Because of its subjectivity, idealism is paving a way for each one of us to criticize the world in our own way and appreciate what we hold dear, ignoring what matters to all but priortizing what only bothers us as individuals. The problem lies in ignoring the unprejudiced problems of the world because the idea of your world is far too narrow and limited to you alone.

how is it easier to be an idealist?

A realist accepts the flaws of the world and accepts that parts of humanity is tainted beyond repair. It doesn’t mean defeat, it means acceptance. We have been alive long enough to understand that we have already lived through a lot of the hells on this planet. We have made it clear to ourselves that we as a society and as a human race, can’t live under idealism. We all want a different world and it’s plainly impossible to achieve that.

Therefore, we think about idealism. We want to ignore the real world problems like famines, oppression, discrimination, corruption, crimes, etc. To hell with it, even if we can ever eradicate these problems, we have to deal with natural disasters and accidents.

If anything, an ideal world can be formed only with no human beings in it. Just because we inhabitate the subjective thinking skills, we tainted the world view that might have stayed ideal in the unbiased perspective.

why is realism harder?

Plainly, it seems that chasing idealism should be harder than being realist because an idealist might focus on solving problems more than a realist. Digging deeper, you realise that’s not the case.

Gandhi’s India was a realistic ideology in a general perspective but it was an idealistic view of the world according to Gandhi. He wanted to make an India where duty to the God was the utmost priority and in serving so, he was willing to abandon all senses and practice restraints. This sounds like the ultimate definition of the fantastical world that the religious texts talk of. But that’s where you will start finding Gandhi’s idealism seeping in to taint the realism of the texts.

Gandhi wanted to practice celibacy and in doing so, he was involved in various potential experiments with his own grand-niece, who was around seventeen, where they slept naked with eachother. Obviously, this sparked controversy about consent and abuse.

In the path of this incident, it is clear that Gandhi couldn’t fathom to live up to the words of the God as they were said. He, in his opinion, had to make tough realistic choices in order to achieve the idealism that he preached for so desperately.

It is very easy to think about a world where revenge, wrath, pride and grief didn’t exist. Several gurus or ‘dieties’ have done their best to force that world upon us and clearly, it never sticks. Clearly, we don’t have the capability to abandon our ability to think beyond what we are told.

After Gandhi’s idealism, there’s Hitler’s Germany.

Hitler was opposite of Gandhi in most sense, he didn’t care about preserving all and building peace. He, himself, was filled with revenge. He wanted to make an ‘ideal’ world where he could make his own people exist. According to him, killing millions of Jews was a necessary step. Interestingly enough, Gandhi almost agreed with Hitler before the second world war. Gandhi thought that the ‘fate’ of the Jews was called for and should be accepted so as to atone for their past karma. He believed that Hitler was solving the problem with lesser massarce. Later, however, when the death toll kept rising, even Gandhi saw the root of Hitler’s idealism.

how is idealism ignorant to problems?

Idealism is a straight path, it calls for mass murder and restraints. It doesn’t call for practicality. Shifting the whole face of the continent ‘removes’ an issue and doesn’t ‘solve’ it.

Chasing idealism is only a different way of chasing subjective realism under the disguise of duty. It’s a myth, it’s beautiful when in imagination. Idealism wants to ignore the real work of solving the problems because of its complexity.

Under a personal comment, I think an idealistic leader is a lazy leader.

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Under my biased contemplation of Dostoevsky, I have only been more and more fascinating with his views on death. His perceptions on life and death is separated by a very blurry line; a line that he subtly ignored. Putting aside other forms, his form of absurdism has been equally fascinating to me. His works contributed acutely towards my shaken belief in god or in at least what is a perceived version of god.

Such and more is The Idiot by the same Fyodor Dostoevsky. After never having to shut up about Crime And Punishment, I have found a home in The Idiot until next time.

Ippolit & his drunken views

In a scene post-birthday party, Ippolit, one of the side characters, got drunk beyond his sense and spurted out nonsense for good ten pages in the book — only that the nonsense made a little too much sense.

“Nature has sentenced me; but I do not want to wait submissively for her verdict to be carried out.”

Another one, that triggered a curious nerve in me:

“It is not despair that drives me, but protest.”

This guy, clearly, mentioned about killing himself and he did so in a manner that he wanted to prove how useless it is to be scared of this ‘unevitable’ death. He sought the satisfaction of proving his free will against nature or god as a whole. It is pretty interesting how the religious texts would mention of indulgences as a sinful act but never answer why the perceived god created those senses in the first place.

This particular notion of seeking redemption through boundations is what is paradoxical in the knit of godly theories. Ippolit stayed confused and extremely contradicting in his monologue, he kept getting frustrated as if he almost reached something but couldn’t exactly see it.

Ippolit mentioned ‘protest’ to be his justification of suicide and a way of proving to this perceived god that everyone has the free will to kill all boundations and explore that unsought area beyond.

And so, he pulled out the gun and put it to his head.

why am i bothered?

Several questions innervate my mind when I think of Ippolit’s protest. Why would the perceived god build a house with two floors if he wanted his subjects to stay bound to the first floor only? Why would this tempting side of every coin be brought into existence? What necessity could have brought the idea of karma cycle into existence? If it’s not supposed to be touched, why does it always float right in front of our eyes? If the perceived god can create and destroy all, why would he create something undestructible and expect us to destroy it?

“If our god was evil, he would create earthquakes, tsunamis, unfair death, injustice, pandemics, drought, depression, etc. He would force people into thinking that he who worships him will be given true happiness. But we should be glad that our god isn’t evil.”

Why would the god create beings that know how to worship him? Is it because the birds and animals can’t worship him? Is he a pathway to our redemption or are we to his?

oh, and by the way, Ippolit couldn’t kill himself. He got scared.

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INTRODUCTION

Toxicity and manipulation have stayed to be quite a heated topic in today’s relationships. And honestly, there couldn’t be a better time for everyone to be so aware of the same. I really wanted to touch on how the raised awareness among the youngsters is also widening the gap between them and the parental generations; but for now, let’s only stick to how arguments are twisted in a manner that one of the partners in the relationship has no way to get out of it. I speak from experience and research, and this essay should be able to pave a path to understanding these ‘unwinnable’ arguments as we go.

UNWINNABLE ARGUMENTS

As a trigger warning, I want to mention that these arguments and verbal discords aren’t always intentional and neither are they always thrown about unintentionally. The former kind requires realisation and honest conversations, the latter requires help from a good psychologist. By ‘unwinnable’ I don’t mean to imply towards the competitiveness of the arguments in the relationships, but the regular pattern of these arguments where one partner is able to ‘win’ all arguments and make the other partner bend their knee leaving them with a sense of incomprehensible defence that they just couldn’t voice.

One partner would start exerting contempt on the other as concluded by Dr. John Gottman in one of his studies. Through his studies, he found out that anger is totally normal with relationships but the actions leading ahead, which are totally at the partner’s hands, end up destroying the relationships. That’s where the condescending nature as a result of frustration hollows the love from the bond.

The feeling of self-rule, self-intelligence and self-importance tend to lean towards the intentional part of the ‘unwinnable’ arguments. And the feeling of insecurity and fear would lean towards the unintentional. None shows mercy to the other partner, and none should be normalised.

UNINTENTIONAL UNWINNABLE ARGUMENTS

Born out of people who are starving for outside validation and respect from their partners, these arguments are very toxic. The worst part here is that the love in the relationship shouldn’t have been at harm because it is usually strong. But because of the insecurity in one of the partners, the arguments always twist into that person’s favour. Clothes? Food? Friends? Work? Guy friends? Women friends? All will be ruled by one person because he/she fell in love in the most toxic manner i.e. the manner of ‘Emotional Dependency’.

Emotional Dependency, basically, talks about how someone’s self-worth and confidence is wholly tied to another person’s existence. Two kinds of people are formed in the hierarchy. One would prey for this dependency and the other would be hunted for the same. Both find each other and both suffer equally.

