Art for art's sake

It is unfortunate how English readers in India increasingly value articles on blatant materialism than simple, earthy things. There is painful bitterness in the entire process, yet, it is fair even to the publication and the writer who regards writing as a business and responds to the demands of the market. It is this emphasis on the importance of money, and the very idea that even the best of the designers and art can be purchased, which is indeed debilitating and demoralising.

The striking juxtaposition of barbarism and civilisation in recent times is quite evident. While on the one hand, we see mind-blowing advancement in science, technology, and lifestyle; on the other hand, we see this degeneration of mind, inability to appreciate the natural and finer things of life. The bull market is almost unbearable, turning life into a mortgage payment, with a price tag on almost everything, including ‘art’. Newspapers and magazines merely try to cater to the popular interests and secure the widest possible readership. For most writers, art is about people who have led a life of greed and opulence. This state of things is traceable to the lack of education, in all senses of the word.

Before things could improve, there could be a period of what many people will call ‘capitalist anarchy’. Bizarre though it may seem, people might then realise that education and emancipation would make them truly human.

Most English newspapers, even the ones who claim to have their own voices, now follow the most commercial route and consider it an indispensable tool for instilling loyalty. The path to success is suppression of individualism and collective good. Newspaper prices are kept low to pull in more people. 

In a sense, this seems to be the only way out. Capitalism is king and pretty much everything is branded. Call it buying and selling of aspirations. Call it free market economy. Whatever it is, there is very little representation of the ‘classic Indian life’.

Meghna Maiti

Wild Spirit

Oh do not touch the wildness; you will not get her;

Her wild, wild spirit hangs low over the seashore,

Like an unstring puppet braving the element;

Flying in face of humanity, baffling the earth,

She is weaker than life, stronger than death.

Sensuous ducts for seduction; lust, lust, lust

Scents of steam and mildew; ancient than world,

Wraps her formless self and makes you flush

The earth rocks and rocks; she rises slowly;

Like a snaky smoke, beyond you and all.

Sins Sins; her sins would absolve in Jesus;

Seven demons to match wits with Mary Magdalene,

She feels a miracle that sets her free,

Finds boundless ocean in the eyes of her beloved;

And within some moments annihilate years.

She is all by herself a wild lion; her gold beaten skin;
Glowing, growling, and hunting, snarl and snarl,
Feasting on the body of her prey from sub-Saharan Africa
Like Shango hurling bolts of lightning at his followers,
Blood, blood, makes her purer and enlightened. 

Shine, shine; her star flickers on and off, on and off;
Its incandescence dazzles the sky and the earth,
The glints of hot meteors fly, and she smiles, loves;
By whatever those sparks mean to her and all,
They bless her with a royal crown and a palanquin. 

Meghna Maiti

Walking In The Rain

Meghna Maiti

Mumbai

Rain, Rain, Rain.

Just look at you, walking in at this odd hour into this dreary land and breathing life into it like a lighthouse on pitch-dark seashore, twirling the side of your skirt pensively as the water drops freckle your cheeks with sweet diamond of moisture - for what?

For a bit of philanthropy, perhaps? Or romance with those hapless souls depressed by the continuous dryness. And it is not without any reason. Look- nature whips Indian economy back and forth more than bankers do. If the kharif crop is depleted, the consequences will be an inflationary Diwali and bleak winter. Fast moving consumer goods companies glide along those glistening streets to glory. What more, monsoon affects replenishment of ground water and generation of hydel power too.

Your mysterious nature even leaves the Met department confused. And how are they supposed to know that you are coming? It is not as if they have a Lord Indra there with his magic stick to forecast the weather. Therefore, we avoid the news and let the element of mystery deepen. Like saints. It is late, we are out of cereals and sugar, and our clothes are itchy. We have to act stingy and postpone our purchases of our favourite cars, television and cars until prices drop.

So silly our impatience now seems, stuck as we are in the unreality of Indian gloom and doom. Now that we have seen you for a couple of days - with your jet-black hair still damp from the shower, with your deep and seductive eyes, with your scents of marsh and upland, and most of all, with your infectious sense of calmness and serenity, seems to be the beginning of a long-drawn affair. Listening to you fall, long after the sun goes down and long after night, until the morning hours, is a deep and most enchanting experience.

However, are you here to stay? Are you growing spiritual, what with the expectations of coming to the foothills of Himalayas, the north and northeast over the next few days?  Will you starve your admirers in some other parts such as Maharashtra, Karnataka? We are sure you will not let drought, your competitor ruin the chances of millions of men.

Yet it seems, we have caught you on a day when you have decided to make a fresh start. To make a fresh start, try to come more often, come more vigorously to plant new seeds in the hearts of your boyfriends, pick out new drinks for them, buy them expensive gifts, settle their finances and pay for their bills. Moreover, do not forget to dump them when your days here are over.

Sensitivity like you is rare to find. We can even see the most intrepid of souls clearing the roads on a rainy day. And those who did not brave you have no idea what they are missing.

We really feel we all love you.

ENDS

meghnamaiti@mydigitalfc.com

IC colony

If  life so desires, I may even lay down my entire future along the streets of IC colony. Those undulating ways meandering through the island city of Mumbai are as wide as many a market square. Their dignity remains intact even after constant assault by the height of pretentious luxury and dubious taste from all around. 

