You'll have to go when your time comes, common sense tells you. That's wisdom learned from experience and observation. Even jokes are not exempt from this fate, it suddenly dawned on me when I read the following jokes from an old dog-eared joke book this evening.
A veteran bank robber much hassled by his wife's demand for cash tries to placate her: "Just wait till the bank closes, dear, you shall have all the cash you need."
Then, there is the much harassed lawyer who keeps calling home and finds the line busy. So, he summons his secretary, tells her to take down a telegram for his daughter. "Send it by express wire," he tells the secretary. "Get off the line this instant, Sue," his telegrams reads.
With the advent of ATM, the first joke works no more. The second one was funny in the Jurassic era much before email, cellular phones, SMS. No such luck now, though.
R.I.P.
Showing posts with label Time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Time. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Monday, October 22, 2007
On the deathbed with severe spinal injuries. Well, almost.
Picture this. It was either in 1973 or 1974 that I acquired an even-then rare copy of The Bodley Head Leacock, edited by JB Priestley and published in 1957, from the old Manneys bookshop in the Poona cantonment one Saturday morning. The other book I bought with it was Napoleon's Book of Fate, an almanac of various predictive devices. I enjoyed and read both the books over the years but somehow lost the latter along the way, probably in the shift from 233 Khetwadi Main Road. As a rule, I’m careful with books. Time takes its toll. Preventing it is beyond me. In the case of Leacock, though, it has been criminal neglect on my part, I’m afraid. I had been missing it for quite a while now. In spite of my best efforts and intentions, I was unable to figure out its location. The other day, when I was clearing a cabinet of its contents for Ujwal (she needs the space to store her craft paraphernalia), I suddenly chanced upon the elusive Leacock. It was lurking at the bottom of the cabinet almost completely covered with a black soot – a victim apparently of a prolonged attack by white ant. Its spine as well as the spine lining and the hinges at the front and the back were in near ruin. The gutter at various places too was badly damaged. Looking at it made me vow never to buy another book. I may not live up to it almost certainly. But vow I did in that shattering moment. Well, I did my best to alleviate its suffering – and my guilt – with vigorous brushing off of the black soot followed by a generous application of an anti-white ant spray and scotch tape. The patient seems to be slowly recovering and in a fairly readable state as of now.
Friday, April 06, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Peter Pan is also Peter Piper?
“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers;
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?"
Mother Goose could not have known of JM Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911). She couldn’t have known of Pan’s talent for playing a mean tune on his Pan pipes, just like Pan of the Greek Mythology. So, the two Peters couldn’t possibly be one and the same person. Also, there’s the delectable evidence of P Piper’s fondness for pickled peppers. In P Pan’s Neverland, most meals were make-believe. So, there you are. If Mother Goose is to be taken at her word, though, her Peter too was as forgetful (he forgot where he left the pickled peppers, didn’t he?) as Barrie’s Peter. In fact, Peter Pan’s ability to forget was legendary. He forgot he had killed Hook after the deed. He even went on forgetting his annual spring cleaning date with Wendy Darling with impunity. There’s a Freudian angle to Barrie’s Peter that is both alluring and intriguing. Peter’s search for a mother for himself and the Lost Boys continued relentlessly although he hated all grown-ups including mothers especially. In his books, a mother was solely for insisting little boys go to bed at a decent hour, tucking them in, telling them bedtime stories, darning their socks, washing their dirty clothes, bandaging their cuts and bruises, giving them medicine, cooking their meals – even make-believe ones – and stuff like that. Even Hook and his pirates seriously discussed getting Wendy to play mother to the Jolly Roger crew. Peter and Wendy played father and mother to the Lost Boys who also had among their ranks Wendy’s younger brothers. And, so on. There’s a ‘Time must have a stop’ sub-theme running through the tale as well. Hook’s nemesis, the Tick-Tock Croc, is there to remind the reader that Time is chasing after each and every one of us as long as we live and breathe. (As a counterpoint, we must remember that the reason George Darling won Mary was because he took a taxi ahead of all her other suitors and proposed to her first – a worthy reward of his ability to save Time, get it?) Peter, the eternal boy, retained his original (milk/baby) teeth all along because he refused to grow up. The fountain of his eternal childhood probably sprang from his ability to forget and therefore not be a slave of Time. His emotions too were ambiguous. There’s an on-and-off sexual tension between him and Wendy, him and Tiger Lily and him and Tinker Bell which he is unable to identify as such because he is a child. His refusal to grow up is an indicator of his inability to take on grown-up responsibilities although as, the leader of the Lost Boys, he was already shouldering the burden of their welfare. That is why he lured Wendy and her brothers to Neverland in the first place, remember? However, when it came to long-term commitment, he was quite firm about not staying back with Wendy and the rest of the Lost Boys. The only commitment he made to Wendy – and sporadically kept – was to take her to Neverland once a year for ‘spring cleaning’ (clearing up the cobwebs of memories and other trivia accumulated over a year?). The Wikipedia article about Peter Pan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan mentions a Dr. Dan Kiley who coined the psychiatric term "Peter Pan syndrome" for his 1983 book on the subject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan_syndrome to “describe an adult who is afraid of commitment and/or refuses to act his age. It is also sometimes used to positively describe an innocent, childlike approach to life.” (In the same vein, Wendy is the girl-woman who acts the role of mother.) Remember, ‘Pan’ (which at times means ‘all’ as in ‘pan-American’) is also a root of ‘panic’ (= sudden fear, especially in lonely places). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(mythology). All the while I was reading Peter Pan, the one melody I kept hearing in my mind was the Lawrence of Arabia theme. With good reason, I realised on reflection. Like Peter, Lawrence too recklessly refused to grow up and chased adventures. Like Peter too, he loved to ‘fly’ … on his mobike. Unlike Peter Pan, though, he wasn’t immortal. P.S.: One claim I find hilarious is Michael Jackson as Peter Pan http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/02/22/the_real_peter_pan/. Never mind the 2700-acre Neverland. Never mind the persistent rumour about Peter being androgenous. Never mind the dark hints that JM Barrie, like Lewis Carroll, was a pedophile. The MJ=PP ‘equation’ is too weird to be believed.
