The Hopper Connection

Last night I discovered an interesting connection. Road to Perdition is one of my favourite movies. The Wikipedia says — "To establish the lighting of scenes in Road to Perdition, Mendes drew from the paintings of Edward Hopper as a source of inspiration, particularly Hopper's New York Movie (1939)". Mendes is Sam Mendes !

The cinematography in Road to Perdition was done by Conrad Hall who won a total of three Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, the last one of which came posthumously for Road to Perdition.

Road to Perdition is a cinematic marvel. I still remember being in awe of the movie after I watched it and thinking about how brilliant the cinematography was. Then, when I read about the movie a little more, I came to know that a lot of people feel about it the same way. I guess I have some knack for appreciating good art. One of the scenes is etched in my memory forever. The scene where Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) kills John Rooney (Paul Newman) is one of the finest pieces of cinematography ever done (In my humble opinion !).

So last night, after, I googled Edward Hopper and saw a few paintings of him. A few paintings seemed familiar. I had seen them before. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out where I had seen them. In December 2020, I had come across an artcile, "The Spanish 1918 Flu and the COVID-19 Disease: The Art of Remembering and Foreshadowing Pandemics" by Joseph L.Goldstein, Nobel laureate in physiology in 1985. Goldstein discusses how the works of art serve as a tool to remember as well as foreshadow pandemics or any other tragedy. He discusses how Edvard Munch, after surviving Spanish Flu, depicted his experience in a painting, "Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu". Munch's most famous work is "The Scream".

Goldstein elaborates upon the work of Edward Hopper with regards to COVID-19. I will reproduce Goldstein's  take on Hopper's work.

Cape Cod Morning (1950)

Goldstein's interpretaion of the above painting: "In the painting entitled Cape Cod Morning, a woman gazes out of the bay window, her arms tense and her grip locked tight on the table in front of her. Her focus is forward and to the outside world, yet she seems imprisoned in her own home, anxiously staring toward an uncertain future and hoping that the lockdown will end soon".

That is certainly an interesting take but this is only one of the interpretations of the work and the not the objective truth. An art's interpretation is slave to the intellectual history and disposition of the observer. I don't know about the original motivations of Hopper and his own view of this work, what led him to paint this or what he thought of it after the work was finished.

I can have my own interpretation of this work. In my opinion, this could very well describe a woman in rural America waiting for her husband or her young son to return home who has been missing in action. It has been five years since the end of the World War 2. She wakes up every morning to look out of the window and probe the horizon in the hope that her son/husband might be walking towards her. My interpretation can be completely wrong as I have zero knowledge about rural America, its vegetation, the types of homes they have over there. Do they even have these windows in rural American homes? I brought in World War 2 only because this painting is from 1950 and that seemed a reasonable assumption to make.

Nevertheless, Goldstein's interpretation is very interesting for our times.

Car Chair (1965)

Goldstein's interpretation of the above painting: "Traveling by train or airplane is typically conducive to conversations and interactions among the passengers. But that is not the case in Hopper’s painting entitled Chair Car (1965), in which four travelers are shown inside a commuter train. The inside space is dreary with no decorations. The travelers appear isolated from one another, each lost within his or her own world. The painting evokes a feeling of cold unpleasantness that anticipates our current practice of social distancing".

I don't have my own interpretation of this as of now !

Acknowledgement: The paintings have been taken from WIKIARTS.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt.

Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt — writes J.M. Coetzee in Waiting for the Barbarians. This one line has stayed with me from the time I read that novel. This was the third novel of Coetzee I was reading and I haven't read him since the day, 25 August 2014, I finished it. I have been on a break from Coetzee and I hope to read Disgrace once again soon.

Coetzee had answered a question, through this line, which had been nagging me for some time. I always wondered about my inclinations and biases when it came to pick a book. In my teenage, which lasted up to the age of 23, I always picked up books which were emotionally lacerating. My instincts led me to choose books which made me blank with their last line.

