Readers Write In #791: To Go In Or To Go Out – Part Two

By Jeeva P

The first time a non-fiction book that made me completely suspicious and cynical of everything around me was Capitalism: A Ghost Story written by Arundhati Roy.

There was another book on the Narmada Bachao Andolan by her which made her case against the construction of a set of fifty or so dams across the River Narmada. Her accusation made so much sense to an already left-leaning angry, young man like me regardless of the authenticity of the facts, the accuracy and reliability of the stats that she had gathered to support her position. The reason for my readiness to accept her argument was only one thing – her language – the exquisite choice of her words and turns of her phrases and the way her language seamlessly blends her personal ideas with the political.

For someone who has already felt lonely and angst-ridden at atrocious things happening all around him while almost everyone else looked like they are either fully at peace or completely indifferent to the ‘inevitabilities’ of this system, Roy’s literary fury compounded by her almost complete moral isolation from her literary fraternity has never failed to strike a chord with me. Having been born and brought up in an educated, middle-class household, I have always felt sick of the tunnel vision, the self-centeredness that has often blinkered the perspectives of my immediate circle when it came to politics and society. Over the years, I have subconsciously grown to hate certain ideas that our educated middle-classes proudly wear on their sleeves, such as their hypocritical love for APJ Abdul Kalam (that only reeks of their utter laziness and ignorance when it comes to following and understanding contemporary politics), their endorsement of soft-Hindutva in issues dealing with minorities, the loud and resounding cheers that emanate from them whenever the government trims subsidies or welfare schemes or reservations meant for the poor, the underprivileged and the traditionally oppressed, etc.

Despite enough Marxist gyaan on how only the prevalent economic and social systems often determine and condition the ideas, consciousness and opinions of the masses and how it is not often their fault whenever they hold a dangerous or a regressive opinion, my antipathy towards our educated, upper-middle classes when it came to politics had never really waned. Having grown up with such a mindset (sometimes to a fault), reading Roy’s non-fiction that often take a vitriolic and a highly contemptuous view of India’s educated middle classes, their lifestyle and their attitudes has only served as a wish-fulfilment for me like how I drew vicarious satisfaction when a commoner like ‘Mudhalvan’ Arjun took corrupt politicians, bureaucrats and scheming entrepreneurs to task in Shankar’s best ever work in Tamil Cinema. But as years progressed, my hate for the middle-classes sometimes grew to unreasonable levels for things such as say, on how they even name their children – Pultheesh, Lithun, Tharkeesh,etc. Some other names of today’s children sound like portmanteaus (for example: Poornitha – portmanteau of Poornima and Anitha) of two different yesteryear Sanskrit names forcibly caged together in a desperate attempt to flaunt their so-called creativity and inventiveness in coming up with ‘modern’ names. These names they never realized, ended up defeating their very purpose – recallability is the first criterion for any good name in my proud opinion – often approaching the difficulty levels of well-conceived passwords that we use for our online bank accounts that demand secrecy and the highest levels of privacy.

My dislike for the middle-classes kept growing in my late 20s like Woody Allen’s mounting fury while standing at a queue at a charlatan who had the guts to criticize his guru Ingmar Bergman in Annie Hall (correct me if I am wrong) and as a result, after a point I couldn’t stop hating even innocuous things such as middle-class obsessions towards glitzy malls, gated communities, ridiculously expensive popcorn at multiplexes,etc. Roy’s apt description of gated communities – in one of her books as the culmination of one of the upper middle-classes’ successful attempts at seceding from the decrepitude and squalor of their largely impoverished nation – only served ultimately to vindicate my anger.

Anger, regardless of whether it is righteous or misplaced is not a very easy burden to carry. The revenue of the Indian Premier League keeps growing every year to hundreds of crores of rupees while its organizer BCCI, run by private businessmen having been listed as a charitable organization is not liable to pay any kind of taxes. With already so much anger boiling inside me against the perpetually burgeoning super-rich class of India (constituting 1 percent of the population but owning close to 40 percent of the nation’s wealth), news like these only served towards exacerbating my antipathy preventing me from enjoying even the simplest joys I derive from watching cricket – the fluidity of a Virat Kohli innings or the fearless intensity of a typical Yashaswi Jaiswal batting masterclass while facing even the toughest international bowlers.

Anger, bubbling hot, perennial and something that never achieves its very purpose, ends up not only poisoning one’s soul but also succeeds in disturbing one’s very basic mental foundations. The neatly stacked set of non-fiction books written by David Harvey, Joseph Stiglitz, John Perkins, Karl Marx and Peter S Goodman that adorn the right corner of my bookshelf no doubt have contributed to broadening my perspective, improved my understanding of the contemporary political economy and have ultimately led to one most important achievement – the moulding of a very empathetic conscience that can easily forgive its master just in case he loses his job on account of this never-ending economic recession wrought by unscrupulous, greedy capitalists.

