baleful prosody for my bed...

Hi all, I fight and I fight and I fight but eventually I have to surrender. After a decade of inveighing against blank verse, a decade of protest against the lethargic abuse of poetic meter and verse, I have finally been beaten down by the progression of post-Modernism into giving the bally thing a shot. Anyway for all it is worth , here goes,

Baleful prosody for a bed

The pillow slumps belligerent,
Though shiny with ages of oily grime

The iron cot lies passive; equable
Flakes of brown paint irritably peeling

The coverlet, limp, amorphous
Gingerly noisome with all too human odors

How useless, yet how so very intimate
As all things truly beautiful are

With due respect to Edward Said...

Hi all. I presumed to title my IIT creative writing entry 'Culture and Imperialism' and hope Mr. Said isn't too unhappy about it as he looks on from on high (unless i am misinformed of his demise in 2002, in which case i stand grievously, apologetically corrected).

My next post, i hope, will be the tablature to the 'Stairway to Heaven' solo, as i am trying to crack it and am at the moment of writing about halfway through. LED seems to think (i wonder if he was being facetious ) that i ought to get it by the weekend. Join me friends in paying humble obeisance to Jimmy Page!

In the meantime, i leave you with the following :

Culture and Imperialism

(Adi-dasa the ever-ambitious sadhoo
Burnt his feet walking the fire-bed through
So the next time, he ran on the coals
With hidden padding on his soles
And invented the first ever sports shoe.)

// this verse belongs to bakri. i take on from here.

So his ochre robes he did renounce
And out of the ashram did petulantly flounce
Muttering ‘neath his breath
“Thus I belie a celibate death,
Why, these imposters are naught but clowns!”

With his invention he made his way
To the bustling port city of Bombay
But was reduced to dire straits
Being an apostate to his faith
For news of his heresy had reached Thackeray

Thus it came to pass, through ubiquitous umbrage
When it came to asking for safe sea passage
To the land of the free and home of the brave
The captain considered, this answer gave,
“Errant monk! May the gods turn thy brains to cabbage”

Then did Adidasa volubly bemoan his fate
Following which, slyly hiding in a crate
Was taken aboard with none the wiser
Even saving passage-fee, the miser;
And cast eyes on Manhattan at an early date

Alas, Adi’s guttural accent impeded his way
For black-suited officers whisked him away
As onlookers milled about and cried,
“That man is first cousin to Richard Reid!”
For all they understood was “shoe” and “bomb”(ay)

In the trial court Adi was hard-pressed
As the iniquity of Islamic terrorism was stressed
Said the prosecution to the jury, “Be wise!
He is naught but bin Laden in disguise”
But the myopic judge, Adi a flagrant prostitute guessed

So he was let off, but with stern advice
To keep his hands from gentlemen’s flies
“You Oriental Geishas can’t do more wrong
Than sell your honor for a song.
Don’t you know wandering topless ain’t nice?”

“Admitted the age is one of spaghetti straps,
But that string which your torso enwraps,
The craziest haute couture doesn’t take
The liberty, such a skimpy bra to make.
Not least, exhibitionism must succeed possession, you poor sap.”

Thus the noble Adi did they basely demean.
The media clustered about, made a scene
To the fleeing monk, thus “O Demimondaine!
Flutter for our shutters”, they chanted in vain
But Adi, eluding their snares, fled to Chicago by the 11:15

There his countryman, Vivekananda he met
And to procure money, entered into a bet
“When you speak to the Congress,
You will find me there in a bikini dress”
Gagging prudery, our hero a handsome dividend did net

With which, thankfully, he bought his passage back
And returning, covered his visage with a gunny sack
When solicitous enquiries men did address,
Adi said, “Having beheld the Mother Goddess,
Wherefore earthly sights? The supreme Bliss they sorely lack

And thus, acclaimed universally, the following autumn
He retired to the forest, with disciples who sought him
And, even today, the leafy glades of Gurvayur
Resound to the sound of that entrepreneur
Deploying the sport shoe upon an errant devotee’s bottom.

:-)

Smoke , don't inhale!

