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.

Free writing on the internet.

I have always wondered about the role the blogs and free/unrestricted writing forums like www.poemhunter.com play in our modern lives and society . I exist on both these worlds i.e of e-blogger and the poemhunter and have been keenly following the writings posted on them and I have always reflected on their role in our modern lives .

Lets look beyond their obvious role as a source if exchange of ideas and information at very little financial cost. One of their roles which I have experienced is when I gain some confidence out of them , like recently a 24 year old lady called Diana from Romania commented nice things on one of my romantic poems . Earlier a guy called Lawrence Pertillar from Connecticut ( USA) had contacted me after he liked my poems . Before that a 40 year old lady from India who writes under the pseudonym of "Tranquil Ocean" also appreciated my works . It really makes me feel happy at times that may be I am not that useless and less abled as the rest of the world makes me feel by repeatedly pointing out my flaws almost on a daily basis.

Atleast some lady in Romania feels that I have a unique and beautiful style of writing poetry! I could atleast convey my ideas of love and romance to someone in Romania because of such facilities on the net. I could light a smile some thousand miles away.

I regularly read some of the poems posted at poemhunter and recently I read a few bizarre ones that made me sit up and take notice . One girl ( I cant remember her nationality , but she was not an Indian ) had posted a poem there which had nothing but the sentence "I hate you" written about a hundred times !!!

Recently there was a great piece of writing put up on one of my friend's blog pbhas.blogspot.com .
She is Nivedita and also happens to be my college-mate and an immensely talented and gifted lady. I should also perhaps dare to say elegant . ( I hope she doesn't read this blog. She might just murder me). But the great writing was followed by a sequence of irrelevant comments ( currently 37) and it ended up in personal attacks . Ultimately it was a complete public fiasco. I should also accept my responsibility in partly fuelling the chain of comments by writing slightly provocative stuff .

But the common link that threads together the "I hate you" poem at the poemhunter and this fiasco at the Nivedita's blog is that these unrestricted writing forums have become a venting point of this world where people find decent ways of letting out their pent up anger and frustrations. This world is today , no doubt a pressure cooker waiting to blast apart . These blogs and forums like poemhunter are doing a great service to mankind by providing nice outlets for these frustrations that let out in any other form might have caused damage to life and property .

I dread to imagine if the subtle fights that ensued in Nivedita's blog would have happened face to face! Face to face fights badly hurts relations and often embitters relations beyond repair . Its best that such things get vented out through writing poetry or blogs etc .

I fancy that the society is not far from a golden day when the husband and his wife sort out mutual understanding problems by writing poetry on such forums or by writing blogs to vent out anger.

Beyond doubts that would be a far better world to live in.

The plight of the housewife and the second child. Part II

Well last time we had left the housewife in a lurch of indecision and its time to scrutinize her situation further before looking at rescue methods . To do so we subject her to further difficult situations that I have seen her to be put into by natural circumstances. The elder child passes out of class 12 with a reasonably good performance and gets admitted to a "good" college with triple E ( Electrical and Electronic Engineering ) or if the son is as good a vagabond as me then comes to CMI to study physics .

Nota Bene : My mother is not a housewife . She is a doctor .

Now this housewife in question has a whole day to herself with nothing to do in particular . Except perhaps if not for the placebo effect the ashamed-to-call-themselves-conservatives would like to label "home making " as a very important occupation .

I wonder how the home can be made by just the housewife contributing to it technically and the husband standing by for the "moral support " !!

THis housewife now has a further problem of haing nothing substantiall to worry except for a vague fear she herself doesnt understand and labels it for lack of words " the son's future " . She even does not have a definite knowledge of what an engineering course takes or what it imbibes the student with . On the face of it she sees a very confusing output that initially all go in with different branches but all come out with a job in some XYZ software company and becoming a part of the IT sector which is supposedly "booming" .

The child now exposed to the more vibrant life of an engineering college and hostel has lesser attractions for th home and proportions his free time ( which is almost always ! ) to the upcoming techfests . Training himself to be an enterpreneur who can do very well human resource management and financial management and can design robots . Not bad but the 2 vital questions that get asked here :

1. Isnt everyone else also doing teh same ?
2. How is the housewife supposed to compensate for this vaccuum in her life with some thing more precise than the wories about the "son's future" ?

Well our concern here is the second question . On the other hand the husband returns back home with a gloomy face and a frown in his forehead due to worries with his boss and obviously he finds lesser time for his wife now that the common link between the child is away from home and the worries look a bit more distant , on the telephone .

So the wife is now losing company from all sides . She is more and more feeling the need to have something more substantial to occupy herself with . She needs something to contribute to . She feels out of use . She feels left alone . She craves for the son to return home . She needs a proffession .

She regrets not being allowed to continue her education to the level of becoming a proffessional . She now regrets her parents agreeing to the marriage . She regrets all that has already happened in her life . She regrets everything .

She wishes history could be re-written . She knows it cant be . She feels desperate . Day by day she feels more and more helpless . She then develops a tendency for high blood pressure . Diabetes . Migraine .
All gets labelled as the post-menopausal effects . The husbands finds an oppurtunity to sympathize and to make a grand show of how concerned he is about the health of his wife . He gets her to the best doctor . The doctor gives medicines .

But the actual problem is never understood.

She has a psychological problem .

She feels a life lost for the purpose of others . First the father , then the husband and then the son . She feels a need for an identity of her own and she regrets that a financial independence arising from a proffession would have solved this problem .

She just regrets and regrets eat up life the fastest .

Now is the second child is the solution to this problem ?

Perhaps not a complete solution but it obviously could have led to a better state of affairs from the psychological point of view . The second child if possibly of the opposite sex than the first would also have in it a prospect of bunch of new experiences for the housewife as a mother .

A second chiled timed such that when the elder son/daughter has passed out the sibling still has the important phases of his/her schol life left . So that in theabsence of the elkder one the housewife has something substantial to occupy herself .

She atleast has the chance to tell herself that she is making a contribution to the society by being the instrument of moulding an individual for the society . She will have something substantial to do than to just worry about the "distant" son's future ( which she technically doesnt understand ) . She will have the opputunity to occupy herself with the daily chores associated with the growing and maturing of another child .

The feeling of being responsible for the good and bad for another upcoming living organism can surely be a fulfilling and more satisfactory experience that to be decorating the inanimate house for those piecemeal appreciations from the husband .

It has been a personal experience of mine that such housewives are far better off psychologically who have a secondchild with a good difference of age between the siblings . Another active elemnt in the house endowing her with responsibilities is not a bad compensation for the missing one .

But then this solution brings with itself further cascading issues . They are as follows ::

1. So will personal happiness of the housewife outweigh the national requirement of curbing the exponential population growth of the nation ?

2. What about those families which are not financially well off to be able to shoulder the financial requirements to bring up two children equally well ?

These new cascaded issues and those others mentioned in part I shall be dealt in part III onwards .