My house ‘Kinny’s Corner’ situated on ‘Holy Cross’ road looks out to a big statue of a ‘cross’ under a green moorish patch. A number of bakeries, eateries, liquor and meat shops dot the landscape, which takes a sharp turn around the great flinty, staid church for the catholic crowd where Jesus keeps their sanity. Up the road lay a boulevard leading to ‘Karuna’ hospital with quaint, arcane houses on one side, remote gypsy fruit-sellers on the pavement, on another side a hillock full of wild foliage peer down into a dry moat, down the sheer wet walls.

The faint, agreeable smell of freshly baked bread, sea-fish, coal-dust waft through the area, and all around you can see those laid-back, despondent faces, which give me fair amount of pleasure: unmarked faces like the innkeepers of sea-shacks, with distant look in their eyes, living their modest dreams.

It all started sometime back when the lease of my earlier house expired: the drawers emptied, furniture packed, the removal van waiting like a hearse in the lane took me to a less expensive area. Then there set reluctantly on my personal map the cross, part rosy church, part hideous real estate agents- where raw emotions intermingled.

Everything that I want to become seems to be here, for better or for worse. My destiny might have been written somewhere along those roads, houses or even in the hedgerows. IC colony may shape the first level of consciousness, which would eventually become the basis of all kinds of connections with beings. This could even be the scene of happiness, misery, real love, first heartbreak, the attempt to write, through the unconscious sources of action, through folly or wisdom. It could well be all of these, who knows………

ENDS

Meghna Maiti

meghnamaiti@mydigitalfc.com

God of all things

MEGHNA MAITI

Mumbai

We still have not figured out whether the outcomes of life are essentially random or whether there is God. Yet, our lives embedded in the vast, complex nebula seem transient, almost hallucinatory. Their sparkly brightness is carried up and down in the vast emptiness as they morph under the influence of powerful outflows and intense radiation from the stars and star clusters around them. As a human race, we have adapted an identity that is generously enigmatic. The sheer evolution of humankind, including the recent discovery of Higgs particle to solve the puzzles of the universe would probably have even God clucking in disapproval. As the bleary-eyed physicists drink champagne and celebrate the key to understanding the cosmos and the elusive realities, the existence of God could well be on the line bordering science with religion.

Lost in the hullabaloo of the neo-atheists in modern life, the existence of God has taken complex almost romantic proportions. Sitting cosily at home with our family and friends, when we had finished our drinks, slowly getting high on the news on ‘god’s particle’ on television and we suddenly realise: something happening somewhere else is, at the moment, far more important than something happening here. More we perhaps get at the inner distractions, dispersals, symbolic disconnections, and networks of underlying disparate and decentering associations, the better we get at figuring out God’s existence in the current states of subjectivity and the conflicts they spark.

Physicists are especially excited with the idea that ‘Higgslike’ particle’ could point the way to new, deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model of physics, about the nature of reality. Yet, such force of nature blurring the sense of reality and abstract, could give a concrete form to God. And the conflict starts therein as majority of the people are conditioned to believe in omniscience, invisible minds and immaterial souls. In that case, their religious sensibilities are often shaped around their blanket rejection of modernism and turning their backs on the life of their times and declaring that the world had gone to hell. Though their tastes are narrow, their devotion is real and fruitfulness is proven by their serenity.

“While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge.”  This quote by Albert Einstein perhaps sums up the timeless interdependence of religion and science.

Higgs Boson may be a manifestation of cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Without Higgs, there might not be atoms or life. Yet no matter how much science explains, it seems, the real void that God fills is an emptiness of our spirit, a sort of yearning for the intangible. Moreover, God has to exist, irrespective of discoveries to satisfy that lust for the divine.

 

What say, God?

 

ENDS

meghnamaiti@mydigitalfc.com

Go Goa

Monday reminded me of the time I started off as a reporter for a financial daily. Those were the days; I was trying to make myself tougher. The time was harsh and treacherous, the perfect surface for my 22-year-old self to sling my backpack, getting briefly lost before I faced the icy inclines of a workspace. I rode in the back seat of my friend’s Avenger bike as it crept across lush green, rutted surface en route the Konkan region to Goa. We rode, away from the present, where a dark world slipped past, life concentrating only on the 20 yards of road glowing ahead of us.

We drove around certain Goan creek to unwind. Sunlight fell through tall coconut plantations and mangroves and lay in puddles along the logging roads that wound past the Western Ghats packed with perennial waterfalls where butterflies tried to flee from us. It had been raining, incessantly, so the wild flowers, and the grass and the pine needles regained their colour, fresh and green as daisies, crackling beneath my shoes when the road we followed petered out into nothing and I stepped off the bike. In this heavenly stillness, it seemed you could hear every totem within a square acre rustling through the shrubs, and when the breeze rose into a cold wind, the area became a giant whisper.

We dumped our baggage in a hotel around north Goa and my friend said, “Let’s go, explore,” holding his bike keys. We both dressed as soldiers, armed with our umbrellas and raincoats. We started again, working our way down to south Goa through the lush green forest, through a cypress thicket. We chanced upon a lonely, white woman sipping some exotic drink in Mango Tree Café and we stopped by and gave her company for sometime.

Night had come on and our visions blurred with the mild drizzle, grayly darkening our way as somewhere an owl hooted, its noise barely noticeable over the chorus of other insects. I was not any tougher when I came back, but, I finally found my voice.

Meghna Maiti