INTENTIONAL UNWINNABLE ARGUMENTS

I still don’t know how to talk about this without sounding biased but these arguments are a result of total narcissism. No one who is sane and also understands the effect of their words on their partner would fall under this category. And according to some studies, the partner who carried a baggage from the past that’s weighing them down would end up on the receiving side of it or fall under the first category. The contempt in these arguments burns like cinder, it could be about religion, finances, sex, children, friends, drugs, etc. And when these topics turn into ‘unwinnable’ arguments, that’s the time to end that relationship. Everything that gives you a unique identity should not and must not be handed over to someone because of your insecurity. Whatever you feel, however you feel for that person, however deep you think the relationship is, your identity stays with you. Your mind stays with you.

REFERENCES

1. https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-to-have-healthy-fights-arguments-relationships/

2. https://sextherapylongisland.com/about-rosara/

3. https://www.gottman.com/blog/how-do-arguments-affect-relationships/

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long-lasting sins

The sins that have taken on for centuries in the society have been more or less accepted as something that can’t be completely eradicated from the society. The major cause of this would be because the other side, the moral side, has never been implied or hinted at. A good example would be women suppression.

Let’s go back a century or two, and in India. Wives of the household didn’t even know what treatment to accept from their husbands. As a result, whatever was given was accepted dutifully. There wasn’t the possibility to even think upon the possibility of any other treatment, and this also meant these women never really knew what they were missing. They had never seen a woman being treated right and hence, they thought the wrong was the right. The sin was not the sin, because it had lasted too long and everywhere. It was not until someone sat down to think what really went wrong.

Even today, I see the older women of the house still accepting the tiny world that they are given; no questions asked. It has been ingrained in them so deeply that even if a slice of freedom and free thought was given to them, they wouldn’t know what to do with it; and they’d circle back to their own tiny world.

They would accept the sin that they are a victim of because, ‘oh, who isn’t?’

Same goes for the people living on the streets. When I and you, people with walls around them, look at these people, we know what they don’t have. We know how hard their lives are, and how hard it is for them to earn a daily bread. We know how cold it gets at nights during the winter. But that pain is all they have known. They don’t have time to think about their misfortune because they are too busy earning another penny so that they can feed their child. They don’t have time to question god why they were subjected to a different fate, all they know is that every piece of food was given to them by the god, despite the fact that the god could have given so much more.

They don’t feel an absence because they don’t know what’s absent. As unfair as it is, they wouldn’t be able to sleep in a fluffy bed; they too wouldn’t know what to do with the that little piece of joy, they would unknowingly find a home in their suffering because, ‘oh, who isn’t?’

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effects of endurance on a sufferer

When something has been felt so many times, in so many different ways, it stops feeling quite so painful. A minor prostitute once said. She said that it was her first experience that almost made her kill herself. And none after that.

This is the problem.

A child born in burning Gaza wouldn’t know what a full stomach fills like, and he wouldn’t know he is being treated unfairly because he just wouldn’t be able to stomach a full meal anymore.

The more you endure something unfair, the more familiar you become to it and the less likely you are to even see it as a problem. Endurance is a skill and it makes you strong, sure; but it shouldn’t go unnoticed how it completely makes you okay with the pain. That’s why acceptance needs to be valued very carefully. Strength should greatly mean fighting through more than enduring through with acceptance. That’s also why fate needs to be a subjectively accepted term because what is a definitive sin should never be treated as ‘fate’.

Conclusively, it can be noticed that pain is empathetically unbearable for the ones who sit to think of their misfortune. Ironically, the line that goes well here is, “The philosophy of life is a privilege, and the poor who need to understand this philosophy the most don’t have enough time to even think about it.”

When I was not writing in the past few weeks, I noticed how buried my voice felt and how unspoken my mind was. I do not like to not contemplate on my life and my current problems, I do not like to give myself a heads-up motivation and get straight to problem-solving. I like to sit through it, write about it — or talk about it. And when I have felt the life deep in my bones, that’s when I get to the problem-solving. This, I feel, is fairly exhausting and a feeble attempt at trying to feel alive.

Not writing is almost like denying myself the pleasure of this feeble attempt. The loveliest part of writing being this sense of recognition without really specifying the problem, rather seeking a solution through floating about the dream-like euphoria of being able to write about it.

Right now isn’t the green side of the grass for me, I might actually be digging straight into the rock bottom. However, I do not like to seek advice and comforting words from people, I like to save that privilege for my writing alone. And right now, sitting tightly through this patch of life, I am surprisingly happy. And heard clearly by my writing.

Interestingly enough flagellantism rose to its peak around 1300 years in 14th century after Christ’s death by crucifixion. The concept of flagellantism also existed before its peak among the loyal followers but this peak has a whole different story around it.

How did Black Death lead to the rise of Flagellantism?

The Black Death was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. It was highly contagious and it spread fast through the whole of Europe and Central Asia, lasting for around half a decade between 1347-1352. The understanding of bacterial infections among the people of those times restricted them to take proper measures like following quarantines or distancing. In fact, they did something worse — they started to publicly flog themselves which then spread the plague among the people who hadn’t yet received it. Consequently, it led to death of over 30-40 million people in Europe itself.

The big question remains that why did people suddenly turn towards this horrific practice of self-torture in the time of already rising death toll?

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In the 14th century, science was believed to be a myth more or less. Therefore, existence of the plague had to be explained to the dying people by the Church; but the Church couldn’t explain it or couldn’t do anything to eradicate it. This eroded and tempered the public belief, and they started doubting the ways of the Church. People went to the extremes and believed that they had to find a way to look for the ‘spiritual redemption’ themselves to pure themselves and the world off this punishment.

Then flagellantism took off. The plague was believed to be a divine punishment and a sign that the people need to atone for their sins, which is why infliction of pain on the self came into practice. Flagellation was performed in the public eye to spread the belief of self-mortification and unknowingly, it also spread the plague many folds. In a way, people looked for god and atonement and in return they caused one of the greatest world tragedies.

Condemnation by the Church and the fall of Flagellantism

Flagellantism wasn’t one of those practices that lasted for many years. In fact, it faced a serious downfall within a year or some of its peak. Flagellation had attained the worst of its face, some cases of forced flagellation were recorded and people went to the ultimate extremes of inflicting self-harm also fatally injuring themselves.

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The Church intervened, they didn’t allow Christ followers to build up this practice and ruin the religion as a whole. To fuel this, the death toll by Black Death only rose further during the time of flagellation as the graph in the previous section showed. Interestingly, the death toll decreased when the practice of flagellantism decreased.

After strict bans from the Church and extreme restrictions, the practice of flagellantism fell.

captured instance of flagellants

face of ‘pain is salvation’ today.

Flagellantism isn’t entirely dead today, but the practice has turned very low-key and harmless. While I am sure that flagellantism to its deadliest form exists and it is still believed as a form of salvation by some people today, major practices of it include people dressing up in their flagellant uniform, and barely touching themselves with a tiny whip on the shoulders as they march past the public on certain occasions and festivals.

The world of today has faced a lot in terms of tragedies and continues to do so. But the need to move towards the practices of self-mortification wouldn’t take a rise unless its a symbol of suffering to the world. Our world eats away at symbolism, and that’s why symbols or acts of empathy and pain will be entertained and greatly appreciated. However, the permanence of it all will always be fragile. The reason would be confined in a few words that the believers seek salvation not pain, and today more than any other time, people seek god and not the soul.

Clearly, flagellantism wasn’t a wholesome practice of finding god but of begging for forgiveness. It wasn’t a fair display of god’s way of working, if any, but it was a strong symbol.

The symbols fail today, they don’t speak to the people anymore. People need god; there won’t be a time when they don’t, but the way they need god has changed ever since the beginning and foundation of all the religions. With time, the faith fades and the identity remains; the identity through a certain religion.

It’s very poetic how Donna Tartt writes one book every decade. In one of her interviews she had claimed that she had tried to write quicker but she didn’t enjoy the process and that it was not how she wanted to approach her art. I value this notion a lot because the respect for art shows in her work, she is not afraid to write absolute truth about society, and in the process she offers us the unforgettable stories. I am talking about The Goldfinch in this essay, the story that will be responsible for deep felt nostalgia if I ever visit New York in my life.

