Of childhoods, and story shops

I would have been around six or seven when my father bought me my first book of stories. It was an issue of Nandan, a children’s magazine I think still comes out. While not my first story, or my first story book by any means, it was, in ways I am still realizing, a watershed moment in a lifetime full of reading and books.

Not that I had not had stories before Nandan. I was born in the early eighties in a village in Bihar (which, to this date, is the only place I can definitively call home), and when born, I inherited a gaggle of grandmas, aunties, uncles, brothers (never cousins), and sisters. And they inherited me. That was the time a child was not a child, (s)he was a communal responsibility, and seeing a crying kid meant you had to make it smile. My nostalgia colors my memories somewhat, but only somewhat.

And so there was the concept of ‘katha’. In winters, there would be campfire like affairs and all the old guys (grandfathers) and the kids (grandchildren) would sit together, muffled in sweaters and shawls and monkeycaps against the cold Bihar winters and the old’uns would tell stories. In the nights, you would sleep with your gramma and she would tell you stories till you slept. They were not pretty stories, always; not always ending happily, or proceeding happily…a lot of them had enough bloodshed and destruction to give pause to Michael Bay and enough retributive justice to cause a fire and brimstone preacher to go mute. But they were always told in a just right way. Anyway, the point was that that Nandan was not the first introduction to stories. And since I did not buy it, it was not my first visit to a bookshop either.

Children often crave forbidden things, things they cannot reach. When I was a child, the spare bedroom in our house had one of those attic-type racks hanging from the ceiling, full of odds and ends. It was forbidden, naturally. Three feet children can suffer serious harm if they fall from nine feet ledges. But we managed to find chairs and tables and to put chairs over tables and, well…mischief managed. The unreliable memory says a dholak (from my father’s college days, probably); a few cartonful of old shoes (again my father’s probably, kept against all reason by a thrifty mother); some out of use receipt books (most likely from a series of failed business ventures my uncle tried to get into at that time); and a half-attic full of books and magazines from when my father was graduating. That was my first real introduction to fiction. And, a real book shop. For a bookshop is not a place where you go to find what you want to buy…it is all those real places you go to to find what you want to read.

And that was my place. Bundles upon bundles of Maya and Ravivar and the initial issues of India Today in Hindi and (gasp!) Mayapuri. They were responsible for my subsequent interest in the Phantom, Mandrake, Hindi sports novels (Shobhabazaar, I think,  by don’t know who (please tell me if you know…if I remember correctly, it was a Hindi translation of a Bangla novel, ironically published in the Hindi translation of an English magazine); they were responsible for teaching much of the history of my country that I know; and it being the early eighties, much of the revulsion I have for some of the leading political leaders of that time. They gave me (though I did not realize it then), a political ideology or what remains of it, a social sensibility, a sense of humanity and imagination and adventure and the never-endingness of the sensuality of the world, and a love for the written word. That place, a 2X4 attic in the spare room of my home was the place I learnt to read.

Of course, by the early nineties, the parents shooed me off to a boarding, and I found a library which was like that attic, only on a gigantic scale; and I took to it with a sense of mischief that once prompted the librarian to threaten to write to my parents, as the gentleman felt I was devoting all my time to Enid Blyton and Noddy et al. Trust me, I had to show my reportcard to get out of that one. And then I moved to Patna, and the best bookstores I have seen in my life.

It all starts with why you read, and moves on to what you read. When you are 58 inches and 40-some kgs and unaware of the latest bollywood shenanigans and specialize in hurling hard wooded stuff and your only redeeming social skill is a bloodymindedness with a cricket ball in hand, sinking yourself in the printed page is a good option. Of course, the bloodymindedness and the cricket ball and short temper allow you to not be written off entirely; and so you survive on your knowledge of cricket and useless trivia you have accumulated for so many years reading so much stuff, and your skill at twenty-nine. And when you hate it all, you bunk lectures, and while the other kids slink into the morning show of that movie with the poster of the blonde with unnatural looking body parts and a yellow vest too small for her, you go and sit at a bookstall in Danapur and read comics, one rupee each, describing the adventures of Nagraj and Super Commando Dhruva and Doga and the ever hilarious Bankelal; mostly with female characters with even more unnatural attributes than the ones in the movies your friends have gone to watch, and with even skimpier clothes. Long live Raj Comics.

But, of course, the real joy of Patna was Gandhi Maidan, and the booksellers near Regent. While they made a living selling ‘competition books’, those were the guys who would buy anything and everything for a price ranging from five bucks to five thousand bucks and sell it for similar prices. That was the first real Amazon, the first real Flipkart of my life; the first real place where I could find everything I wanted, and a lot of the stuff I did not know I wanted. With the options of returning the books after reading, and taking other books back. In truth, it was the first Blossoms of my life.

