Roundabout Truths

If we can – freely –

admit to ourselves that the

Underprivileged automatically

lead more virtuous lives

and the righteous follow in file:

then we might suspend this

acting out we do in difficult ways;

misdirected (almost) always

on unsuspecting souls & elbows

[it’s a privilege to be unlovable]

Then we might even find ways

to answer the oldest question ever posed

How to pass the time? This time, with fewer scars;

who knows? We might even make ourselves

useful.

There’s virtue in being useful; mostly
it’s honest and has constructive results -

- usually. When I sit with my grandma a while

I feel I have been of some use.

And I pat my own deserving back for it.

The Business of Theatre in the Attention Economy

Last weekend I watched a Hindi play. Although I’m very interested in theatre activity, my work hours and time management prevent me from watching all the plays I would like to. But last weekend, I watched the same play, twice, Saturday and Sunday.

***

Several years ago, or what feels like it, I could contemplate the world for hours, drifting between incomprehension and acceptance. But it doesn't really bother me that I can hardly sit still without having to resort to using the internet, or a phone to constantly re-engage and connect with other living elements of my world.

***

Somewhere I read, a guy had correctly pointed out that we now live in the attention economy where human attention is a scarce commodity. Our reserves of attention and attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, the further we’re exposed to instant gratification and an assault of data and information every way we turn. So something that holds our attention for really long is what will be prosperous in this economy.

***

So when the internet is where-its-at, when your marriage is validated when you update your facebook status, and most of these public and data-rich activities are performed for the public eye, it behooves one to hold the precious and rare away from the scrutiny of jaded, cynical eyes roving through the cesspit these beholders believe the internet to be.

***

I have been living without a functioning computer at my flat for a few months now, and I find that while I’m sorely missing out on the music I want to listen to, I am getting so many other things done that I would never get the chance to do if I would be glued to my twitter timeline every night, or bouncing off the wikisphere or blogosphere drowning in a flurry of hyperlinks. Cooking, reading, talking to friends on the phone once in a while. Yeah, this is not a bad deal.

***

Perhaps at a time like this, an art form like theatre is the most relevant. For art to exist, for artists to survive and interest in art to sustain, it must adapt. But maybe the inability of an art form like theatre to adapt to this age of easy accessibility, unavailability in a virtual form like an e-book or a music album or a film turned into bits, keeps it real. And pure. Theatre remains something to be experienced, in the moment, and is no less visceral in its approach and execution than it was a thousand years ago on the ancient Grecian podiums.

What's your Story?

My friend, Sorjin*, is a guitar player. He loves to play the blues, and can seduce you with a few notes on the slide. He told me once that he decided to go the way of music because it is a free-flowing, real-time expression of you. Who you are, then. Not a distillation, a derivation or a rationalization of what you think your character is. That things like books and movies need a narrative - a beginning and an end. cause and effect. so if you start with one thing, you end up with another. music doesn't rely on that narrative formula, or any kind of rationalization. Take Merzbow. or Lustmorde. What they do is play subliminal 'noise' music, which cannot be brought down to a scale and moves (I think - I don't have it figured out) intuitively, like a mood changing through a landscape. 

Music has the ability, as Huxley said, second best to silence, to express the inexpressible. You can never know who you really are, maybe because there is no you; maybe because it is beyond our perception; or an elusive combination of both. But you will find that music - whether listening and appreciating, or singing or playing - can talk to the you inside. In a way that books, paintings and movies never can. And he played me a song the other day, called 'Untitled', in an album that was untitled - maybe to ensure that nothing more than the music itself could be inferred from that piece. 

#nowplaying Brian Eno - Taking Tiger Mountain

It's a good lesson for life. We've often thought about the OST for the 'movie of our life', that captures in glitzy cinematic detail the trials and travails of a day in our lives. Even autobiographies that don't tell you how the writer became who she became, are decried for lack of a gripping storyline. 