I have read The Secret History as one of her other works and that story had transformed me into an analytical reader, also after which I couldn’t sit through fantasy books anymore. No offence intended because I was a vivid reader for fantasy books and I have lived through that era of magic. In fact, Leigh’s Six Of Crows still holds the position of one of the top five books I have read.

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what’s The Goldfinch about and why was Boris an important character?

Theodore Decker was only thirteen years old when he lost his mother in a terrorist bomb blast in one of the most famous museums in NYC. He had merely escaped the tragedy, lying under the rubble of cement and debris, the realization of what had happened came late to him. What kept his senses focused on breathing was an old man named Welty who was taking his last breaths under more rubble. Amidst the chaos, Welty (who was equally delirious and confused) handed a painting from his side to Theo and begged him to keep it. The painting was of The Goldfinch which had survived the blast in the museum, and was about to embark on a lifetime journey with Theo and in the process some questionable lives would be lost.

Boris Pavlikovsky was a boy that Theo met when he was struggling to live sanely with his gambling addict and run-away father in Las Vegas after the tragic explosion. Boris is a very important character to shape the whole story because he, indirectly, decided the whole life path for Theo. On one hand, Boris gave Theo the spark of drugs and on the another hand made him see the life through a different lens, through which the world is equally dainted and yet, there is more happiness here than we would like to believe. He made him see that alongside grieving the loss of a mother, the life can still make sense. The sense could be derived through narcotics and drugs, or could be through the life that Theo chose — he went back to NYC.

After a monologue from Boris where he tried to apologize to Theo for a mistake, and after what was also a unique take on The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Theodore had thought:

“…And it occurred to me that despite his faults, which were numerous and spectacular, the reason I’d liked Boris and felt happy around him from almost the moment I’d met him was that he was never afraid. You didn’t meet many people who moved freely through the world with such a vigorous contempt for it…”

The reason I started thinking of Boris in a different way was due to these lines that Theo had reckoned. Boris was not the best influence for a normal kid at the age of thirteen. In fact, he was the worst influence and the kind of kid that parents make a specific point of keeping their children away from. He was an addict, he drank alcohol like water and lived in a house mimicking a dumpster. His father was abusive and fatal to him, and interestingly, Boris was also a little abusive to his father; the justification for all being the trance of alcoholism, obviously.

Theo’s father died in an accident which, coincidentally, landed exactly when the father had been weighed down by severe debts. Just a few scenes before this accident, Boris said to Theo and he wanted to run away, get away from everybody and live the life in a way that he could control. What came out of his mouth as a result of being stoned and frustrated by his girlfriend, was taken very seriously by Theo.

As soon as Theo heard that his father had died, he decided to run away. He persuaded Boris to accompany him but Boris couldn’t fathom why Theo was leaving all of a sudden. Ultimately, Theo ran away alone and found himself in New York — the place where he once had a home, in the hope of building that home again.

“i dreamt of her, not as a presence but as an absence…”

Theo loved a girl, her name was Pippa. This particular parallel in the book is very dear to me for two reasons: first, how he fell in love with her and second, the complete incompletion of their love story.

Theo saw Pippa in the museum moments before the explosion, and he was infatuated within a second. It might have stayed to mere infatuation if the museum didn’t blast to pieces moments after. But, no, he had to selflessly, mercilessly fall in love with her.

It must have been something very divine to find someone in the moments between living and dying to hold on to. Pippa was severely injured in the blast, she couldn’t walk for a long time and stayed with her grandfather’s friend; also the place where Theo will stay in New York.

The reason that Theo fell in love with Pippa wasn’t because of her beauty or what we call as ‘knowing the person’ because he had exchanged less than ten words before he knew he loved her. Pippa was the girl that Theo thought of when he wanted to distract himself from his grief, he had loved his mother dearly and it took him a long time to accept the fact. Pippa had indirectly saved Theo from several sessions of torture and sorrow, she had, somehow, helped him work his conscience above and beyond the guilt he had started inhabiting. He had constantly blamed himself for his mother’s death because it was because of him that they were in the museum that day.

Pippa didn’t love Theo back, or at least not for a long time. Maybe, Theo had taken too long to confess his love for her or maybe she felt something similar for Theo because they wore the tragedy of blast together, but it didn’t quite reach the pedestal of love. This incompletion in their love story was, somehow, so complete. There is no way this love story would make sense if she returned his love or they got married. Both of them actually end up marrying completely different people in their lives, the people that were stability and not telepathic reconciliation of grief.

the significance of ‘The Goldfinch’ painting

The moment Theo accepted the painting from dying Welty in the museum, his life had already decided a course for him. Theo kept the painting with him so dearly as if, if he lost it, the world would fall apart. He had decided to return the million dollar painting back to museum at times but he could never work beyond the thought. Keeping a piece from the museum made him feel eased, he relaxed whenever he touched the painting through the pillow cover taped on the back of his bed where he had hidden it.

Theo didn’t have intentions of selling it or profiting off of it. After his dreadful and memorable time in Las Vegas, when he came to New York with the painting still in the pillow cover, he was determined to return it to the museum. But the things had changed, the painting was already declared stolen from the crime scene on the day of the blast. The potential art thieves were being arrested and brutally interrogated. Therefore, without ever having the courage to take it out of the pillow cover, he put in a safe where he wouldn’t touch it for a long time.

If he wanted, he could dump it anywhere and forget all about it. The good chance was that the painting would be destroyed in fire or be crushed; this didn’t sit right with Theo. He had gotten so attached to the painting that he couldn’t fathom it being destroyed in any way.

Only after years of naivety did Theo once again got plunged into the hole of underworld with his dear friend Boris and all for this painting. The incidents that unravelled put everything in a different perspective for Theo.

The Goldfinch in the painting was firmly chained at the leg, and the bird was looking straight at the onlooker.

The painting’s symbolism also stood dear to Theo, and by the end of the book, his view for the painting had changed immensely. The serenity of the painting touched Theo’s heart in ways he didn’t understand for a long time. He breathed the air of peace when he finally was able to return the painting to the museum, the place where it belonged, the place where everybody could see not only the grief of the bird, but also the grief of Theo.

“…And if I could go back in time I’d clip the chain (that chained the bird) in a heartbeat and never care a minute that the picture was never painted.”

Ultimately, he didn’t care for the painting, he cared for the bird. He cared for not being caged, ever.

Death isn’t so much of a thing that happens than it is a process; it doesn’t necessarily mark an end but rather begins something that we won’t completely fathom until death herself comes to us. I call her ‘herself’ because of how twisted it is; how beautifully unknown it is; and how inexistent it is until it touches someone personally.

When I was small, I saw death as this scary occurrence that ends, destroys and consumes lives; which is true but the scary part of it is what I have always wanted to shut off. It used to keep me up at nights in worry that it was coming to me; and when it would, it would end my dreams, my goals and my life yet to be lived. It wouldn’t let me smile a little more at my mother, it wouldn’t let me have the day when i gather the courage to finally hug my father, it wouldn’t let me tell the milk dairy’s uncle that it was because of him I didn’t have to walk that extra half mile to get the daily brown bread, and it wouldn’t let me meet the man who I would love and cherish for the whole of unstolen life.

All of these things still stand true if death does come knocking. But what if I never stop smiling at my mother? What if I hug my father everyday? What if I tell the dairy uncle how grateful I was for his bread? What if I loved all the people as immensely as they love me and find a fulfillment there? What if I just… lived?

which death is the best?

