मैं बियर हूँ

Even after all these years, I have to relearn this every few months- that if I don't come here and blog atleast one a month, my mental faculties dip and I get crankier and progressively more disoriented. And what's worse is that that makes me want to control my reading/ watching/ listening - because when I don't see/ can't parse outcomes, I feel compelled to control the process - and it makes me jittery, instrumentalistic, confused and angry at the self-imposed parochialism and return-seeking mentality until, obviously, I can't handle it anymore and blow up. Gather the pieces, blog it out, take a vow to learn from the experience, sort of try to hold the realisation in cache for a few days before, inevitably, wash, rinse, repeat.

I don't think I can be a writer. Scratch that. I don't want to be a writer. Especially if a writer is defined as someone "for whom writing is harder than it is for others". I relish blogging since I discovered it, what, 18 years ago- even when I loathed it for reminding me of my inadequacies, talentlessness, lack of ambition, will and imagination at ever making it as a writer. Even in those moments I could turn only to it to express my hurt, bitterness, even, occasionally, anguish. Yet the desire refuses to leave me- to be a published author, some sort of an.. artist. Its transformed, over the recent years, from a fiction/ film writer to a public intellectual but both manifest from the same desire- to put out important, original ideas in words and be hailed as a visionary. Its not unromantic as dreams go, perhaps, but the inherent tension in holding such a hard-to-define-in-absolute-terms image is not knowing how to get there. Is your lack of discipline a failing or a necessary transgression of your brilliant mind? Is your unreliability something to be fixed or suggesting a roving personality destined for grander things? Does your formlessness and incomprehensibility reflect a lack of clarity or an attempt to chafe against tradition and create something truly radical? Obviously all those are true. Obviousersly that doesn't help me very much.

One thing's certain- this moment atleast. When I approach the world with a What-am-I-going-to-get-out-of-this attitude, I usually turn it into a very painful experience, draining all possible joy of discovery from the encounter. Everything I've enjoyed and cherished in lfie, I've done only when I went to it with an intention of play and exploration (How much I love Prof. Suits and Prof. Ngyuen for The Grasshopper). Partly owing to the nature of the world (with its rampant functionalism and Effective Fuckin' Altruism), and partly owing to my ideas of how to be as a grownup, I've tried to turn passions, frequently intense and brief, into, interesting choice of word here, productions, with an end goal in sight and, more crucially, a mindset to pull all components together in service of the end. I'm shit at it. Now we can argue if my being shit at it is a proclivity I can't do anything about and need to learn to live with and assume there's some benefit of that (is this me falling into that trap again) or if it is something I need to work upon if I ever hope to achieve anything even remotely close to greatness and if I fail to do so, I'll have lived and died like billions on the planet with no discernible impact but it is nevertheless important to acknowledge the reality of that situation.

Duty is exalted and rightfully so as I've come to appreciate in the last few years. We are in many ways a hive mind, a society that can only continue to run, atleast in this form, on the basis of specialisation, stability (via contract enforcement), and symbolic manipulation. It has to be all hands on deck to navigate past polycrisis and in such an environment 'saying for saying's sake' doesn't seem like a defensible position. Ofcourse a large part of it is driven by hubris, like Meheranna pointed out recently at my climate change rhetoric, a desire to play a part in the bigger stories. And that would, naturally(?), mean an ability to adapt and reshape/ contort according to need in pursuit of a grander goal. "Disciple is learning to prioritise what you want most over what you want now" and all that. But do we live in a world conducive to such deferred gratification? Things seem to change so rapidly that it is better to get what you want now over a future promise that might never come to pass. What if it does come to pass though? Then again you can lament or choose instant gratification then too? Isn't it a diminished life- చిన్ని కష్టాలు, చిన్ని సంతోషాలు, చిన్ని ఆకాశాలు.. కలగలిపి చిన్ని జీవితం. You can't have it all, I suppose. Or is there a way to optimise it?

Reviewing Terrence Mallick's Knight of Cups, Rangan garu wrote, "..this is the very essence of modern art, that the film is nothing but a Rorschach test recording our responses, our interpretations" and so I ask myself if this in some ways more human precisely because of a lack of agenda. Meander this way and that, wonder|ponder- పండిన వేపకాయ హృదయం/ తీయ తీయగా చేదు చేదుగా/ తడి తడిగా. That my duty here is to put out honest thoughts and feelings; An audience, if any, will make of it what they can. At the same time, if I've understood the essence of LLMs from Prof. Wolfram correctly, they do that too- drift through wordspace, rolling and tilting, drawn toward gravity of the next probable word. They don't care about the overall meaning or the motivation that triggered the wordchain; Only abide by their فطرت. Now that's a quandry: Optimally work towards an end and you're a machine. Simply roll along and you're no different to an LLM. How does one continue being a human here? Is conscience, మనస్సాక్షి, a guardrail imposed by society for the communitarian good or is it what makes us deeply, genuinely human? Are societal expectations to be respected because they lead to smooth overall functioning or challenged because they dehumanise us and reduce us to cogs? Is looking after one's own interests, physical, emotional, whimsical even, a betrayal of the wider cause or is it, if not a moral duty a la Rand then atleast, the best of what a person can do- those concentric circles of control, influence, and concern?

At 35 its tiring and infuriating to still keep asking these questions. On good days though it feels like this is my thing, నేను సైతం ప్రపంచాగ్నికి ప్రమిదనొక్కటి ఆహుతిచ్చాను- unless I'm debasing solidarity by saying thus. Yeah, so anyway, I don't know. I don't know what kind of an influence this will have on Dharani Noor- I want to be the sorted grownup who creates a stable space for her to experiment in, not an erratic adult who confuses her further (NB: Venkat Rao's recent message to grownups to become Schelling Points). But, for one, that's too long a game, with too many variables, not to mention a highly dynamic protagonist, and I don't know if I can control my natural tendencies for that long, and, two, looking at some adults I wonder if that kind of middle-class respectable stability doesn't create its own baggages and dissatisfactions. Consequently, a voice pipes up, if this is just me rationalising (thank you Rama Rao garu and Dheeraj) my indiscipline and weak-will and DN deserves a better nanna. Someone who shows up irrespective of mood, someone who honours contracts, who is reliable and accountable. I would ofcourse like to be all that but I've tried, I really have, but on many days I just can't seem to be able to gather the energy and the will.

Truth be told, I do have a sense- not always clear, not always articulatable, not even always correct but nonetheless broadly correct, atleast pointing me in the right(now I don't know what that precisely means or how I can objectively verify it)-ish direction. And that's towards exploration- of places, people, ideas, tools and techniques, cultural artefacts. And I hope to share them with my daughter- not necessarily as instruction but as shared humanity, shared biology, shared stardust. To sit with the five-year old her as our train is crossing a bridge on the Godavari and we look out the window together as the sun starts to rise and the world starts to get illuminated- little by little.