I owe four years of my life to those roadside bookstalls from whom I purchased mostly Frederick Forsyths and Jeffery Archers and Hardy Boys, but the occasional Shakespeare and Voltaire too (what bores!). And, that 4 years coincided with the years of my life when I was required to read Shakespeare and Dickens and Shelly and Keats and Bronte and Shaw. And that was the times I learned that hindi pulp fiction was fun too, that Surendra Mohan Pathak and Ved Prakash Sharma et al could be tremendous fun and could stop the world for two hours and 200 pages. That was the time I learned to enjoy Hindi literature (reading Kamaleshwar’s Kitne Pakistan serialized in Hindustan- the only great novel I have read in a serial fashion), my first few episodes of Hans and Kathadesh…that was the time I vaguely began to realize what made great literature great. Then I moved to Guwahati, which was a very nice place except for the lack of any really good bookstores and then to Jamshedpur, which was the same, and that one lack in both places makes them cities with a hole in the place where there heart would be. Except in Jamshedpur, in the term before I was due to leave, a Spencer’s opened, and one of my close friends got a PhD grant, and he treated us to a book-fest, some of which I still haven’t finished reading.

The point of all this nostalging being, bookstores. They are not always places you find physically, or virtually. They are places you find mentally…something goes twang, and there you are…standing in that small hovel, holding in your hand the little, yellowed, falling apart copy of the book you never knew you wanted, but would pay a year’s salary for at that moment. Till reality hits. That place in your mind is the bookstore, the story shop…because the story in your hands is your own, and that moment of your time is all you live for. Your bookstore is in your mind.

Sportsmen, role models, and belief

(I wrote a longer version of this as a comment on @sidvee's blog, and lost it trying to log in. Don't think can recreate the entire comment, so here goes a paraphrased version.)

The other day I was part of a twitter discussion about why the minor misdemeanors of sportsmen get the most stringent scrutiny, while even the wildest acts of other celebrities do not seem to affect the barometer of public affection. Case in point: the Lance Armstrong issue. The claim is doping, and I do maintain that in a vicious world which has a so much injustice strewn around should you care to look, the breaking of a few million people's faith should not really matter all that much (it does not to, me- I think there are maybe a few billion people who have never heard of Armstrong). And there
are guys like Salman Khan who was accused of running over actual, physical people (an act that usually results in death, unlike hurt emotions), or a Sanjay Dutt (accused and convicted of worse- naivete or not), and still their movies run to full houses and nobody seems to make any noise about their histories. It is a cynical world.

I used to believe in sportsmen once, I have been chewed out and spat back in an interview for saying that if I had to look at one person for inspiration in the world, I would look at Steve Waugh (which, given my background, the interviewer thought, was a stupid choice). But I believe that when we are choosing our role models, the context plays as big as role in the choice of the person and the strength of attachment we feel towards him. So, when we are looking at an SRT play in an India/Mumbai jersey, we are not just looking at him as a sportsman, we are looking him as a manifestation of what we stand for (the belief of how the country should be, how the city should be)- sublime, resilient, able to come back from behind, able to be heroic in defeat...choose your faff. Same, I feel, would apply for sportsmen who do not play for countries, but play for clubs, or teams like footballers or F1 racers- all of these entities stand for something- we like the team, we associate values to it, and when the favored child shifts, he still carries some values attached to the team (does not have to be real, can as well be perceived).

By comparison, when I watch the white shirt tear itself of Salman's body in a Dabangg almost as if it hates being wrapped around it, I do enjoy it; but neither I, not most of us imagine being locked in a battle to death with goons on a vengeance trip in an obscure place. (The context thing applies here too, remember how AB of Zanjeer or Roti, Kapda Aur Makaan or Deewar was expected to live to higher standards- his context was closer to the real world-does that sound funny?).

And that is the long and short of it, I guess, we pick heroes based on how we attach to them, and that, in turn, is based on context. So, I would say we are doomed to gaze on those stars and pick out 'our' heroes among them for so long as we live, because we identify with them- if we didn't, we wouldn't patronize what they did. Think about it, at its crudest, cricket is just one man throwing a ball hoping to hit a stick while another hopes to hit it with another stick, and ten other guys wait to chase that ball. Not the most urgent problem facing us, is it? But we need metaphors to live, and that is as good a metaphor as any.

