Problem

Most of the books I’ve read in the past few years placed a heavy focus on romance and love. Even the ones that didn’t deal with these themes explicitly had subtexts that had to do with them. Now this isn’t to say they weren’t tolerable, — some of these books happen to be my favourites — but I wish so many books (even films and songs, for that matter) weren’t so obsessed with love. There are many other kinds of human relationships that we could explore instead.

One problem I have with a lot of books about romance and love is that they seldom scratch past the surface of a certain experience to talk about something bigger, or at least signal such a move. Few even care to wonder about the possibility of such transcendence. They’re mostly content with appealing to a reader’s sympathy/desire/joy and, in doing so, rely wholly on the process of self-identification of the reader with the narrative. As readers we, too, have come to internalise that.

And love sells, of course, — even I know that — but I’m thinking about this purely from an ideological/principled point of view; the economics of it is largely immaterial to me. Moreover, it’s never a one-way traffic when it comes to art: the concept of “what sells” is shaped as much by the (expectation of the) audience as by the creators/distributors of artistic production.

Solution

The most obvious solution is to pick the books I read more carefully. but, as an aspiring writer, I must also try to do what little I can to correct this imbalance.

So, for months I’d been looking for a more interesting dynamic to examine, — something that doesn’t have such a huge, pervasive, constricting cultural myth built around it as romantic love does — and now a brief conversation on Facebook has presented me with an answer. I am going to spend the next few years of my life exploring our relationships with things (esp. technology), animals, ideas, and places instead — in short, our relationship with the inanimate/abstract/nonhuman.

This isn’t just about rejecting trends but also about trying to understand the underlying assumptions/principles that inform them. To reject these trends properly, I will have to first understand what it is I’m rejecting. Familiarising myself with these assumptions/principles can also inform my perspective in a different way, — intent does matter, after all — and that’s what I need to start working on.

how do you leave a city once you’ve given it your heart?

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maybe dilli is nothing but a city, and maybe the sound of a metro pulling out of a station isn’t supposed to make you fall in love each time you listen to it. maybe we’re supposed to keep walking into — and out of — identities, never wearing the same mask in another place (not because we can’t, but because some lives only belong to certain streets and can only thrive in the unremitting sunshine of a certain gaze). maybe i’ll come back later, as i always have. maybe my life will go on existing here, haunting all the points in space and time that will lie outside my body’s reach. maybe this is what i want. maybe the new place will be just as magical, just as heartbreakingly beautiful. maybe my heart longs to run to new places to have itself torn up there anew.

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even the promise of a new love could never make leaving dilli easier. some things never change.

some others do. i’m going to pack and squeeze dilli into my favourite songs and words, force all of it inside and keep pressing until it all explodes into numerous shreds of skin and bone and muscle and blood: spreading everywhere, spreading so far in a spray of ineluctable bloody mist that i’ll never be able to escape it. and then, finally, everywhere and everywhen will be dilli and i will never have to leave again.

gotta anchor all the magic i’ve ever collected to every inch of this city.

do not disturb.

While talking to a friend about breakthroughs in science, I told myself to record what I said to him. So: a brief note, because I often find myself telling people this same thing: most scientific research is incremental in nature.

Science, in all its self-corrective glory, is a collective enterprise. Scientists build upon existing work, — instead of creating a new framework from scratch each time — in the hopes of finding yet another missing piece of the puzzle that the community labours to solve collectively. Disproportionate glory is often bestowed on the ones that find the last (or the first) missing piece of a puzzle but it does little to change that science is, above all, a collective enterprise. Scientific revolutions are rare and major breakthroughs depend on the body of knowledge available to you. You have to be working on the right problem at the right place at the right time with enough funding/resources/genius at your disposal to create a tectonic shift.

Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or we are incalculably precious and interesting.

— Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

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let’s try to move away from the human and the linguistic. let’s move to the place where the words ‘insignificant’ and ‘precious’ mean nothing — there are no words here, no meanings. i rather like it here.

i don’t always approve of the way we try to attach meaning to everything. i hate the way we sometimes desperately try to tease beauty out of the ordinary, the unusual, and the chaotic. we exist and, sometimes, that’s all there’s to it.

I do not want to be a person / I want to be unbearable.

— Anne Carson, “Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions”, Decreation, p. 72

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One can be a person and still be unbearable. All people are unbearable: unbearably ethereal, unbearably beautiful, unbearably Other.

I want to invite her and Kundera to dinner, and stay up all night talking to them.