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?"
Mother Goose could not have known of JM Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911). She couldn’t have known of Pan’s talent for playing a mean tune on his Pan pipes, just like Pan of the Greek Mythology. So, the two Peters couldn’t possibly be one and the same person. Also, there’s the delectable evidence of P Piper’s fondness for pickled peppers. In P Pan’s Neverland, most meals were make-believe. So, there you are. If Mother Goose is to be taken at her word, though, her Peter too was as forgetful (he forgot where he left the pickled peppers, didn’t he?) as Barrie’s Peter. In fact, Peter Pan’s ability to forget was legendary. He forgot he had killed Hook after the deed. He even went on forgetting his annual spring cleaning date with Wendy Darling with impunity. There’s a Freudian angle to Barrie’s Peter that is both alluring and intriguing. Peter’s search for a mother for himself and the Lost Boys continued relentlessly although he hated all grown-ups including mothers especially. In his books, a mother was solely for insisting little boys go to bed at a decent hour, tucking them in, telling them bedtime stories, darning their socks, washing their dirty clothes, bandaging their cuts and bruises, giving them medicine, cooking their meals – even make-believe ones – and stuff like that. Even Hook and his pirates seriously discussed getting Wendy to play mother to the Jolly Roger crew. Peter and Wendy played father and mother to the Lost Boys who also had among their ranks Wendy’s younger brothers. And, so on. There’s a ‘Time must have a stop’ sub-theme running through the tale as well. Hook’s nemesis, the Tick-Tock Croc, is there to remind the reader that Time is chasing after each and every one of us as long as we live and breathe. (As a counterpoint, we must remember that the reason George Darling won Mary was because he took a taxi ahead of all her other suitors and proposed to her first – a worthy reward of his ability to save Time, get it?) Peter, the eternal boy, retained his original (milk/baby) teeth all along because he refused to grow up. The fountain of his eternal childhood probably sprang from his ability to forget and therefore not be a slave of Time. His emotions too were ambiguous. There’s an on-and-off sexual tension between him and Wendy, him and Tiger Lily and him and Tinker Bell which he is unable to identify as such because he is a child. His refusal to grow up is an indicator of his inability to take on grown-up responsibilities although as, the leader of the Lost Boys, he was already shouldering the burden of their welfare. That is why he lured Wendy and her brothers to Neverland in the first place, remember? However, when it came to long-term commitment, he was quite firm about not staying back with Wendy and the rest of the Lost Boys. The only commitment he made to Wendy – and sporadically kept – was to take her to Neverland once a year for ‘spring cleaning’ (clearing up the cobwebs of memories and other trivia accumulated over a year?). The Wikipedia article about Peter Pan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan mentions a Dr. Dan Kiley who coined the psychiatric term "Peter Pan syndrome" for his 1983 book on the subject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan_syndrome to “describe an adult who is afraid of commitment and/or refuses to act his age. It is also sometimes used to positively describe an innocent, childlike approach to life.” (In the same vein, Wendy is the girl-woman who acts the role of mother.) Remember, ‘Pan’ (which at times means ‘all’ as in ‘pan-American’) is also a root of ‘panic’ (= sudden fear, especially in lonely places). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(mythology). All the while I was reading Peter Pan, the one melody I kept hearing in my mind was the Lawrence of Arabia theme. With good reason, I realised on reflection. Like Peter, Lawrence too recklessly refused to grow up and chased adventures. Like Peter too, he loved to ‘fly’ … on his mobike. Unlike Peter Pan, though, he wasn’t immortal. P.S.: One claim I find hilarious is Michael Jackson as Peter Pan http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/02/22/the_real_peter_pan/. Never mind the 2700-acre Neverland. Never mind the persistent rumour about Peter being androgenous. Never mind the dark hints that JM Barrie, like Lewis Carroll, was a pedophile. The MJ=PP ‘equation’ is too weird to be believed.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
The trouble with Harry.
Not Hitchcock’s second favourite film out of his own ouvre, the black macabre eponymous comedy (a capital T in ‘trouble’, though) about the corpse that wouldn’t stay put in one grave. Harry as in ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’, meaning you, me and whoever. The trouble is, we live in linear, sequential, serial Time. Unlike in the digital realm, you cannot undo. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/undo-way-to-go.html. Or, retrieve the past to amend and relive it. Then why do we have alumni meets? Are we just aping the West? From what I can gather, these occasions are looked upon even there more as opportunities to show off how better off you are and how much better you have fared than all the rest of the lousy losers? It’s no problem for a guy like me blessed with an easily and swiftly erasable memory. And, no envy. I’ve listened to the heart-rending confessions of battled-scarred veterans just back from one of these journeys down the memory lane. Full of self-pity, regret, jealousy, a sense of failure. If you cannot handle the aftermath, why accept the challenge in the first place? Because someone dared you? Avoid. Run. Duck. No pain is gain too. Less is more, hombre.
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