It is very interesting how ‘sudden’ or ‘quick’ death is considered the best way to go. An accident? A criminal death? Why the best way to go though? They say, it’s so that the person wouldn’t feel the pain, the torture and the very existence of death. But isn’t that a biased statement? A ‘sudden’ death means a halt. A cessation of all you have ever known. It doesn’t mean a pain-free death, it means a death is forcing you leave everything behind without a chance to bid farewell to any of those things. The ‘sudden’ death of a person leaves behind coils of regrets among those who lost that person. It doesn’t make the dead suffer, it makes the alive suffer. It leaves the people ruminating on the last words exchanged, hoping for a slight change in the tone of the words they exchanged last; hoping that there could have been more love in their words. As it turns out, death can make living people suffer her.

On the other hand, the ‘slow’ death? Maybe due to a long sickness. Or the proclaimed worst — a criminal death that includes torture or revenge. This is where the body suffers and the soul quivers; this kills the will. The ‘slow’ death defines the desperate attempts at pouncing and grabbing onto life. It doesn’t have space for acceptance, it always kills the person first and the body latter. It crushes the dreams of the person and also gives them time to feel the loss of the self.

Obviously, there is the ‘natural’ death — shed a few tears, feel an absence but… the time had arrived, it was inevitable. Everyone sees death come, they hear her whispering behind the curtains, they feed her and hate her at the same time. And then she’s gone with the soul. Everyone accepts it, including the dead.

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hours through death.

The best way to go is to go ‘suddenly’. A cardiac arrest, maybe? Maybe a truck hit you while crossing? A suicide, maybe? A beef leading to be shot in the head? An earthquake swallowing the entirety of your house? You never see it coming and you never see it taking you away. Hours before death, you were living as you always were. You smacked your little brother on the head for hiding the birthday party snacks from you, and then hid it high on the cupboard where he couldn’t reach. You sprawled on the sofa, switched on your favourite channel on the TV and drank your cold coffee. It was your mother’s birthday tomorrow. she thinks that you and your brother don’t remember her birthday, but you do. You are waiting for the clock to hit 12, and wake her up to a big surprise. Suddenly, the floor seemed to shake. You ignored it, it was only eleven minutes before 12. You switch off the TV, and get up to call your little brother from his room. A vulgar shake. It felt like one of those jolts you felt when you used to puff up your friend’s weed. Another shake. Another. And the whole world around you seemed to fall apart, the TV fell off the wall, the books fell off the shelf, the fan stumbled at the ceiling. You hear cracks and breaks all around you. The clock hits 12. Then the ceiling falls apart.

(TW) The heart rate rises, the fear locks in. Only the survival instincts work, all senses fail. There is nothing you can do, you are frozen on the spot as pieces of cement fall around and over you. Blood gushes out, bones break. None of the vital organs are hurt, yet. You try to crawl away, you try to move, but a brick falls on the lower part of spine. Suddenly, your legs fail to work. You want to use your arms to move your body forward. Under the table maybe? The shelf from the side wall falls over you, breaks your ribs and the bone punctures into your pancreas. A pain shoots up in your body and a sweat breaks out. Something else (you couldn’t comprehend what) falls on your head, damaging your skull bones. The brain fluid starts oozing out of your eyes and nose, your vision seems to fail and arms don’t seem to move as you wish. You stay where you are until another piece of the ceiling crushes your head completely. The birthday was never wished. The snacks were never eaten.

Rape? Revenge murder? Ransom murder? Serial killer? I wouldn’t describe the criminal death for obvious reasons, but here the physical pain never accounts for suffering. How would I ever describe the will, the hope and the dreams dying? Death, in this case, doesn’t even feel like it’s a process. It feels like a person. A person who is standing there with a knife or a gun or… just enough power over you. It forces you to get on your knees and beg; forget the self and beg. Beg for the world, beg for the shame, beg for the family. And beg for the life. the life that would most probably feel hollow to you after this, but in the moment it felt like the most dearest thing to you, that you wouldn’t lose it for anything. This life brought you to this death, and you want that life again. It’s just irresistible because… the life you knew. The death… you don’t know. In life, you had people to call you own. And if not people, you had things to call your own, you had memories to call your own, you had a mind to call your own. In death, you don’t know. You don’t know what you get to take, you don’t know if you ever get past the process of dying? What if in death, you keep dying for eternity? You just don’t know.

Natural death is the kindest. No death is beautiful if it was followed by a life, but this one is less cruel. It doesn’t surprise, you knew it was coming when you heaved your first breath. This one lets you feel her. It tells you one by one, what’s dying in you. It reminds you of the best memories and the best people you spent your life with. Death coddles you and tells you that you are hers. She’ll ask you to sleep more. She’ll tell you that you can’t talk anymore, although you can still hear your loved ones talking. There’s signs of rotting skin on the back of your knees, you lose bladder control. You don’t eat or drink anymore. There is a lot of coughing which makes you feel like that your lungs will burst out any moment.

Soon, the blood pressure falls and the efficiency declines. The eyes are tiny bit swollen and incessant tears flow down. Your whole body has gone cold, no amount of blankets makes you feel warm.

The breathing gets shallower, the blood doesn’t reach your heart efficiently. the blood cells are dying, the new ones fail to form. You don’t know the moment, but one of those times you fall asleep.

In the sleep, you meet a lot of people. Some of them dead, some alive. You tell them you love them, they tell you they love you. There’s laughing, there’s crying. You feel some regrets. You feel some contentment.

Lastly, the death came quietly and took you away, without disrupting your sleep.

Death may be the scariest thing, or it may be the best thing that happens to you. But neither of its possibility should make you feel, even for a second, that you should await her arrival.

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“It’s not who you are underneath but what you do that defines you.” — Rachel Dawes from Batman

Apart from the few philosophical exceptions, this statement would stand true (the philosophical exceptions being the assessment of self detached from the world) because we do unmistakably attach ourselves with the world.

the comfort of vulnerability

Why would this urge to share even emerge in us? Because of our nature as animal species, we exist as a community, we exist as a shared interest. The fact that we have evolved beyond just survival, makes us prone to relationships. We are among the some mammals who follow the existential rule of living in colony. Isolation isn’t meant to treat us well, and vulnerability or sharing in general is meant to build bonds and strengthen relationships.

Being the only self-conscious species in existence, we are a culmination of every good and bad feeling. This sheltering of emotions is also a result of the fact that we are a part of something called as ‘social mammals’. Surviving as a society for such mammals is only possible if there is a sense of togetherness and fellowship. This sense of togetherness means sharing food and shelter for some animals, and for us humans it means that and so much more. We have set the bar up so high ourselves to filter out the people we want to connect with. This bar isn’t built in a day, but through generations of emotional and psychological understanding.

The desire to be understood is another factor that really fuels the need of exposing yourself. This can be connected back to the fact that we aren’t meant live by isolation. Any sense of isolation and seclusion from this society induces a restless reaction in us which in turn creates the need for connection. We can think of this connection as a switch that might just click at any moment but we can never tell when the wiring goes off.

We want someone to look at us, see our worst sides — the sides that we have sworn to hate ourselves — and not disgust away. We hate to go unrecognized and unseen, we want someone to glide through our traumas and guilt, and still see us past the smoke.

the missed consequences of vulnerability

No one has to take a responsibility for you, no one has to have a natural foundation to understand your stair of thoughts. But still we look for a few of those people who really will show empathy that doesn’t only originate from sympathy. The core problem with this is that no one can ever know you better than you know yourself. Hence, in the attempt to do so, a slight judgement will always be passed through to you. This can have positive and negative effects on you. The judgement might give you a new introspective rail or might push in a pit of loathe.

The fellowship we seek in being vulnerable is mostly only limited to the promising words that will not result into a real shoulder to cry on. And if you find a real shoulder, their subjective wisdom will weaken your self-perception. Only rarely, your vulnerability will be followed by a silence of understanding.

I, personally, am very scared of baring myself to the extent of showing someone what the inside of my brain looks like. I don’t think that every other person is molded in a way to understand how my beliefs, opinions, and secrets are justifiable. If I show the wrong person how the prison inside of me looks like, I might just die on the spot. My thoughts don’t make me, my conclusions and my actions make me. The thoughts that pass through my mind, the justifications, the hate, the jealously, the guilt — all of it just boils away when a conclusion has been reached. But I can not imagine, even for a second, that someone would be capable of understanding that train of emotions.