"There were three thousand six hundred and fifty three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. The three extra days were for leap years." — wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Ivan is an ordinary prisoner in a Soviet labour camp in the 1950s, in Stalin's USSR. This single line is haunting beyond measure once you arrive at it which coincides with Ivan's bedtime in gulag.

I never felt a need to relate with any of the characters of the books I read. Their pain did the job. Pain is universal, happiness is inherently subjective and local. A woman losing her child at birth, a son grieving over the death of his mother, or a father losing his grown-up son; the pain is the same irrespective of the geography, anthropology and politics. It will be the same in the USA or Burma or Liberia. How one deals with that pain is something very local, having evolved over centuries guided by traditions and exigencies.

What I find strange is the way society limits and regulates the expression of pain. I am not aware of the restrictions placed upon the expression of  agony across different cultures but I can talk about what happens (used to happen) in the western state of Rajasthan, India. The villages in Rajasthan have Rudaalis who are professional mourners. These women, who live at the margins of the village ecosystem, are summoned when an upper caste male of the village dies. The womenfolk of the so-called upper castes are prohibited to display their emotions in public. These Rudaalis are hired to cry on their behalf, to represent their grief and to broadcast their wailing through their voice in the community. I wonder what makes Rudaalis so good at their job.

Pain is a very grand word. But what exactly it means? The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defines pain as — "An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage".  Coetzee certainly didn't have this definition in his mind when he declared the truth of pain above everything. A sprained neck or a bruised toe is certainly painful and we do have the ability to verbalize these kinds of obvious 'painful' experiences. Even a baby who doesn't have the ability to express the physical pain through words can do so by crying. But physical pain can be cured.

What can't be cured through modern medicine is anguish frozen deep inside our hearts, a festering wound of an indelible past. I reserve the word 'pain' for physical sufferings. I prefer to use the words — anguish, agony, heartache, grief, torment and affliction for various shades of mental sufferings.

I have always preferred two Sanskrit words to describe any kind of unintelligible pain —  व्यथा & वेदना. The Buddhist teachings have a vast literature on the word वेदना.

When Kunti went to meet Karna before the impending battle of Mahabharata, she was in deep pain (read anguish). The verses from Rashmirathi beautifully portrays her condition.

सुत की शोभा को देख मोद में फूली,

कुंती क्षण-भर को व्यथा-वेदना भूली.

भर कर ममता-पय से निष्पलक नयन को,

वह खड़ी सींचती रही पुत्र के तन को

When Karna hears out the confession of Kunti and responds, his response exudes the pain that he has lived throughout his life. In Coetzee's framework, all this pain is truth.

डूबते सूर्य को नमन निवेदित करके,

कुन्ती के पद की धूल शीश पर धरके।

राधेय बोलने लगा बड़े ही दुख से,

‘‘तुम मुझे पुत्र कहने आयीं किस मुख से ?

‘‘क्या तुम्हें कर्ण से काम ? सुत है वह तो,

माता के तन का मल, अपूत है वह तो।

तुम बड़े वंश की बेटी, ठकुरानी हो,

अर्जुन की माता, कुरूकुल की रानी हो।

‘‘मैं नाम-गोत्र से हीन, दीन, खोटा हूँ

सारथीपुत्र हूँ मनुज बड़ा छोटा हूँ।

ठकुरानी ! क्या लेकर तुम मुझे करोगी ?

मल को पवित्र गोदी में कहाँ धरोगी ?

‘‘है कथा जन्म की ज्ञात, न बात बढ़ाओ

मन छेड़-छेड़ मेरी पीड़ा उकसाओ।

हूँ खूब जानता, किसने मुझे जना था,

किसके प्राणों पर मैं दुर्भार बना था।

Lama Tsongkhapa (1357 — 1419), who was a great master of Tibetan Buddhism said that there are eight types of suffering.

