friend, just stand

In those heathen times
While we made love to our moms
Those uncouth bums only danced
To the tunes of their muse
And then night, in the dark
With those spears in their hands
That blood bath off the shore
While prevails all over this silence of the strand

But then the time passes as the truth
Not the water in a river
Come meta-humans of those books
And those kings and the queens
While the well-fed thinker thinks
It’s not done, why a father of the father?
When even we don’t need a father
He proposes only beauty
And forgets the substance

Beauty kills, creates the hunger
So you heathen! You think,
You might go any longer
But you are myopic, you so called seer
Cause you are not informed
That Euclid is dead, huh!
You still live in that world-former
But any way so was Marx
Alas! Oh! Bakunin
You were not much of a talker

गजानन माधव मुक्तिबोध : चांद का मुँह टेढा है ???

2007-07-12T12:50:00.000-07:00

बहुत ही दुःख होता है अब मुक्तिबोध को पढ़ कर जब कि हम मिल्तों (Milton) कि कवितायेँ पढ़ कर बडे हुए । दुःख होता है कि किसी ने पहले क्यों नही बताया कि हिंदी साहित्य मे खालिस aesthetics पर ही नही विचारा गया है और किरातार्जुनियम और कुमारसंभव (जो कि स्पष्ट रुप से संस्कृत साहित्य है ,लेकिन हम प्रारम्भ वहीँ से करते हैं ;अतः मैं हिंदी साहित्य को एक तरह से भारतीय साहित्य यहाँ कहना चाहूँगा) से लेकर बाद तक के काव्य मे केवल एक vague भावना के ,जिसका कोई सीधा समाज से लेना देना नही है के आस पास ही नही घूमा गया है । और दूसरी तरफ जैसा कि जनवादी कविताओं मे पाया जता है , ऐसा भी नही है कि कवितायेँ केवल सामाजिक समस्याओं की एक प्रतीकात्मक सूची बन कर रह गईँ हैं । लेकिन यह दृष्टि कोंड केवल मुक्तिबोध को पढने के बाद ही आसानी से बन पा ता है ।

मुक्तिबोध मे मिल्तों की कविताओं जैसा घनत्व है , पौंड और एल्लिओत जैसी प्रथम दृष्टया जटिलता है और बहुत ही अनूठे ढंग से, हालांकि कि हिंदी साहित्य के विद्वान् संभवतः अनुमोदन ना करें , संफ्रंसिस्को पुनर्जागरण अथवा Beat Movement के कवियों (Allen Ginsberg ,Kenneth Rexroth , Gary Snyder इत्यादि ) जैसी अभिव्यक्तात्मक स्वतंत्रता है । कहीँ कहीँ हम उनकी कविताओं मे फ्रेंच कवियों जैसे कि Arthur Rimbaud और Paul Verlaine जैसी प्रतीकात्मकता कि भी झलक पाते हैं । हालांकि इस तरह से उनका मुल्यांकन करना एकदम उचित नही है , किन्तु जैसा कि स्पष्ट है कि यह लेख मुख्यतः उनके लिए है जो मुक्तिबोध से परिचित नही हैं और जो यूरोपियन तथा अमेरिकन साहित्य के ज्यादा नजदीक रहे हैं , यह एक सहज रास्ता दीख पड़ता है उन्हें मुक्तिबोध कि कविताओं से परिचित कराने मे ।
मेरी अपनी समझ मे उनकी प्रतिनिधि कविताओं का संकलन पर्याप्त है उनमे रूचि पैदा करने मे । पहली कविता ही
झंक्झोर देने वाली है ' पूंजीवादी समाज के प्रति '। और अन्तिम कविता उनकी मानसिक स्थिति को निस्कर्षित करती है ....
"बेचैन चील उस जैसा मैं पर्यटन शील ........"। सही ही कहा है अशोक वाजपेयी जीं ने मुक्तिबोध के बारे मे कि वो एक कठिन समय के कठिन कवि हैं । लगभग सभी कवितायेँ मरणोपरांत प्रकाशित हुईं । कठिन आर्थिक पारिवारिक जीवन से जूझते रहने के बावजूद साहित्य से जुडे रहना , वह भी पचास के दशक मे , कविता मे प्रयोग करना यह सब उनके मौलिक वादी होने के साथ साथ साहित्य से उनकी प्रतिबद्धता का सूचक है । लंबी कविता का चलन चला कर वो avant-garde कविओं मे स्थान रखते हैं । मुख्यतः एक कवि होने के बावजूद गद्य साहित्य मे प्रयोग किये ....ब्रह्म राक्षस का शिष्य ......एक ऐसी कहानी है जो हिंदी मे फंतासी और अति यथार्थ वादी (fantasy और surrealism ) भावनाओं का अनूठा संगम मालूम पड़ती है ।
और भी बहुत कुछ है कहने को पर स्थान और शब्द पर्याप्त नही हैं ।

"Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen" versus "ignoramus et ignorabimus"

2007-05-09T09:14:00.000-07:00

Whatever i am about to write was known to Zeno of Elea,and therefore to everyone. First thing i came to know,which is culture inculcated, that believing that earth is flat is wrong and that earth is spherical or elliptic is right.Zeno also knew that ,but since he and everyone thought in terms of Euclid (and even today we somehow think a la Euclid),a paradox was celebrated .Paradoxes are simply manifestations of extremes out of continuum of a causal chain.So the problem emanates from the conceptions of extremes and continuum itself.The conception of continuum seems, prima facie, intuitively clear to human brain and ergo the secret of the ambiguity appears to lie somewhere in the perception of extremes or the infinity.Though deeper inspection reveals that the conception of continuum is nothing else but a meta-construct on the conception of infinity.
Digression: When we were young ,we never passed things in silence and were not aware of anagrams which were not a priori anagrams.Self-reference is the truth was known to the Charvaka,others couldn't understand it because it was so simple, so mundane, pertaining to the quotidian(what we don't understand is the simple and complex is what we understand,should I support it with academic reference of Murray Gell Mann ?) .Put it otherwise, the Charvaka proposed that epistemology is in vein and that's why one should just live and do whatsoever to sustain livelihood.For obvious reasons they were supposed to be a group of bums and social parasites. Human brain is regimented in a way that we mostly understand and again re-understand and we believe that we have come out with something new........ will-o'-the-wisp.These became slowly 'things of the past'.Something happened of significance in the western hemisphere in the early 20th century(What follows is serious name-dropping and my apologies for that.).Mostly it has to do with the Hilbert's programme,not negating the influence of Frege,Whitehead,Russell(Principia..) and Peano on its development.They firmly believed that regimentation of language is solution to 'the problem'.Things started well and Principia was the symbol .But a permanent halt came when this not so regular member of 'der Wiener Kreis' called Kurt Godel suggested starkly clear through his two 'Incompleteness Theorems' that the Hilbert's programme cannot be carried out .And viola! what a similarity between Godel's and Charvaka's propositions.This historical and hence cyclical movement itself records ,though vaguely,the idea of the incompleteness theorems,that "we understand and again re-understand and we believe that we have come out with something new......will-o'-the-wisp"(contd.)