Subtle Romanticisms {Part V }

The subtle romance with lonliness ::

Have you ever felt the need for a warm comforting hand on your back when you are broken down and when you are depressed ? Have you ever felt the need for someone to sit by and talk when you have nothing left to do ? Have you felt the need for someone to read your inner self and speak for you when you cant articulate words......if yes then you are romantic...

Have you ever sought ways out of the situation when you dont get the above things ?

I have talked with the mirror . I have talked with the walls and the cupboards , the stones and the rocks and the skies for the last 20 years and it feels good at times and it is a very efficient way at times to get out of depression but only if your placebo effect and the illusory world is strong enough to believe that it is reality.


If you ever feel the need for a warm comforting touch when you are in deep traumas or are depressed then do what I have always done..it works....

Sit silently and think taht it is not you who is sitting but imagine two persons inside you. I think of my right side and my left side to be the two different persons. Then think that all your woes and depressions are of the person on the left and not of the one on the right. THne menatlly detach yourself from the right and think that it is someone else .

Then imagine that the hand of the right is someone else's who loves you a lot and puit it lightly on your left hand. If your imagination is strong enough then you will feel that it is someone else comforting you. It gives rise to a great amount of joy inside.

Then take your right hand and put it lightly on your left shoulder and then press it down slightly. It feels great if your process of virtual detachment inside your mind has been strong enough. It will almost feel as if someone you love has on its own volition read your dpressions and has opted to comfort you by putting its hand on you.

Try repeating the above from the left on a the right. It will feel like reciprocating back to the kind touch of the right.

You will almost stop feeling alone if your imagination is strong enough . You will coexist with two identities inside you and which can talk to each other when either is depressed and can either can put its head on the other's shoulders to feel the warmth of love.

Romanticism is what arises from within without any external motivation. Its a feeling of love an joy that fountains deep within or when you look at the four maxwell's equations listed out together or imagine playing piano in the foothills of alps on a snowy morning.

Subtle Romanticisms {Part IV }

A fragment of my explicit romanticisms , for those who can read Hindi and and acquainted with slight Urdu terminology ::

Woh jheel si ankhein , jinme zamana duub jaye ,
Woh bikhri zulfein , jinme chand chuup jaye.

Woh suni sham , woh saji mehfil , woh bolte sannate ,
Tanhai yeh zindagi ki , sirf ayine ka sath ho ,

Mil saka na jo chaha , toh raste ko manzil samajh lo.


Anirbit
18th February 2007

Subtle romanticisms {Part III}

There is a subtle romantic poet in everyone of us and it is absolutely beyond my understanding as to why the people with high IQ tend to kill this instince within themselves and continue to look down upon the people who let these instincts manifest. I have heard a milion times from such people the lectures regarding the diplomacy and the sophistication achieved in public life by not allowing the emotions to rule actions and by not manifesting the poetic instincts. Anyway since I dont belong to this upper strata I really dont understand what all this is supposed to mean.

ANyway whether fortunately or unfortunately my life has brought me to close interactions with many of the people of this upper strata. The best of such interactions was with a guy called Parijat Sen . { In case you dont know him then give a Google search on his name and follow the links that come up from the HBCSE web-page and soem newspapers..you shall know all about this magnificient guy I have got to know..}

The point is that Parijat although has almost all the typical features associated with that strata of indian intellectuals recently did something very astonishing and I would like to record it. This hard core proffessional academic on the New Year ( 1st January 2007 ) sent me a poem on sms .

I had later come to know that he had sent that poem to some of his other friends too and I did feel sad about it. But anyway the poem ( although very short..) he wrote was great ( Atleast I find it so ) and highly unnatural from the rest of his character . I type down below the poem that he wrote ::

" A year to come with joy and love ,
A year to touch the skies above ,
A year to love , A year to care ,
A year to remember I am there.

Happy New Year "

Subtle Romanticisms { Part II }

Imagine the following things :

1. A large cottage house on the foothills of the alps. Its snowing outside and the weather is slightly damp and humid. There is a central hall in the middle of the cottage which has a glass dome and large glass windows . The snow covered alps are visible from the windows and sparkling flakes of snow are sticking to the glass windows . The fir trees far away are swaying to the gentle wind and the flakes are getting replenished as soon as they are getting blown away. The slight drizzle of the rain sounds like a distant murmurs rising from aeon's of nostalgia.

In the centre of this large hall there is a large grand piano . It is made of black-brown mahogany wood. The rain cleansed sunlight from the far away hills sparkled and diffracted through the snow flakes hit the mahogany wood and set it to glow. A sombre glow of the wood like a deep thought shine of smile on the face of a knowledgeable person who has stood centuries to witness life and earth.

Someone comes into the room and strikes a key. A deep mellow sound resonates across the room and echoes across the alps like a subtle truth reverberated through the approval of ages of thoughts.

The piano starts to play in the central hall and the sound is purified by the shimmer of snow filtered sunlight streaming in through the glass dome high above.

Subtle romanticisms { Part I }

I have always believed that what essentially forms the core of my self and my truest identity is my sense of beauty. I have always had a sensitivity for beauty. Its obviously a very deep question as to "What is beauty?" . Perhaps the like of Keats in the "Ode to an Greecian Urn " , "Truth is beauty , Beauty is truth" is a very hard hitting statement . But I think that it is more of a pessimism and placebo effects rather than a true appreciation of beauty. The truth is that few millions of children in India die because of malnutrition. What is the beauty on it ? Or is it some kind of a beauty of the state of the human mind of NOT being in an illusion that India is on the road of great progress , but that it is aware of the ground realities . Perhaps yes , perhaps not.

My artistic insights and inclinations are what form my first instinct and it has been always a difficult thing to live with. On one side my artistic sense of beauty has been a source of great joy for me as a fountain head of poetry or paintings but on the other hand I have always felt that it was my excessive artistic inclinations that have hindered my progress in science and mathematics. The essential beauty of a geometric shape like the mobius strip has always appealed to me as the first instinct and its a second thought that it is a non-orientable manifold .

I have observed from my experiences that people who are great in science and especially mathematics have very little human sensitivities especially a sense of art/music or beauty . Feynman himself had claimed in his autobiography how he looked down upon all kinds of artistic activities as base compared to the precise world of mathematical physics. But it obviously remains a debatable question since he had also done a huge number of paintings when he was a professor of Caltech. Similarly Einstein was a good violinist and Seshadri is a carnatic singer and so is Ramanan.

Hence it is highly debatable as to what exactly is the relation between artistic inclinations and scientific ( especially mathematical and mathematical physics ). My hunch is the following :: the age group of mathematical talents that I have had personal experiences with are of the middle school and above to undergraduates. May be the mathematical geniuses by nature look down upon artistic and romantic aspects of life as if they were some foolish trivialities and later as they grow up they get interested in it.

But it could also be possible that given these people's tremendously high intelligence the form in which they appreciate such aspects of life and how this appreciation manifests is beyond the comprehension of the common lay man like me.

I as a part of the crowd of commoners may be totally incapable of understanding how they appreciate such things as their ways of manifestations are totally anti polar to how I ( as a representative of the common crowd) would express these sensitivities.

But of course the above topic is only a digression to the main focus of this sequence of blogs.

I shall return to the main topic in the next blog.