The brain is a rush, it doesn’t stop, it doesn’t let you breathe. Most of the times, the brain is what kills you and most of the times, its your brain that nobody will ever understand.

Your soul doesn’t need recognition, your brain does.

He increased his pace, hugging the coat around him tightly. He lived half a mile away from the tavern where he worked during the night. Come this time of the year, and the taverns and bars are filled with men seeking warmth for the weather and their aching heart. The Man always wondered why did the most hearts break in the winter, or maybe the broken hearts are felt deeply in the winter. He didn’t know, he had never been in love.

There was a woman though who loved him immensely. He had been with her a few times — the times that she worshiped and he, mostly, forgot until the next time. He wasn’t a heart breaker, he was just decidedly consumed in his own mind to think of empathy. This woman couldn’t see that he was just completely lost in his life and consciousness, she didn’t see that he wasn’t capable of giving or receiving love. The Man, on the other hand, was very much aware of the fact. He knew it for sure when his mother’s smile on receiving the pashmina meant absolutely nothing to him. Even in the house on the other side of the hill, he didn’t even jump to try and do something to save the old woman after his unintentional push knocked her out and the lost blood killed within ten minutes.

At times, he felt like he disappeared for hours but in reality, he was at the exact same spot as before or sometimes at completely absurd places. Once, there was a time when he was with his friend from the neighbourhood and he spent a reasonable hour with him chopping woods. And then, suddenly, within a blink he was with at the tavern and was offering a drink to this friend. When he asked him about what had just happened, the bewildered friend told him they were chopping wood for five hours before taking a break and coming there. Interestingly, according to this friend, the Man hadn’t acted weird or disconnected in those five hours. But still, the Man simply forgot those hours. It was almost like an unintentional deletion of a portion of the memory.

So, it was no surprise to the Man that he was going insane. He was losing his memory piece by piece, and it wasn’t as unintentional as he thought. He hated working in the sun to chop woods or wash clothes. He, somehow, deleted the instances that he hated but he didn’t want to forget those instances either. It was a torture to him to skip through life with a weakness so tormenting.

He would spend hours listening to his father talk and then without a warning, the father would be dead like he has been since three years. The Man thought he didn’t have anything to call his own because he just couldn’t tell what was truly there. Even with the things he had, he felt like he had lost everything.

Just two days ago when he was having lunch by the river, he saw a kid. A ten year old boy who was throwing stones in the river and laughing sheepishly. He taught the kid how to make the stones bounce on the water surface. In the evening, the Man turned to say goodbye to the kid and it was just a stone. He had talked and played with a stone all that time. There wasn’t so much grief in talking to a stone as much as there is in knowing that you were talking to a stone. Insane men are the happiest until they know they have gone insane. The delusions make them happy until the curtain starts to show. The Man cried himself to sleep that night.

Even now as he neared the house, he kept wondering if he was on the right direction. What if he ended up going to that woman’s house and fall asleep by her bedside only to open his eyes and find himself sleeping by the bench on the pavement?

When he stepped on his house’s threshold, he felt something. There was an excruciating chill in the whole village but his house felt oddly cold. Not cold as in cool, but as in ice. Nothing that can be solved with a pashmina.

The Man pinched himself, staring adamantly at the dilapidated door. He feared if he would blink he would go somewhere else — he would lose something else. His days start and end with this same fear of losing something new that day, and of having the privilege to skip through the grief only to meet it in some other form any other day without a warning. He hated this cycle, and consequently, loathed himself for being a coward who is sheltering this escapism.

When The Man knocked the door to his house, he didn’t dare to blink. He opened his eyes so wide that tears started rolling down his cheeks, and his mouth was left agape.

No one answered. His heart skipped a beat.

He felt himself being sucked into a trance, but he refused to give in. He refused to be insane.

The Man gulped and kicked the door open.

Inside, lay his mother in the pool of her own dried blood. The pashima was sitting on the chair and interestingly, without a stain of blood on it.

The Man blinked.

He slowly moved across his mother’s dead body without stepping into the blood. He picked up the pashmina and went to her room. From under the mattress of her bed, he pulled out an envelope. He opened it and found the savings. He quickly put it in his inner coat pocket and stepped outside. Tucking the pashmina under his arm, he left the house.

Today is my mother’s birthday. I will give her this pashmina. He was thinking as he walked.

Context of the theory mentioned (spoilers alert)

The Idiot is about a man who inhabits a very honest soul and who also holds conviction for morality. This man, Myshkin, had an impossible time trying to live as he was in the world of 19th century Russia. He was kind-hearted, generous, generationally wealthy and what we call as ‘easy meat’ today. He would decide upon giving away money to a fraudster who claimed ownership in Myshkin’s wealth; interestingly, Myshkin was aware of the man’s fraud. He was the kind of man who wanted to help everyone despite the suffering it would bring him.

One of the key characteristics of Myshkin was that he loved in sympathy. There were two women in the book that he claimed to have loved because of their low status in the society and their mental conditions. One of the women was neglected by society because she was raped by a man and hence, she was entitled ‘impure’ in reagars to the societal standing. The other woman was one of the main characters of the book – Nastasya Fillippovna.

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Nastasya was everything that a woman would do to go against the rules written in thin air to fit in the community. She ran from her weddings more than three times and she did so in the fear of destroying her and the groom’s life. She was always confused but also very cunning in a way to keep two men always ready to marry her; one of the men was Myshkin. Roghozhin was the other man and also the man who loved Nastasya to the extent of hinting that the suffering that Nastasya has caused in the due course of her bewilderment of choosing the right man, he would kill her the next day both of them got married.

A reddit comment does justice in defining her character.

Myshkin considered Nastasya to be a poor soul in a dreadful condition and he loved her with thorough sympathy to the limit of being scared of her. In my understanding, he was afraid because he knew he wouldn’t be able to help himself to go on and marry her if she ever did decide to sit upon the decision of choosing him. It was almost like he couldn’t help his nature of helping people neglecting his own desires.

Myshkin’s character is inquisitive to me in a way that he would burst up at conversations of spirituality, morality and faith but wouldn’t know the path of conversation regarding handling and decision making. In fact, I think he made some of the worst decisions by brazenly visiting the people the very next day after they had shamed him the previous day. Obviously, his visits were about reconciliation and apologies.

On the day of his birthday, a small surprise party was organised at his shelter. It was in this party that a man named Lebedev talked about the theory of quantitative sins through the story of ‘eating the monk or the infant’. Our Myshkin went hand in hand with the theory, and perfectly fit the theory.

Eat the Monk or The Infant?

“With the twelfth century and with the centuries that neighbour it on either side. For then, as the scribes write and confirm, universal famines in mankind visited it every two years or at least three years, so that given such a state of affairs man even resorted to cannibalism, though keeping it a secret. One such cannibal, approaching old age, announced of his own accord and without any compulsion that throughout his long and poverty-stricken life he had killed and eaten personally and in the deepest secret sixty monks and several infants — about six of them…” “…As for lay adults, as it turned out, he never lay a finger on any of them with purpose.”

Whether or not something this gruesome could be true for the twelfth century is not the point of our discussion. Cannibalism is way different than eating animals because of empathy. Even among animals, not all species are built in a way to eat their own kind.

As for the immediate question as to ‘why the monks?’, another man in the party said:

“It’s probably that in the twelfth century monks were all there was to eat, because only monks were fat.”

This is a baffling statement with no solid foundation or evidence as such. But the statistics of these statements being factually accurate didn’t matter. Lebedev further continues:

“It is evident that, tormented by terrible pangs of conscience (for the old man was religious), and in order to reduce his sin as much as possible, as a kind of experiment, on six occasions he exchanged his monkish diet for secular fare…” “…And then, in the first place, as I perceive it, an infant is too small, that’s to say, not large enough in size, as over a certain period of time the number of lay infants would have to be three, nay, five times greater than the number of monks, so that the sin, if it were reduced on the other hand, would at least be increased on the other, if not in the matter of quality, then in the matter of quantity.”