1.  The suffering of birth.

2.  The suffering of old age.

3.  The suffering of illness.

4.  The suffering of death.

5.  The suffering of encountering what is unpleasant.

6.  The suffering of separation from what is pleasant.

7.  The suffering of not getting what one wants.

8.  The suffering of the five appropriated aggregates.

This neatly encapsulates every kind of pain Coetzee proclaimed to be the truth. But is Coetzee right? Is pain the only truth and everything else is subject to doubt? Literature has its own limits. It does a very good job of portraying the problems but offers no solution. It creates a thirst but offers nothing to quench it.

Can this pain be cured? Advaita Vedanta claims it can be. Isha Upanishad (Mantra 7) says:

यस्मिन् सर्वाणि भूतानि आत्मैवाभूद् विजानतः।

तत्र को मोहः कः शोक एकत्वमनुपश्यतः ॥

"He in whom it is the Self - Being that has become all existences that are Becomings, for he has the perfect knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief who sees everywhere oneness ?

Buddha showed us the path 2500 years ago. All the pain is merely an outcome of our ignorance. I have personally experienced that the pain can be dissolved with a little maturity and understanding. And that's a relief.

Coetzee is wrong.

उदास’ शब्द ‘उदासी’ की जगह नहीं ले सकता।

— निर्मल वर्मा  

PS: For a more complete description of suffering, one may refer to the editorial, "Bending Low with Load of Life: Meaning of Human Suffering" in the May 2021 issue of  Prabuddha Bharata.

The Dead Squirrel

It was 12 August 2006, my birthday. The day was Saturday, the second Saturday of the month, the day of the parent-teacher meet. I always used to skip this meet because, I, quite frankly, considered it pointless. But on that day, I was in my school practising for the zonal badminton tournament which was less than four weeks away.

I had to come back home in the middle to fetch something — shuttlecock or money, I can't remember. A squirrel came under the front wheel of the rickshaw on my way to the home. It suddenly came out of nowhere and rickshaw puller couldn't apply the brakes in time. The squirrel died in a few seconds spewing a lot of blood. That's probably the first time I saw a living object dying.

Every single time I see a squirrel, I find myself reliving that harrowing moment. Every 12 August, I remember that squirrel.

I have a very muted response to death. Death makes you philosophical, momentarily. Death reminds me of something which I read in my seventh standard English literature textbook by Oxford University Press.

“Man's dearest possession is life. It is given to him but once, and he must live it so as to feel no torturing regrets for wasted years, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he might say: all my life, all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world──the fight for the Liberation of Mankind”

— Nikolai Ostrovsky

क्या कभी सोचा है

हर पाँच सुबह सप्ताह में उठकर 

जब तुम काम पर जाते हो 

सड़क के ऊपर चलते हो 

क्या कभी सोचा है ?

जब तुम ऊपर चलते हो सड़क के 

मैं अंदर तैरता हूँ गटर में 

जब तुम बाहर सांस लेते हो 

मैं दम घोंटकर हाथ मैले करता हूँ 

तुम्हारे घरों के मैल से 

तुम्हारे मल से 

क्या कभी सोचा है ?

कौन हूँ मैं ?

तुम जब अपनी तरक्की पर फ़क्र करते हो 

वंदे मातरम् का उद्घोष करते हो 

भारत माता की जय बोलते हो 

तब उस माँ की इस संतान को याद करते हो ?

जो तुम्हारे सामने से गुज़रता है 

तो हवा की तरह देख नहीं पाते उसे

लेकिन उसी हवा में जब किसी बंद नाले की 

दुर्गन्ध तैरती हुई तुम्हारी नाक को परेशान करती है 

तब ढूंढ़ने लगते हो मुझे 

मुझे गंदगी में उतार कर 

स्वच्छ भारत बनाते हो 

फिर भी मुझे ख़ुद से दूर रखते हो 

अलग गिलास में पानी देते हो 

आईने में बिना शर्मिंदा हुए बाल संवारते हो 

और सुबह काम पर  निकल जाते हो | 

वतन की सर-ज़मीं से इश्क़ ओ उल्फ़त हम भी रखते हैं 

खटकती जो रहे दिल में वो हसरत हम भी रखते हैं

—  जोश मलसियानी

Juvenilia

On the night of 14 December 2018, between 00:005 and 00:15, I was rummaging through my teenage memorabilia —  mostly books and notes. I stumbled upon an old envelope with perfect creases. It probably had remained unopened for ten years.