But we don't live our lives like that. There will be days and days together when you don't understand what you're doing, but you know you're doing it because something is making you do it, guiding you in that direction. When/if it ends successfully, people call it motivation, a killer instinct. If it fails - well, it doesn't matter what you call it, nobody's listening. 

So for days like that, I think we'd all do well to think about something like this. I'm reproducing a quote below.

You will find that people love their narratives. They need for your life to have meaning; it must provide them a teachable moment, whether cautionary or aspirational. But you will never be who they think you are. 

The more you allow their expectations to dictate to you what you should be, the more unfamiliar you’ll become with your own reflection in a mirror.

I found this through my subscription to Andrew Sullivan's the daily beast, by the way. Whattay blog. It's a blessing in these days of mindless diversions. 
*name changed. But it would be pretty cool to have a friend called Sorjin.

Yesterday's Thoughts

Fuck the night joint. I'm way too sleepy and tired by the time I return home, and somehow defeated, to really let the drug stimulate my thoughts. The morning brings with it a wonderful wave of contemplation, so morning joint it is.

So while staring at the spirals of smoke, and in the many long-drawn minutes after, I was steeped in thought, of varied things. 


*****

Going easy on myself has had disastrous results on my money management. I have completely eaten into the savings my grandma painstakingly built for me, and I'm left with 1/5 of a lakh now. It's pathetic. I can't live within my means :( I intend to bring it back to the original amount, if not bring it on par with where it would be if I had let the interest accumulate. 


The Flatmate is currently the likeness of a saint. He is finding the strength to always do right by himself and is enduringly pure. He's a real inspiration, if you are looking for it. 
The city noises on the cab to work are gratingly present, each and every day. Sometimes, you hear the voices behind the noises, the urgent alarm of the ambulance, the bored persistence of car horns, the buzz of the beautiful rains. 


Being a non-vegetarian also changes your personality. The way food is attacked, and the defensive response that one evolves in response to allegations by vegetarians makes one develop a different attitude in life. In other news, Woodside's BeerNBurger festival is great, and Ireland's corned beef burger was amazing. It didn't even taste like meat. Just like a really well-cooked and flavoured patty, with smoked bacon. Mmmm. 


I should not smoke so much if I want to sing. It's not good for my voice or my lung power but it won't even let me practice, because getting stoned makes me unable to approach music a little detachedly. But I get so restless just to think of being by myself sober. 


Ze Stick will be coming over in a few weeks. I will have to sort out my room and get an internet connection and stuff by then. Where will she stay otherwise!

Within every extrovert, there's an introvert screaming to get out.

I've been an extrovert for far too long. So long that I have little clue what to do when I do find myself alone. <cue jokes about jilling off> More often than not, I spend my time dilating my pupils and retreating into that passive wonder-world which also, apparently, obeys the economic dictum of the law of diminishing marginal utility.
It's getting difficult to shake off this state, where there are always things to do, but then you always have so many choices - and you know, YOU get to make the right choice for yourself, the overwhelming knowledge of the fact that your freedom is your responsibility - that I get stuck with what Stephen Fry called options paralysis. Truly, I need to spend more time just doing my own thing and getting the hang of it. Not that I didn't, in the past, but really developing it, honing it and making it my own. Even 'doing my thing' feels like a borrowed pastime.

But really, the way to get unstuck from options paralysis is to reject everything. The most peaceful place in your mind is where there is nothing. Try as you might, 'nothing' is an exceedingly difficult state of mind to achieve. So, the next best thing follows, one thing. But to really do that one thing right, and do justice to it, you have to die first. Die completely. Leave your half-hopeful ambitions, your distant dreams and your exotic-for-the-sake-of-it choices. Let go over the cliff, as the zen monk says. And then your own fears and lethargy and false hopes will never deceive you. Maybe I should give it a shot.

Oh, and hat-tip to ol' Prufrock for that line in the title. It's true.