But that unfortunately, is the only solace I can draw from this otherwise precarious condition. Apart from that this apparently enlightened Jeeva is a mere caricature of his hero Kamal Haasan in Sathya who wants to bark at his happy-go-lucky friends at the sight of even the slightest injustice,

“Enna suthi nadakra aniyaayam, exploitation, idhelaam enna poruthuka mudila.. I am angry and I want all of you to be angry!”

***

From the above description I can understand if my readers assume that Jeeva in person is nothing but an angry, volcanic. arm-chair revolutionary ready to spew lavas of Marxist aphorisms at the slightest provocation. But nothing could be farther from the truth. I have a very healthy circle of friends who often make it a point to invite me first for any outing they plan, for any Saturday night-outs and most importantly have my phone number starred in their mobile phones in order to give me a call and vent out whenever they are in any kind of personal or office-related crisis. How?

Everything that I have recorded here with respect to my antipathy towards the middle-classes is confined only to these pages and I barely allow the simmering vitriol to rise to the surface whenever I am in direct contact with these people. Do you consider it as some sort of an achievement? I do, at least to an extent. And there is one more thing to add – even if I sometimes let my anti-middle-class bigotry get the better of me, there is a very particular, well-practised way I do it. I sugar-coat my opinions as much as possible and make sure my point is put across without causing any personal offence to my listener. I understand that this essay is turning out to be my first ever vanity project but my readers need to understand that I am struggling to find a way to convey the ultimate aim of this essay.

Everytime I pick a non-fiction book to read, I don’t venture out without the safety gear kept within my reach – another fiction book to read in parallel. There is a scene in one of Goundamani-Senthil’s less famous films where Senthil lets out a laugh every time before inhaling a puff of his cigarette. When someone comes and asks him the reason behind his strange behaviour, Senthil responds, “A scientist abroad has confirmed that a puff of cigarette takes away three days from the life of a smoker. Another scientist has confirmed that a single act of laughing helps man to extend his lifespan by at least three days. So, I am just making sure that I compensate for whatever I lose by smoking”.

Why do I have to anoint my fiction books with the title of ‘my life-savers’? An essay written by my friend Wise Ass Fool in this blog asks a question – ‘Do you want to go within or without?’ Non-fiction in my opinion takes me out while fiction at least for me does the opposite. 

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Assume that you have just joined a new office and a few of your new colleagues have warned you to be wary about a particular person, name him X. They keep saying that X is a scheming guy who makes it a point to extract favors from you while offering you nothing in return. He is someone whom you should always stay away from also because he has been divorced on account of him having maltreated his wife and having cheated on her. Assume that you soon run into X and are forced to share a project with him. As you keep working with him for weeks together, you don’t find him as unscrupulous as your other colleagues have made him out to be. He is gentle, respectful and even affable with you. What do you do?

I have been thrust into situations mentioned above multiple times and I have at least three or four acquaintances like that who are for want of a better word – socially ostracized – but have managed to be on good terms with me. Of course, I grant that they never have made the list of my all-time best friends but they have – this is very important – very rarely caused me any harm as I had been cautioned about. 

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I recently had the opportunity to read a book titled Museum Of Innocence written by Orhan Pamuk. It is about a very rich industrialist Kemal ‘Bey’ who is already engaged to another very rich woman named Sibel. Even if he is not passionately in love with her, he very much likes her and is soon to be married. But as destiny would have it, he comes across an old relative of his named Fusun, a relatively poor girl but with great beauty and personality, almost half his age. Both of them are attracted to each other but Kemal finds her irresistible allowing her to become his eventual obsession. He on the one hand is unable to break his engagement with his fiance Sibel right away but on the other hand, he remains enthralled with Fusun at the same time. Fusun soon learns that he is cheating on her and disappears from his life altogether all of a sudden. A heartbroken Kemal loses all interest in life on account of Fusun’s disappearance and ends up estranging Sibel as well. Sibel soon calls off the wedding and the rest of the story follows how passionately Kemal tries to pursue and marry Fusun who by quirk of fate the reader later learns is married to another person. Out of 700 pages, almost 400 are dedicated to how Kemal is smitten by Fusun, how he follows her by ingratiating himself with her family and how much he values his passion for Fusun as he starts secretly spiriting away even her trivial possessions such as her kerchief, bottle caps, little dolls, etc. By the end of the book, Kemal manages to accumulate as many things as would fill an entire museum that he dedicates entirely to his memory of Fusun. 

Almost by the end of a hundred pages, I was instantly irked by the moral compass of the protagonist when he cheats both Sibel and Fusun and I wanted him to get his comeuppance as quickly as possible. But as Sibel breaks off her engagement with him, we slowly realize that Kemal’s obsession with Fusun is real and had there been no Sibel he would not have had to cheat her at all. He had continued his affair with Sibel only because he was not able to tell her the truth and hurt her right away. When Sibel calls off the wedding, he is in fact perfectly relieved and decides to pursue Fusun single-mindedly. 