Hi all. I guess one has to keep the ball rolling so here's another exposition of putrescent prose for your perusal. This came out in the Hindu on the 12th of this month and you can see the neo-conservatism brimming over. Basically, I think it is a rather stupid of young folk to veer to extremes of illogicality in their rebellion against authority. Right now , the emphasis is on "Doing it different." Even if doing it the right way is the most logical thing to do. Poe knew what he was talking about when he wrote that brilliant monologue on perversity. Today's youth is mind-bogglingly perverse.

Anyway , here goes.

Smoke, don’t inhale

If the modalities of expression of public outrage over the Stephanie hit-and-run case is any indicator, Indian nouveau riche society has been badly bitten by the ‘smoke but don’t inhale’ bug. The Stephanie case is but a microcosm of a crisis of identity that is looming, menacingly, over young metropolitan India.

It is interesting to note that the primary defense offered by the accused was that the victim was an ‘acquaintance’. The implicit assertion here is the rather austere statement that good girls do not hang out with acquaintances at late hours of the night.

The existence of this puritanical streak is further supported by the evidence that, over the week following the incident, certain newspapers reported Stephanie as having been a ‘night-club’ dancer. We are confronted here with two puritanical presumptions. One, being a night-club dancer is a questionable profession. Two, murdering a woman perceived as being ‘easy’ is, in a way, less of a crime.

The question now is, given that bourgeois India finds the concept of open sexuality abhorrent, why is it that the metro yuppies insist on flaunting their liberated sexual mores so very insistently? Popular teenage perception, consistently reinforced by main-stream Bollywood, has raised, among other things, alcohol consumption and eve-teasing to the status of mandatory rites of passage to that exacting Holy Grail of ‘coolness’.

The trouble is that the archetypal urban dwelling 20-something metropolite derives his outlook upon life not from the reality of Indian society but from the unadulterated poppy-cock of MTV. Concomitant with the economic liberalization of the early 90’s, India witnessed a massive burst in the somnolent entertainment industry. Studio after studio, with little or no talent aboard, jumped on the cable telecasting bandwagon and to stay alive in the market, religiously adopted the trends of the US industry ad libidum.

Unfortunately for us, while the American industry has moved on from its fixation with bubble-gum pop and while American society is in the process of moving on from its experiment with liberal sexuality, the Indian nouveau riche is caught in a cleft stick. When all the hoopla raised about pub-hopping and live-in relationships etc. finally began to garner metro mainstream acceptance, they found that their American idols had moved on.

In a culture as hysterical and volatile as ours, there is little scope for rational demarches. Once the slide to decadence, euphemistically denominated ‘emancipation from ossified medieval mindsets’, had commenced, there was little the yuppies could do about it than to learn to like it.

And that is why, while farmers in the Andhra heartland starve and their crops wilt for lack of water, the booze flows without fail in the pubs of Hyderabad. That is why, while a 21 year old girl is chased at midnight and killed on the streets of Chennai, in all probability, a Tollywood film unit is recording a similar stunt for the hero to pull off not so very far away. Of course, in reel life, the hero can hold his drink like a man, drive like a maniac and still impress the adoring muse who, coyly, accepts his proposal for marriage, cohabitation, sex etc.

If the above statement appears abstract, readers are invited to recall a certain Bajaj Pulsar ad, first telecast last year, where the hero commandeers his elder brother’s bike and drives about town, ‘hitting on the chicks’. The protagonist’s disc brakes allow him to spare the life of a rabbit that happens to blunder in his way. Stephanie, alas! She was not so lucky.

How can our youngsters be blamed if we, through the mindless commercialism of our entertainment industry, present them such ambiguous social messages? Where does machismo end and idiocy begin? Where does seduction end and molestation commence? For today’s generation, these ethical boundaries are becoming increasingly fuzzy.

In our zeal to ape Occidental values, we have omitted to consider the fact that, such as they are, these values have evolved indigenously in a social milieu very different from ours. Our efforts to superimpose American ideologies on our own have resulted in the creation of a dangerous dichotomy between our societal archetypes and our ethical values. In simpler terms, society today wants to smoke, but is not ready to inhale.

It is the task of the media to mould the objectives of the entertainment industry to confirm to our collective vision as a nation. To replace films about prostitutes and homo-sexuality with crude, unimaginative indigenous icons, as the Government persists in doing, is to further propagate the myth of Western superiority.