The old man was a religious and duty bound fellow who was quoted to have a guilty conscience because of his cannibalistic activities towards holy monks. This notion sent him into spirals of repentance and regret. He believed for certain that he had embarked hell upon himself by eating holy monks. Therefore, in the light of performing an experiment, he decidedly started eating infants — six to be precise. This way, according to him, he wasn’t ending a holy life but rather a new life which hadn’t yet chosen a path of holiness and faith.

But this wasn’t redemptive to the old man’s conscience because of the infants’ nutritional value i.e. where he ate one monk, he would have to eat at least five infants. Therefore, as Lebedev stated it that the old man’s sins would increase instead of decreasing as he had hoped because of the ‘quantity’ of sins. In the eyes of Lebedev, eating a holy man is less grave of a sin than to eat numerous number of infants. The old man also realised that in trying to reduce his sins and in following a path that he presumed was going to relinquish his sins only increased it many folds.

Taking this and implementing it into a common man’s life, it makes sense. The sins that bind us to law are ‘grave’ and ‘notorious’, and the sins that would lead the mankind to a presumed hell. And same hell is also reserved for people dishonoring their own religion and neglecting the ‘sacredness’ of their faith.

In the same sense of eating a number of infants, plunging yourself into repentance journey and trying to free the guilt-ridden conscience by following rituals of sorts or forcibly trying to act kindly with nothing but the fear of hell in mind. In the hope of reducing the intensity of your sins by performatively following what is only assumed in your mind to reduce your sins, you will end up in a loop of repentance for the mere display of the former repentance. This loop is drawn around the fear of redemptive punishments post death or in the next birth.

Fear leads the hand of a faithful person crushed under the guilty vehemence, and pushes him over the edge into the abyss of forever deploration. The mind is a wicked place for a believer because it not only binds your freedom of thought but also attaches you to the fear of non-believing.

Faith wasn’t built on the foundation of fear but rather of love; faith wasn’t supposed to be so enragingly binding to the minds which are meant to think beyond limits.

As another line in The Idiot goes:

Also, I would, as expected, blame my decision making skills for letting someone walk all over me. I would hate myself at times to be dumb founded enough to not be able to see through someone who was simply as incompatible as water is with an electric switch. But as it turns out it’s not the case. This never was about my naivety or my incompatibility to recognise the wrong in people. Let me try to break this down.

JUMPING TO SHOW MYSELF

I am not an indirect person and definitely, not a secretive person. Sometimes, I would be smart enough to understand my need to indeed be a little mysterious to some people but still it’s not an instinct for me to not always be an open book. In fact, I take pride in the fact that I am an open book but it comes at a cost.

When I talk to a new person, my first thought isn’t much real towards trying to examine and understand the next person as much as it is towards me trying to make sure that the other person is able to see me for me. This particular situation has usually arisen whenever I have tried to talk to someone that I liked, the crushes of sorts. Rather than trying to ignite the understanding between him and me, I would evidently incline towards voicing my personality in every way possible.

And the beforehand clarification also stands firm that I, in no way, want to make myself or any of the readers start the over-exhausting process of ‘analysing’ people that we may or may not have a chance to ever even talk to again. My point here remains that in situations where you and I can deem it necessary for someone to become a huge part of our lives which is also why I am talking about crushes in particular.

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This particular instinct of me trying to display myself as if I have only got this one meeting with him is right and wrong equally. The only right thing is that he gets the chance to understand me for me without a mask that we will have to carve out in future meetings. The only wrong thing is that I wouldn’t get to know him as deeply, I wouldn’t be able to understand him equally.

Another one of my fears for this self-display is that I completely forget about my past experience with a person who was exactly the same as this new person, because I am too busy trying to show myself. All the precautions and all the skeptical steps that I had promised I would take are then forgotten only to resurface when it’s too late and when I will again hurl myself into the guilt-trip and self-blame.

I was able to map out this series of events and throw away the practice of self-display to some extent. I have ever since been able to be surrounded by great people. I, now, automatically hold dear conversations with people who pronounce in any way to show compatibility to understand ‘me for me’.

However, none of this is the major point of this essay.

‘FOREVER’ FIGHT of choosing the right person

The ‘forever’ fight implies towards the fact that no matter how deep my analysis for him goes, the fight will either go on or will be won with a treaty. I call it a forever fight because the right person isn’t really a single personality that you choose as of today. Even if he is everything I need right now, I know it for a fact that he and I will have to fight forever to remain the right person for each other. This is valid for two reasons.

First is where I change. The second is where he changes.

I am not a machine and I am not programmed to behave one way for the whole of my life. In fact, I have seen major changes in me in the past two years with respect to, without exaggeration, everything. And I know for a fact that the people I had considered to be my people then for the rest of my holy life, will nowhere be able to stand the sight of me now. Not because of despise but because of change. Because of the new formed incompatibility.

The changes make me feel that the people from the past have stayed too far off and I don’t think I will ever be able to catch up to them. And mind you, none of these people are evil for me in any way. The only change is the change — the healthy and completely natural change that you and I will always encounter in life when we keep growth as a constant.

I don’t have to be the only one to change. He can change, and I am sure that he will. We both will. The fight will go on. It’s not a fight that we will fight with weapons, we will bind it with the promise to always have space to adjust to each other's changes.

The only learning is to always be ready for a change. If someone is worth it, change a bit. We are all humans here.

I touch on the topic of sins and justice particularly because I recently remembered a line from a book by this author who believed in no justice because he saw the peace of mind of a mouse who doesn’t understand the concept of justice or revenge. As much as I noticed, every act of justice is driven by vengeance and it seeks to see pain as well. It believes in inflicting pain in the return of pain. It is a system of humans to bring torture to the ones who torture others and to seek revenge off the sinners. And these sinners are either sinners in spite or sinners with no other view of the world. I will talk about this with the example of a woman who murdered his husband because he cheated on her. If I stay in my human’s perspective I will forgive none of the three people involved in this act but as an alien, I see no sense of inflicting pain. A man slept with a woman. That is what it was, an orderly human behavior. But this other woman just got vengeful and angry, and in a moment she stabbed the man in rage. She dropped the knife the very next second and screamed, ‘NO!’ But what would it change? And asking the people who knew her, they were happy to an extent and implied her route was wrong. But tell me now, didn’t she act on her humanly instincts as well? So, she was just as justified? Then why is she being hanged for murder? They are saying that’s how justice would work here. But they haven’t put a rapist behind bars for a very long time. And as a human, I have seen people outrage and feeling mine burst out as well. As an alien, I have given up for humans all together. And that is what the sinners, philosophers and animals have done. I will come back to this line later on. The other kind of sinners are the ones who see no other view of the world. No, they are not just the ones who think that life is nihilistic. But also the ones who understand how their acts affects others and how everything they do is going to derange people’s souls. But they have given up empathy, control of the self, and they have given up on the world’s redemption. Some sinners hate themselves and want themselves to stop, guided by the moral sense of good of others. But they have known the world from the eyes of a sinner, they saw the people who loathe them and ones who somewhere try to make sense of their actions, the ones who try to find them, the ones who try to stay away from them, the ones who want to kill them, etc. enough for them to count themselves away from a normal human altogether.

