Privileged, who me?

I have more than a sneaking suspicion that I saw myself as a member of the privileged class in my childhood. No, I did not know the exact phrase for the state I imagined myself to be in. The reasons for this self-delusion were simple. I was waited upon by a couple of servants, one of them an old family retainer. We had a car. http://tinyurl.com/4m58jq. Not many others we knew had one. We took an annual summer holiday either in Matheran or Mahabaleshwar. http://tinyurl.com/4wljxg. We also used to go occasionally to Pune, sometimes staying at the Morarjee Gokuldas Sanitarium opposite the Pune Railway Station and eating out at Dorabjee's and the Railway Restaurant managed by Brandons. http://digbig.com/4xsxf. Our train travel was by first or second class in a reserved coupé. We lived in a fairly spacious terrace flat at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4. I did not attend a posh school, though, like Ashu and Abhi. My first school was bottom of the barrel. The second one was fairly respectable. We ate and dressed well. We owned a gramaphone to play 78 rpm discs http://tinyurl.com/5t6cxx and a Bush radio http://tinyurl.com/4ndw75. I had plenty of toys to amuse myself with http://tinyurl.com/4grxkp. We went to see a fair number of movies and plays. The illusion of living a privileged life stayed with me till the time I joined the Forward Market Commission on a measly salary of Rs.400/- a month after doing my Master of Commerce by thesis. http://tinyurl.com/6cbkte; http://tinyurl.com/6qt87g. By and by, however, the scales fell from my eyes, as Pelham ("Plum") Grenville Wodehouse would have succinctly put it. What I should have realised is the so-called privileged status is ephemeral, like everything else in this world. Truman Capote would have most likely understood. http://tinyurl.com/64laor.

Pain and suffering.

Is Art always and without exception a child of pain and suffering and deprivation? Can an artist never be someone who has had a normal – even a “boring” – childhood as Alan Bennett has repeatedly pointed out? An artist as a tortured soul suffering in the Nether World is the fashionable take and a much touted figment of popular imagination as well as a conscious and deliberate media spin. A deprived background adds a dramatic edge to the story no doubt but need not be the fact of the case. Sunil and Nargis Dutt surely did their best to give Sanjay a happy childhood. He turned out the way he did despite it. Now there is a media conspiracy to whip up sympathy for him by projecting him as a tortured but noble soul loved by one and all. His recent Gandhigiri-spouting Munnabhai screen avatar is put forward as an additional proof of his being a good but misunderstood human being. Even if all this is taken at face value, does it condone his role in the Mumbai blast case? I no longer belong to the eye for an eye school. But the Indian State surely cannot afford to take a lenient view of the digression and make an exception for an individual citizen for the sake of its very existence. That’s the way the cookie crumbles as the saying goes. However, the point I’m making is that the art born out of suffering seems to be a false premise. Just as much as the rosy-hued portrayal of an artist as a rootless person, a born expat or émigré, an outsider – the other trendy self-delusion much favoured by Salman Rushdie – happens to be. Art can be a way of earning money like anything else people do for the same purpose. If you happen to be good at what you do, it may even turn out to be a fairly lucrative and comfortable way of doing so. And who knows Time may decide to forgive you all your trespasses and faults as it did Yeats in Auden’s view:

Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and innocent
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
http://www.serve.com/Lucius/Auden.index.html.

Truth to tell, there was a time in my life when I too flirted with the artist-as-a-tortured-soul and artist-as-an-outsider self-delusion. I even affected what I thought of as an arty mode of dress, khadi kurta over denim jeans. (I was no stranger to jeans of course as I had adapted them as my favourite garment of comfort in my early youth. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/02/gruelling-test.html.) I also started frequenting art shows and craft stores regularly. I used to visit Contemporary Arts & Crafts when it was a first-floor walk up – with a wooden floor and down-to-earth prices – opposite the Bombay University near Kala Ghoda as well as the old Bombay Store on Phirozshah Mehta Road. I was a regular at Wayside Inn, another Kala Ghoda landmark that disappeared quite recently. Arun Kolhatkar and George Fernandes too used to frequent the moderately priced eatery. More truth to tell, I was attracted to copywriting because I thought it was a creative field. Along the way, I dabbled in writing for children and was successful at the very first try. The ditty book I did with Sanat Surti (I See, I Think, I Sing) published by Thomson Press as a Sunflower Books paperback in 1972 won the National Book Trust Award. The second book (The Cloud & the Kite) – we tried selling it to a Japanese publisher – never made it. I lost the comprehensive dummy of the book soon and along with it the children’s writing yen. I continued to do well at copywriting and won a few awards as well, though, fortunately having shed the copywriting = art notion. It’s just business writing – a fairly comfortable way of earning good money if you’re good at it. Experience shows that the Auden hypothesis applies to good copywriting too. Amen to that.

Revealed at last! My shameful neurotic past.

I was 18 and in the second year of college when I became convinced that I was neurotic. Having just read an American paperback on the subject (I cannot for the life of me remember its title and author), I had come to the conclusion that every young American worth his or her salt had neurois and had undergone long drawn psychoanalysis for it. In fact, I thought it was a rather chic and smart malady to suffer from. I continued to read pop psychology and search for labels for my neurosis. Like a true hypochondriac, I used to imagine a whole gamut of typical symptoms in myself such as vague unease, wakefulness, a forlorn feeling of loss and foreboding and the meaninglessness of life. I used to walk up and down on the terrace above our third floor flat at 233 Khetwadi Main Road for a long time at night on the pretext of a constitutional. My neurosis library was built from books bought on the pavement of Hornby Road. I also used to borrow from a comics wallah at Lamington Road a pseudo medical and slyly prurient magazine from the US, quaintly called Sexology. Started by Hugo Gernsback – after whom the Hugo Award for sci-fi is named – in the 1930s, it contained vaguely written gibberish about various maladies and conditions and was full of scientific seeming line drawings. I used to borrow and browse through every issue religiously as soon as my comics wallah got it. I don’t think I read many articles in their entirety, though. (To add a cloak and dagger flavour to the whole affair, he used to always cover it with a newspaper before handing it over to me.) I had also got into the habit of reading a slim DIY magazine called Psychology. After a couple of years of all this, I slowly got out of my delusional mode and, somewhere along the way, came to realise the utter sham of the whole thing. Today, I am of the firm opinion that all the so-called angst, anxiety, low self-esteem and resultant suffering that people bitch about are mostly bogus and self-manufactured and the therapeutic ‘help’ industry is a vast money-making racket. The whole self-delusion is created by unrealistic over-expectation, greed, jealousy and an obstinate refusal to call a spade a spade. I fully agree with what Samuel Goldwyn had to say on the subject: "Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined." See what Sexology looked like: http://www.magazineart.org/main.php/v/healthandfitness/sexology. There’s a slide show of Sexology covers too at http://www.magazineart.org/main.php?g2_view=slideshow.Slideshow&g2_itemId=6961. To read an article from the magazine set to pop music from the sixties including Beatles, click here: http://www.samsloan.com/sexology.htm