There were a lot of takeaways for me from the story – love could strike you at any moment in your life and if it is so strong as to wreck the lives of you and your near and dear, it sometimes is not wholly your fault. Just like how Kishore leaves Ramya Nambeesan for Vijayalakshmi in Bharatiraja’s story of ‘Modern Love Chennai’, this story also explores the possibility of a happily married/engaged man who simply cannot resist the pulls and pressures of a love that is simply too ethereal and sometimes even intoxicating.

If there is a reason why I was able to continue with the story despite not much happening in it for the last four hundred pages or so, it was because I could relate to Kemal’s fixation with Fusun that propels him to even steal her things as to savor them in solitude with his touch. In adolescence, I too remember having been besotted with a Kerala girl who I always had considered above my league. I had never spoken to her till then but one fine day I had the opportunity to get her classwork notebook for copying on account of my absence. I still remember how hesitant I was to touch her notebook for my mind had attached some kind of an other-worldly importance to it. I remember wiping my hand before opening it and when I leafed across the pages, it felt like I alone had been bestowed with access to a very rare, mostly forbidden space to simple, ordinary mortals like me. When I returned the notebook to her directly with a half-formed “Thank you” hesitantly issuing from my lips, she gave me a very angelic smile that instantly catapulted a lowly soul like me to her supposed unimaginably, heavenly heights.

“Naa enga unga Kadavul enga nu yosichen! Aana indha poraamai unga elaarayum vida enna usarama aakiruchu!!”

My thalaivan’s lines in Ravanan to Aishwarya Rai which I saw after four years reminded me of that episode.

***

The novel raised a lot of questions in me. What if such an accidental obsession like Fusun had struck my life too? What would I have done had I been in Kemal’s position? Can warm, gentle love for a nice, good-looking woman withstand the ‘hurricanic’ pressures of a sudden, epiphanic love felt for another? I had a few answers but they simply weren’t enough. I probably would have informed Sibel right away that I am seeing a girl named Fusun and risked breaking her heart then and there. I certainly wouldn’t have cheated on Sibel and kept Fusun in the dark. My conscience, I know pretty well, is made of fibres of such delicacy that it would tear under the burden of cheating someone else for satisfying my own personal desires and hungers. But applying the same standard for a man of a different internal wiring like Kemal is very absurd in my humble opinion. All I can see from the novel is Kemal, though not outwardly honest, is not certainly made of vices that characterize adulterers and pathological liars. He is in my opinion a hapless man caught in a dilemma who is ready for a new birth but badly wants a peaceful and a painless death to occur to him in his previous life. 

So this is what I think I had wanted to convey – fiction in Wise Ass Fool’s words helps me to go inward, introspect and meditate upon myself. I discover in the process, weaknesses, flaws and strengths in me though how much of it I would be able to work on and remedy is a very moot question.

Having been raised by a strict father, I was often told that whenever I was not able to get good marks in a subject there was only one reason – my preparations just were not enough. There were plenty of exams in my college where despite my best preparations I was not able to score the best. There were plenty of grey areas – the question papers were incredibly tough or the books that I had been referring to were just not enough or I could have had a fever during my study holidays. But none of them mattered to my father – if I were ill during the exams, it was because I had consumed something which I was not supposed to (I admit dad, you weren’t this harsh and there were thankfully no such occasions to test you in this count, but bear with me I am trying to get a point across to my readers). If my books were not guiding me properly, I should have looked for the right books well before the exams had commenced. If the question papers were so tough, I should have started preparing according to him, at least a couple of weeks before when I had actually started preparing. 

If you look closely, people like my fathers were imposing strict standards to follow during our formative years and according to them, to use the hackneyed phrase there is only black and white and no grey zones in this world. And in today’s corporate professional arena too, the same could be said about our managers. If your application is malfunctioning, it is either due to your negligence or outright ignorance. There is no middle area where the application could have had to scale up to a huge volume of traffic it was not habituated to before. Or if it is an issue with your monitoring, it could never have been because you had to focus on another equally critical task at the same time. Capitalism does not want grey zones and to an extent I now realize my father had prepared me for this already.

But fiction is where one comes across situations where things could go wrong despite nobody’s fault or people who are not inherently evil are forced to do evil things. And this is where I now realize I have learnt to read people as flesh and blood individuals while non-fiction most of the time addresses people as classes or mobs or communities or societies whose behaviour may not completely reflect the complexity and the astonishing variety of flesh and blood individuals who actually form them.  

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So, for every page of non-fiction I read, my habit of reading at least two pages of literary fiction has in conclusion helped me to a great extent in keeping the dangerous forces in me in check. Fiction probably has given me an avuncular Samuthirakani-like exterior while succeeding at the same time in straitjacketing a Katradhu Tamizh Prabhakar keeping him confined to my innermost dungeons.

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So, my dear friend Wise Ass Fool, it is for you to decide now whether to go in or go out!!