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A serial killer has decided to forget the morals and duties, and just act on his own tendencies. He has kidnapped several women and murdered them. He claims he enjoys the act and has no regrets, when he is taken under custody. As a human, I do not understand this man and I curse him with the worst punishment. But as an alien, I see he has given up on the world. I, in no way, wish to sympathize with this man even as an alien. But he has given up on the sense of duties, human boundations, and the limitations that the mind causes. Rather than expanding his capability and making the intelligent things happen with his mind, he rather just lets himself indulge somewhere in the between and expand skillfully into something that the human texts advise against. These texts and morals that humans so incessantly stick with, they do not yet know, with evidence, where they came from. They follow these aesthetics because they think this will make the world a better place and the mind more at peace. For the latter, I see no sense of shutting off instincts. The former, yes, humans must shut off their senses. But then how will these go hand in hand? They have created two completely different dynamics to be achieved. I do not know how they will fulfill both. Up until now, they have compromised one or the other. A father has forgotten the peace of mind in the sense of keeping his children and wife happy. And a murderer has killed his uncle making the world a worse place. Me, myself coming from a different planet, severely believe that these notions are worthless. Either there is a flaw in the formation of these beings or there is a grievous misconception in their beliefs. And with beliefs, I am not implying religious or spiritual at all. I am talking of a belief that every human follows on this planet. They think of kindness, selflessness, humbleness, forgiveness, disgust with killer blood, and respect to anyone they don’t know, as the ideal way of survival. Asking a bunch of these beings about their beliefs, atheist or not, these are qualities they all agreed with. But considering they are themselves just flawed, I see no reason to believe any of this to be true either.

There must be something severely wrong in the virtues or the teachings here to have come to the conclusion of thinking of the world along with selfish desires. But my human self is telling me I am beating around the bush and not understanding that thinking of the world is also one of the selfish desires in itself. I am nodding a little. From where I come, they do not know of emotions and instincts. They know of survival and intelligence. But coming here, I wonder how we were surviving with intelligence without instincts? Why did we never want to rape, kill, force, steal, swindle with others? I come from a planet with no sins. There are no sins. And we haven’t cried or smiled ever. I do not know how these people do it here. They laugh when an intelligent joke is told. They smile when they see someone they care about. Their physical actions show their emotions clearly, so it is pretty easy to tell. They cry and wail when someone dies or someone they love leaves. I thought this was all that could make them cry. But here I saw my human self cry when she was alone. She cried when there was too much on her plate. She cried when she couldn’t go to sleep. She cried when she hurt herself physically. She cried hearing of a painful death of someone she doesn’t even know. I can not tell her emotions behind them all, but somewhere I know it’s self-pity and hurt in some. As an alien, I do not cry. I look at things critically and judge people on the basis of their results. Humans think that’s the best way of being. But I don’t think I, being the ideal being, even know that I am the best way of being. I stay emotionless on most occasions. They tell me it’s good to be this way. But I do know now because someone here told me a world with no sins is also a worse place to be in.

A world with no evil is not ideal either. I do not know what you humans want or what exactly you have understood in this sense of living. One of you said the world you live in is already ideal. For once in my whole life as an alien, I was confused. I hadn’t known this emotion. You told me that a balance is needed to make an ideal world. And it is indeed true that the beings will never know the world that is ideal. And the being wouldn’t survive if the world wasn’t ideal. I argued that my world survives… but it does not have the balance of good and evil. You told me that it doesn’t apply to me, because us, aliens, haven’t even come to the comprehension of good and evil. We are not the world of good and bad because there is no good without the knowledge of bad. Without knowing or exploring the sins, we just exist and act in a way that was always defined automatically among us. I said, it is supposed to be better either way though. You said that who will define better when there is only one way we know and that now because I have seen evil, I would be restless in my world. I pretended to laugh (we never laugh at our planet) and said that how would that be. You told me that the opposites exist because of the existence of both. And now thinking that my world was good and ideal, I had created evil in my world. I felt fear for the first time… it was nice. You told me that what I lacked was the sorrow, grief, hate and regret. I said that it was better that way. You told me that I can say it now because I have known these emotions. It’s because I, now, know the negative that I can identify the positive and appreciate its existence. The world created with the realization of being ideal is futile. The people need to know the right, they need to chase the right. They have to let the spite take over. They have to make justice a moral aesthetic? No, I start disagreeing again. I can do this all over again. This is extremely absurd.

I saw sense for a second and now again, I don’t.

I had only recently read Amrita Imroz by Uma Trilok, and my thoughts on the same had been spiraling ever since. Uma was a friend to Amrita, starting as an admirer of her writing, who saw it up close how Amrita and Imroz were devoted not to each other but to each other’s souls and how it seemed mythically surreal to witness a bond so pure.

a little about Amrita and Imroz

Amrita Pritam, an Indian novelist and poet, lived her life without ever leaving her prime, constantly revolting against societal biases and Imroz (or Inderjeet Singh), a painter and a poet, spent his life adoring Amrita’s prime and living with her even after she died of a long illness in 2005. In fact, he had muttered to Uma at Amrita’s cremation, “Why be sad? Nature did what I couldn’t — free her from physical pain. A soul broke away from her body, to become free again.”

Amrita and Imroz were two inviduals in one who were in constant mutiny with the society. Imroz was younger than Amrita, which was already frowned upon by the society and Amrita was married to Pritam Singh before she ever met Imroz. To top that, both of them lived together without ever getting married. Imroz’s exact words at being asked the reason for this by Uma was, “Couples who are not sure of their love for each other need social sanction… We expect the society to take a decision for us or put a stamp of approval on our decision, only when we don’t want to exercise our own free will and do not take responsibility of our own actions.”

There was an instance where Amrita talked about the ‘pain of creation’, she talked about how when Kunti from Mahabharat created something so pure as a God’s child i.e. Karan, she had to abandon him because of the fear of society. Amrita claimed that she didn’t want to live like that, she didn’t want to blanket her relationship with approval from society — she didn’t want to abandon something so pure because some people shook their heads.

And to define how they lived their life in togetherness for forty years, is a whole different endeavour.

“The two made a very touching impression. Amrita and Imroz sitting together, serving each other, eating together, Imroz nursing her. Sometimes talking, sometimes silent, sometimes thoughtful with a distant look.” “They both spend their time at home in their own rooms — she , in hers , writing, and he, in his, painting. The doors remain open. There is the fragrance of each other’s presence but there is no interference.” — Uma Trilok in Amrita Imroz.

Imroz was a painter and he had decorated their house with his paintings and art work like it was the part of the house design — he would write with paint on lamps, on tables, on walls, everywhere. He would create art for Amrita with every new breath she took. Amrita herself would make out a poetry after all the times he looked at her. She wrote about him in metaphors that I have personally gushed over.

About Imroz she once wrote: (english translation)

“I can patch a sheet if torn, but can i stitch the sky?

A husband dies, I remarry. A lover dies, can I live?”

“My suffering is the lesser truth when weighed against the greater truth… the happiness of my life with Imroz.”

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An instance described a scene where Imroz had taken Amrita to a terrace of a building from where the Yamuna was visible.

Amrita: Have you ever come here with anyone else?

Imroz: To me it appears that I have never visited anywhere with anyone else — ever.

There was this beautiful line which came through when Imroz was asked about how he remained so humbled in the relationship, and how his ego didn’t take the best of him: “Prem gali saankari ja me do na samaye.” (The love lane is narrow, two cannot pass through it.)

imroz’s philosohpy

I rather enjoyed Imroz’s philosophy of life. He didn’t much believe in anything else except for love, not just for Amrita but towards every one. He had also said that when love brings peace one doesn’t talk harshly to anybody because there is no harshness within the one. I absolutely loved this paragraph of his:

“Do you know Rabia Basri? She was a famous saint who deleted a sentence from Quran, which said ‘hate the devil’. When asked why she did so, she replied, ‘I have no hatred in my heart and I see no devil,’ because, in her heart, only love prevailed. By reading Buddhist scriptures we do not become Buddhas, and we do not become Krishnas by bowing before him. By bowing just for the sake of bowing, we become smaller. We have to invoke Buddhas and Krishnas within us. When they are awakened where the devil be found?”

This philosophy only reminds me of a line I heard somewhere that when you love something so passionately, so indulgently, you will also overcome the fear of death because it wouldn’t matter if you died after that— for that moment you would be so fulfilled.

the bond between Amrita and Imroz

Amrita’s and Imroz’s bond wasn’t built on bricks of responsibilities but on bricks of detachment from the world and devotion with each other. And mind you, the latter one is much harder to fulfill in life. That is why people initially sitting on the claims of ‘forever’ often let their relationship crumple when society or their own biases interfere.