A plant, in the absence of artificial splints, will grow to assume its natural shape. Likewise, gradual censorship of the MTV culture is likely to result in the maturation of metropolitan young India as a strong, vibrant social entity, in conformance with our cultural ethos.

Full stop!

(Oh, to those of you who have been kind enough to point out a blog is for recording personal musings, i am afraid i have to offer a firm nolle prosequi to the prospect. It is with the sole intention of getting my articles down on the net that i am prosecuting this venture. anyway , the contents of my biography would merit publication on asbestos at the very least! Ciao for now.)

speech for the (con)dumb

hmm ... how does the red guy go about writing his very first blog?

Stop Press!

Condom here wants me to write an article on the vices of live-in relationships for his english class tomorrow. funny thing is, it was a week ago that he asked me to write an article in favor of the business. Something fishy ?I suspect a girl is the reason behind his volte face. All in a day's job for the esteemed Condom.

Anyway , here goes:

"Ahem , what is the first thing that comes to your mind, ladies and gentlemen, when you think of living-in,' cohabitation', as it is euphemistically called. I, forgive my puritanical views, am reminded of the redoubtable blunt Duchess in Tolstoy's "War and peace" , who when apprised of the Countess Bezhukova's extra-marital aspirations, acidly remarks, " There is nothing heretical in what you are attempting dear, its been done for ages. Only, they call it adultery." Or words to that effect.

While the world has certainly moved on from that cruel Russian winter of 1812, I intend to prove by virtue of my arguments, that certain verities stand true forever, and that the indispensibilty of matrimonial sanctity is one such.

Proponents of live-in relationships argue that marriage is anachronistic in today's hectic metropolitan lifestyles. They assert that the concept of the existence of an indissoluble bond between a man and a woman is as irrelevant to society as is the abacus to computing. The contention, justifiable in a sense, is that the concept of matrimony assumes on the part of both contracting parties a constancy of thought, speech and action that we as a species are genuinely incapable of.

With women increasingly holding their own as professionals and with metropolitan ethicality increasingly tending to a unisexual ideal, the idea of delimiting spheres of interest based on gender no longer holds water. With the nouveau riche increasingly demanding a lifestyle of convenience, an institution that imposes upon you a long-term liability would certainly appear to be a bad bargain.

It is obvius that, viewed from the 'I-me-myself' point of view, the stand against cohabitation is rather untenable. The question to be asked then is this, is society merely the sum of its parts, or does there exist a bigger picture that we need to collectively consider for the furtherance of our culture, of civilization itself?

If so, we need to look beyond live-in relationships per se at their impact on society in general. The biggest issue is, the issue of issues. What about children? Do they or do they not entail long-term commitments in the union of a couple? Or is reproduction out-moded just as well? Children, it is universally established, are a humongous nuisance. Why not dispense with them altogether? That's what sensible, modern, emancipated, liberal live-in couples do.

Not really? You want children? But you want to be able to walk out of a relationship at an hour's notice too! Please gentlemen, you can't have your cake and eat it too. The question here is, would you like your relationships with your kids to also be just as disposable as you would make your sexual ones?

Next, we consider sexual bonding from an evolutionary perspective. Once upon a time, back in the hoary mists of pre-history, homo sapiens used to live in massive, rigidly exclusive social groups. To the end of the Paleolithic period, we find no evidence of structure in sexual associations. This was followed by the hierarchical structuring of mates on the 'Alpha male rules' Darwinian principle. By the early Neolithic period, however, we find that, with increasing linguistic and social skills, sporadic efforts were made by group leaders to match all group members in long-term bonds. Such behavior, it may be noted, is also evinced by the higher mammals, viz. primates and pinnipeds.

By the end of the Chalcolithic period, we come across the first instances of religiously ordained marriage ceremonies. In history, of course, the matrimonial relation is too well documented to brook further discussion. A pertinent point, however, is that the concept of polygamy(or polyandry for that matter) has never been found to rise uniformly as a trend.

The crux of the argument is as follows. Is the nouveau riche not, by arguing for looser connubial ties (or their abolishment), bucking a Darwinian trend established 10,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age?

In summary then, is not this endeavor perverse in terms of both biological and social evolution?

I think we may, with some justification, answer in the affirmative. If so, what is the rationale behind cohabitation? "

phew , enough of this . Condom is going to make quite a splash tomorrow, isn't he?