As far as as Karl Malone's article about the responsibility of sportsmen is concerned, in an ideal world, everyone would be like that. In the real world, we have people like Charles Berkley who don't have any obligation to 'raise our kids'. To these guys, I only have one thing to say: you had talent, but that talent did not make you famous. You could always chosen not to be famous- so top taking it as a freebie and start seeing it as a responsibility, because like it or not, people are going to look at you. (I grew up in a world where being a grown up was a responsibility- where grown ups tried to behave properly in front of kids, or at least as properly as they would expect kids to behave- where the ability to behave as you could: to live life as you could, was not a responsibility, not a privilege).

I know my idols do not have to feel the same way, but they do have the choice to. And as far as I am concerned, I will always believe, simply because not believing is far more easier, but that much uglier.

PS: Any articles I refer to are all linked to in @sidvee's post, and I am being just lazy, but you must read that post and chase the links.

Stories

When I was something around 3 or 4, my father bought for me the first piece of fiction I ever read. It was a hindi magazine called Nandan, full of stories of sweet little children who obeyed their mothers and never got into trouble, and of impish little children who sometimes disobeyed their mothers, but still managed to cause only so much mischief that everything would turn out all right in the end.

Since then, I have been a sucker for stories.

When I was six or seven, we used to play with makeshift bows and arrows, you know, little bows made of bamboo sticks split down the middle and dried and smoothed so the sharp edges would not cut our hands- 18 inch bows, fitted with the strings they used to sew those jute bags of wheat with, and armored with one and a half feet arrows of reed. Sometimes, just like the kids who like to play with kites and who sex up their manjha, we used to sex up our arrows. A little bit of coaltar applied to the tip of the arrow would give it weight, and would ensure that when all the local Arjunas of the village went into a pissing match of who could shoot an arrow the furthest, you would be affected a bit less by the wind, and your fate would rest more in the strength of you shoulders. And, of course, the level of enthusiasm you had for the chastising that would follow if any of the elders caught you playing with these potentially eye-damaging equipments.

When we grew older (by a couple years), the test of the strength of the shoulders that came into vogue, was kabaddi. As expected, I was a sissy on a kabaddi field, never touching anyone, never killing anyone, doing my best to not get caught, and not putting up a fight, once I did. And then, someone introduced me to a bat and a ball, and since then, that was it. What is the point of it all? Stories. I am telling you stories which might or might not interest you or affect you, the same way they did when I was a kid.

And then I got sent off to a boarding, and thus started my real tryst with stories. But it was not until college that I really began to understand them- the essence of stories which we told or listened to.
What is the significance of stories? And how are they best told? We know that they are mostly written for heroes. The victor always gets his story written. And sometimes, someone stands up to tell the tale of the one who lost, from his perspective. And the wrong becomes the wronged against, or not, depending on how pursuasive the chronicler is. Every fairytale told from the point of view of the orge bears a sad story, or maybe not- how can predisposing factors justify evil? And yet, we have the fairytales of the brothers Grimm. And more importantly, history. What we have lived.

And a rich tradition of oral history, which is the most treacherous and prevalent of all. Anecdotes are not good friends of one in search of superficial pictures, because the ones which are most often told are the ones which are agreeable to most people. And, yet, they might not be the most correct ones. Because, you know, victory might not always be definitive or truthful.

So, why the stories about the bows and arrows then? Simple, really. Whenever we played those games, the arrows would land some seventy-eighty yards away in fields of wheat-stumps. And there would be one person keeping watch where everyone's arrow fell. And some arrows would always, freakishly, get carried away by the wind. A minor form of cheating in children's games.

But you get my point, I guess. Now think about those whose stories are not told.

In Defense of Blogging

(Or Tweeting or Instagramming or Facebook Statuses)

Of late, I have been hearing rather a lot about people blogging and tweeting and facebooking and instagramming- and much has been made of the quality of the posts on offer, and why we are doing what we are doing and should we be doing something different, like may be writing a book, which, ostensibly would be a better utilization of our time. One frequent explanation proffered for this deluge of status updates (whether in a few words on FB/Twitter, on via pics on instagram or via eloquent posts or incoherent rants on blogs and other such fora) is that we all seek to massage our egos- the breakdown of this argument being that such posts/updates are essentially a reminder to the world of the arrival of the person posting it- ‘Hey, I am here! Are you?’ While I do not completely rule that sentiment out, I am not in full agreement with it, either. I believe that this is a more primal need- a need to communicate with like minded people, a yearning for dialogue and approval from what one perceives as one’s peer group- in an ironic twist, the more our lives are becoming compartmentalized and insular, the greater our need to communicate seems to be.