To Amrita and Imroz, ‘love was to get rooted, to grow, and to blossom in the beloved’s ground.’ They didn’t think they were perfect, because it was a shuddering though that ‘perfect’ was something so solid that something can be added or removed from it. They had room to grow, to sprawl around, to find themselves and to fall into each other’s arms in the end.

Souls could be immortal, but not the bodies that carry their weight.

Amrita died in 2005.

She wrote a poem for Imroz when she knew her end was near. The english translation is at the bottom.

“मैं तैनू फ़िर मिलांगी
कित्थे ? किस तरह पता नई
शायद तेरे ताखियल दी चिंगारी बण के
तेरे केनवास ते उतरांगी
जा खोरे तेरे केनवास दे उत्ते
इक रह्स्म्यी लकीर बण के
खामोश तैनू तक्दी रवांगी

जा खोरे सूरज दी लौ बण के
तेरे रंगा विच घुलांगी
जा रंगा दिया बाहवां विच बैठ के

तेरे केनवास नु वलांगी
पता नही किस तरह कित्थे
पर तेनु जरुर मिलांगी
जा खोरे इक चश्मा बनी होवांगी
ते जिवें झर्नियाँ दा पानी उड्दा
मैं पानी दियां बूंदा
तेरे पिंडे ते मलांगी
ते इक ठंडक जेहि बण के
तेरी छाती दे नाल लगांगी
मैं होर कुच्छ नही जानदी
पर इणा जानदी हां
कि वक्त जो वी करेगा
एक जनम मेरे नाल तुरेगा
एह जिस्म मुक्दा है
ता सब कुछ मूक जांदा हैं
पर चेतना दे धागे

कायनती कण हुन्दे ने
मैं ओना कणा नु चुगांगी
ते तेनु फ़िर मिलांगी!”

“I will meet you yet again
How and where? I don’t know that.
Perhaps I could be a
figment of your imagination
Or maybe I will draw myself
As a mysterious line that shouldn’t be
On your canvas
Quietly, I will stare at you
And I will meet you again.

Perhaps I will become a ray of sunshine,
And revel in your colours
Or maybe I will paint me on your canvas
I know not how or where
but I will surely meet you.

Maybe I will become a spring
And the water that sprouts from it
I’ll rub its droplets on your body
I’ll become the coolness from it
That rests on your burning chest
I don’t know anything else
But I know this much
That no matter what time does
This life will walk along with me.

This body? It perishes.
Everything does.
But the threads of memory
Are woven such
That the universe resides in its every bead
I will pick those tiny beads
I will weave the threads
And then.. I will meet you again.”

After I have made my feeble attempt at trying to convince you that I don’t read contemporary biographies, I would like to tell you about Maxim Gorky’s My Childhood.

A little about Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov was a Russian and Soviet writer alive between the mid 19th and mid 20th century. He was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. His life was renowned as that of a socialist. From all I gathered, he was a restless man who needed to ask questions and answer them himself if he didn’t like what he was told. Gorky was actively involved in Russia’s geo-politics of the time, on and off supporting Soviet Government.

His childhood seems to have shaped the major part of his personality. His father died when Gorky was ten or eleven years of age. Soon after, he and his mother shifted at the maternal house. According to the book, Gorky’s mother ran away after a few months and returned after several months or it could have been years. Between this time period, a lot happened to Gorky’s eleven year old self. We’ll now talk about that ‘lot’.

The ‘lot’ that happened with Gorky in his childhood

When he and his mother moved at his maternal grandparents house, he was a shy and extremely introverted child. He had a hard time trying to find his people for the environment of that house was more violent and troubled than he had ever seen with his parents. The constant quarrels and bitterness bothered him a lot. It bothered his mother more, if not equally, which also led to her leaving that house behind and reluctantly, her son.

The men in that house were portrayed more violent than women in the book and I remember reading three implications where it was made obvious that the husbands of the house were brutally violent with their wives. One instance also clarified that one of Gorky’s uncles beat his wife to death. And I might be a little juvenile in these topics but it did come as a shock to me to read that no substantial legal inquires were ever made.

Gorky, being only a kid and not yet dwelling in men’s ego, was horrified at the sight of domestic violence and frequent ‘thrashing’ of the children of the house. The grandfather was the worst of all, and he was the one to take the responsibility of thrashing the children whenever they misbehaved or disobeyed. Obviously, Gorky soon became the one to be thrashed the most.

Further, he found himself confiding in his grandmother more than any other family member. She wasn’t all flowers to him, but lesser thorns. She would be the one to always answer his insistent questions about why grandfather was beating his cousin, why did the uncle kill his wife, where did the mother go, etc.

The environment of the house, however, did not transform Gorky’s personality to become like his cousins. He only turned more rebellious and less quiter. He would try to avenge his grandmother after grandfather slapped her or he would try to stray away further than he was ordered.

After a few acts of fanatic physical violence between the grandfather and his sons over property distribution, the sons separated. It wasn’t a great relief to Gorky because he only became lonelier without his cousins. However, the grandfather and Gorky started sharing a few heartfelt interactions in the book at this point.

Further, Gorky’s mother came back and not a huge explanation was provided to Gorky or the grandparents. Soon, the mother took over the whip of the house and turned out to be more rebellious and moreover, successfully rebellious. She remarried to a man from the neighbourhood but that wasn’t a great marriage like her previous one. Her bond with Gorky had bittered and he didn’t find himself on the same page as her, but still loved her deeply enough to try and stab his stepfather after he was accused of cheating on her and also beating her.

Soon, Gorky’s mother died and he left that house a little while after that.

I am, now, going to talk about the philosophy on God that Gorky, in his childhood, understood in a very naive yet speculative manner.

The evil and good God in My Childhood

It’s almost poetic how evil and good God portrayed themselves so well into the grandfather’s and grandmother’s character. Gorky called the good God as grandmother’s God and the evil fearful God as grandfather’s God.

“How is it that the grandfather can not see the Good God?” Gorky asked himself this question at various instances. Grandfather’s God was the the God in the books, the God described in the history. Grandmother’s God was the one she preached with love and nothing less, the God who was present in angelic miracles and fair disposition.

I am going to quote what I would presume was the best line I read in the whole book:

“…even in church, I made the distinction as to which God was being addressed. Whatever the priest recited — that was of Grandfather’s God. But the choir always sang to Grandmother’s God.”

Here, Gorky implied that the priest (the spiritual books) was what Grandfather’s God embodied and ‘that god aroused in Gorky’s mind a feeling of terror and unpleasantness’. He voiced his view on this God by saying that this perception of divinity didn’t have devotees as much as it had subjects. This God didn’t love his creation and he only looked at them with the eye of menace and cruelty. This God wasn’t fair and had no proximity with the humans, whatsoever.

But the choir, the hopeful hymes and songs, were the part of Grandmother’s God. This God was the ‘dear friend of all creation’. This God oozed of hope and prosperity, and judged his people on the basis of sins and good deeds. Grandmother’s God had stories of forgiveness, angels and miracles associated with him, and was more colourful than Grandfather’s God. Grandmother had also narrated an incident to Gorky about the time when she saw an angel herself helping the priest in the church.

The most interesting part was that at times, the grandfather and the grandmother would be talking about the same St. Nicholas but with polar opposite emotions in their eyes. Grandfather had a plead buried in his lashes, and the grandmother would have a happiness buried in hers. This is more interesting to me because it also implies that maybe this is how religions came into picture — to divide the singular entity into two entirely different beings as you see fit.

The philosophy of good and evil god has recently caught attention, and is greatly argued upon. And this is my entire submission to the argument, if you may.

A tribute to Maxim Gorky

Gorky didn’t write in a way to please the readers or in a way to show anyone how hard or absurd some parts of his childhood were. I believe that his way of storytelling was very raw and greatly formulated in a way to show the nicer world the ugly world. In ways, he talked about things not so directly associated with him but with philosophy, current affairs, domestic violence, supression, etc. I appreciate My Childhood more because of the lens of a child that the book was narrated in. The perspective of the world through the eyes of the kid is like an alien’s view — unbiased.

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