History and Humility

"History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme."

- Mark Twain

I have opted for History as a core subject at college. I love my course, and a lot of that love has developed because I love my teacher. She is not a professor. She is fireworks in flesh. She is the reason my eyes have begun hating me and loving me, when I watch History Channel in the middle of the night, with ear-phones on and the living-room lights switched off. And yesterday night, while I was watching something on the Inquisition (ironically started by a person called Pope Innocent III) and Witch-Hunting, it struck me that History has taught me to be humble.

When I would read about things like the Holocaust, the Dark Ages or the the terrible, terrible condition of peasants during the French Revolution I'd think, "I could've shown them a thing or two about how to run the country; they handled things so badly. I could've shown them how to resolve conflicts on the ownership of resources, or how to develop efficient infrastructure, or how to draw public policies, or how to manage public dissent. Were I there, things could have been handled so differently. I could have shown them the way to do it right, and prevent so many catastrophic consequences. Things would have been so incredibly different." Then I stepped down from my pedestal, but just a bit to think, maybe not me but at least any capable leader of my time.

And then it hit me - were it not for History, I wouldn't have known anything at all about these things.

Indeed, these concepts wouldn't exist.

History gives us a chance at something which always seems to be just out of our reach - the future. We can't rewind the tape and live it all over again, no matter how differently we would and no matter how hard we want to. But what we can do, is learn some useful lessons from the past and change where we're going to.

Cheap thinking

(Caution: Extremist views expressed. General feeling while writing this article was, "Screw Laissez Faire opportunists!")

This article is partly my undigested and very frenzied thoughts on gossiping and partly something I wanted to write after I read an article written by my friend Tina, which you can read here.

It doesn't take much to get my neurons and tongue fired, often in quick succession. One such thing is the word, 'gossip' and any faint strains of an argument justifying it. It gets me kicked inside, I cannot stop myself from making myself heard - loud and clear. So I've decided to write it all down and get it thrown out from my system once and for all, so that the next time I hear that odious word, I'll just give them the link to here. (Narcissus and I seem to share an awful lot of genes)

If talk is cheap, gossiping is free of charge. When we gossip about something/body, we're doing the least amount of separating-rational-from-rubbish kind of discretionary thinking possible. Some people like to say gossiping brings about a little magic in their lives. I really don't agree with this. Seeing dust particles dancing in Medusa-esque frenzy, suspended in a beam of sunlight cutting through a dark room seems more like magic, in case David Copperfield is not on your speed-dial. The sense of 'magic' these people are talking about is delusional and borrowed because we don't create anything, we just propagate water-tight, compartmentalized thinking. Adjectives are thrown around like used recharge coupons and prejudices become as convenient as disposable tissues. Agreed, it takes effort to convert something mundane in to something magical. But the satisfaction in doing just that is Premium A-Class. And who's asking you to be Superman? Go for a walk. Watch the sunset. Turn over stones and see what's below. Doodle. Listen to RHCP. My cousin-brother's favourite - give your boss a sudden smile, just to see his expression defrost.

Some people like to sugar-coat gossiping by calling it, 'expressing an opinion'. Bullshit. Gossiping is a dirty word and you can't canonize it. If gossiping is an expression at all, it's an expression of unconformity to what you think is right. She doesn't walk talk dress eat think like you do. Big deal, sweetheart. I don't think we realize just how much we're limiting our ability to embrace and find beauty in things which at first appearance may look a little off the graph's co-ordinates or just plain crazy. Me thinks crazy is good, real good. (Ahem. About this unintelligible piece of gibberish here - I don't apologize for it, but you have to meet me to know this)

One universal element in gossiping is the presence of an air of collective agreement (thus eliminating the possibility of alternate opinions). Everybody nods their heads like they're all in some Very Serious Seminar For The Upliftment Of Humanity. I'm very sure there are atleast a few people who have had no exposure to the kind of things being discussed but nod their heads they will. And we talk about rebellion and being teenagers.

Sometimes life is labourious, grey, boring, empty, pendulating in vacuum. I give you all that. But how on earth does tracing the trajectory of somebody else's life give you a purpose to your own? Maybe George Clooney's life is labourious, grey, boring, empty, pendulating in vacuum. Who knows? (Apologies to Sonal). I'm still waiting for my illuminating moment of insight here. Because there is so much ignorance, so much naive realism involved when we juggle thoughts and speculations around like that. It's all a question of personal bias vs. personal experience or knowledge.

These severely perpendicular views aside, my indignation here is not meant for people who may have indulged in a word or two against somebody. Heck, I do that too. But if your indulgence is similar to that of a desperate diabetic's, you're sadly just another drop in the ocean.

Urban euthanasia

He wears a faded Mickey Mouse t-shirt with torn shorts, both of which have succumbed to an easy brown colour. His hair is greasy with that very Bombay combination of humidity and dirt, and his face is a refugee camp of diseases. But all these physical generalisations of poverty come to an end when your covert glance reaches his eyes. They make you refute the Classical Indian Conditioning of underestimating the personality in black eyes. His sooty eyelashes reverently caress irises which look like two lunar eclipses. Pain, hunger, terrible beauty.

His daily job is as monotonous as a blue-collar worker slugging it out on his five inches of the assembly line. He cleans the compartment floor with an assortment of fossilized bamboo branches - but then his gaze sweeps over you and cleans up so much more. His alleys brushed, he swiftly stands up as if righteously reminded of his dignity and takes out two shiny pebbles from his pocket. Suddenly, the frozen atmosphere of the train compartment is shattered. He starts singing. His song is a cliched cacophony but he does create music. (I have always been against the idea of genres)

A wave of disapproval washes over - how did this piece of persevering vermin find its way in here? But he remains invulnerable to his cocking sixth sense. Swaying to the gentle rhythm of the train, he clicks his pebbles with fluid expertise and blares forth. There seems to be a disconnected quality to his song; the lyrics seem to struggle against becoming a robotic monologue till somebody hands him a tired two-rupee note. He weaves his way between an impossible number of bodies and bags, his jarred notes heightening the silence. Finally, the train halts and the boy nimbly jumps off onto the platform, his thin frame dissolving easily, exiting one crowd and entering another.

I am left with a will-o-the-wisp memory of a boy and his song. And I undergo the sixth panic attack I've had in this week.

There are two things in life that I fear the most. One is being seated in an over-speeding motor vehicle and the other is becoming desensitized. Desensitization is one of the side-effects of living in an incredibly fast-paced city which is still dealing with a lot of unclaimed baggage. I sometimes feel the emotional quotient of our people is ten points short of a plastic bag's. And I can't imagine anything more catastrophic to the future of humanity. Yeah, I know that sounds straight out of a UN World Poverty Report, but it seems this will become just more than red-tape lingo.

Bob Dylan said it best:

"Yes and how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?
The answer my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind."

I hope we strip ourselves of our wind-cheaters.