The other day I was reading an essay by Salman Rushdie dealing with the themes of emigrant literature, history and the role of literature in society. These are big themes, and not relevant to the topic I am trying to briefly tackle here, but his explanation of ‘who’ do we write for seems to me to be pertinent to the current discussion:

“This raises immediately the question of whom one is writing ‘for’. My own, short answer is that I have never had a reader in mind. I have ideas, people, events, shapes, and I write ‘for’ those things, and hope that the completed work will be of interest to others. But which others? In the case of Midnight’s Children I certainly felt that if its subcontinental readers had rejected the work, I should have thought it a failure, no matter what the reaction in the West. So I would say that I write ‘for’ people who feel part of the things I write ‘about’: but also for everyone else whom I can reach.” (emphasis mine)

The context is different, but the parts I have put in bold above seem, to me, to apply to every scrap of writing or tweeting or status updating that is done for public consumption. And the need for finding that empathy is also a large part (apart from the egotism) of why we write*.

As an aside, a lot of people complain about information overload and signal-noise ratios in the age of the web. I disagree; I have long believed that more than an information problem, what we have on our hands is a problem of effective filtering. 

Your thoughts are welcome.

*This, here, is about personal (i.e. unaffiliated/individual, for want of a better word) writing for public consumption, and I do not presume to include the writing of literature or journalism in the ambit of these narrow, individualistic causes/motives of writing.

P.S. The Rushdie quote is from a 1982 essay called Imaginary Homelands, which can be found on the London Review of Books. There might be a free subscription requirement.

Talking to Complete Strangers

Perhaps there is something about talking to complete strangers that  makes us give far more of ourselves away than we would, normally, to someone we know, making for moments of unassailable intimacy with people we would probably never meet again which would be completely impossible with people we know- friends, relatives, siblings, parents. Perhaps it is the absence of fear of being judged, perhaps it is just that the people we actually know have been measured by us and found wanting on the scales of empathy-identified as non-kindred spirits showing our wounds and conflicts and contradictions to whom would be a complete waste of time, or perhaps it is just the yearning; no, hope; that we all have of finding someone who will Understand. Maybe this is what we want more than anything else in our lives, to be understood, to be known for what we are and to be accepted for what we are and why we are what we are, to have someone who would not speculate on the motivations behind our actions, who would be in complete tune with the way things are and will be in our lives, and who can live with that fact. And in that context it is ironic, and yet not entirely ununderstandable why we seem to open to strangers more- strangers represent the unknown, and when the known has been measured and found wanting, the unknown always also brings hope.

Response to a FB Post

"They got it right,when they said,women were nothing without their men..for we are moulded and shaped and touched and carved by the different men,who dot the landscape at different points in our lives..their adoration touches us,their naievete tickles us and the heartaches they cause,makes us tougher..and we find strength in tears,and softness in strength..and realise it is alright not to want to stand alone all the time,and also,to stand alone does not mean we are always wrong..and the secret is as simple as to laugh as much as one can,to cry,and to feel,and to giggle and to ache..to live as much as possible,in one lifetime..make it one glorious blur..for at the end,like a wise guy somehwere said,we are indeed the sum of all our experiences.."
-Friend on FB

Response:

That works both ways. It is dangerously one-sided, and to a large extent, either naive or oversimple. Doesn't it work both ways? I would use the word people- the people (meaning the men or the women-as the case may be) who touched us. The people who had us waking in our dreams, and from our dreams; the people from whom we waited awake while we dreamed, the people who put reality to sleep, while they were busy jolting our reality- those who shook the foundation from under us, while really becoming the foundation of what we became in future.

Time might as well be a metaphor- in so far as these people are concerned- for mostly they never go away. Geographies cannot separate, nor can chronologies differentiate, sometimes some people just make us give up. It sounds too romanticized, but is not- applies equally well to people we love or those we hate. They all shape us...as you say...our experiences. It is not always bright, it is not always that which sheds the maximum light, it is not always people we personally want with us, or wish wanted us with them. It is nothing personal, as far as people are concerned, even though it is everybit as personal as personal gets. But in the end, people are people. What matters is us, who let people get rights on ourselves that even we do not possess.

 It, sometimes, is like voluntary captivity. Yet, every morning, we wake up, brand new-almost like we are unwrapping the sun from its box-bright and shiny. And then we let go through the rest of the day, like every day is a lifetime, burning in the bright light of the gift we have unleashed, each one of us our own Prometheus grimacing our own burnished smiles under the very fires we stole from our own personal Olympus, and gave to them- mixing a lot of metaphors, every morning, we are gods who fell on our own swords. We think we are getting wiser, we think we have found a way. When all that is true is that we have lost it, and are just running around in circles like hamsters in a wheel. Man or woman. We are our own prisoners.