When I opened the envelope, I found newspaper clippings and a few printouts on the history of physics. The printouts were from 2005 and I couldn't remember anything about the clippings. The United Nations had declared 2005, The International Year of Physics, and I was being forced, by my class teacher, to participate in some in inter-school competition on the same theme. As I was extremely shy during my school days, I managed to excuse myself from the event. I still dislike occasions where strangers behold me. This has slowly changed over time. With acting in a few plays and skits during my undergraduate days and hosting quizzes regularly during my master's, I feel much more confident on the stage now.

The clippings and printouts threw me back in a time about which I had almost no recollection. Nevertheless, these little pieces of paper did their job. A mirror which has accumulated dust over the years, still shows us our own reflection when it is cleaned.

I am in the dark about the date !

This must be from 2005 as that year was the 100th anniversary of the birth of 'Special Theory of Relativity'.

Certainly from 2005.

28 September 2005

2005 was a very important year in my life. It cemented my interest in physics.  That was the first time I read about Special Theory of Relativity in a magazine called Vigyan Pragati. It had that famous definition of STR form the man himself - " Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity". I bought the  biography of Einstein from the World Book Fair of 2006. Sadly, that remains the only book about him I have read till date. 

I don't want to annotate any further on 'my past'. My words won't do any justice. Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem — The Past, captures the extent of my desiderium.

The debt is paid,

The verdict said,

The Furies laid,

The plague is stayed,

All fortunes made;

Turn the key and bolt the door,

Sweet is death forevermore.

Nor haughty hope, nor swart chagrin,

Nor murdering hate, can enter in.

All is now secure and fast;

Not the gods can shake the Past;

Flies-to the adamantine door

Bolted down forevermore.

None can reenter there, -

No thief so politic,

No Satan with a royal trick

Steal in by window, chink or hole,

To bind or unbind, add what lacked

Insert a leaf, or forge a name,

New-face or finish what is packed,

Alter or mend eternal Fact.

ज़िंदगी रोक के अक्सर यही कहती है मुझे 

तुझ को जाना था किधर और किधर आ गया है 

— ज़िया ज़मीर

PS: Happy 140th Birthday Herr Einstein !

Correction: New map pins down 'dark matter' is from 9 January 2007. The Old Man And The E is from 24 June 2007. Google helped me !

Friends, Friendship & Divorce

Years ago, someone told me that our successes and failures are not entirely our own. Society is equally responsible for both, and we should always keep this in mind. I first understood this when I went to Banaras Hindu University to begin my undergraduate studies in 2009. During the first two physics lectures, our professor enlightened us about the history of our university and the efforts of several individuals, working both in isolation and in cooperation, to erect this edifice. That narration impressed upon me the immensity of Pandit Malaviya's initiative and his efforts to bring his vision to life.

We are humans only in relation to society. Our existence has no value in isolation. Society influences us in both subtle and coarse ways, and in turn, we too leave our mark, however insignificant. In my case, the influences of society were most prominently manifested through individuals whom I like to call 'friends.'

I consider myself extremely lucky to have a wonderful set of friends. My closest friends are from my BHU days, and it had to be that way. That was a time when we were transitioning into adulthood from teenage, and the phenomenon of coming of age collectively leaves an indelible mark on the rest of our lives. Surely, a few years down the line, we might laugh at our naivety and ignorance from that time, but we had an amazing time back then. I have always considered friendship to be the most sacred of all human relations, even a notch above the most intimate familial bonds. It is something for which we make a conscious choice, and if we don't seriously respect our choice, that says something about our own character. Friendship shouldn't have an ideological basis. If that is the case, that bond will break apart at the very first sign of divergence. I have a colorful set of friends. There has to be certain similarities to sustain a friendship. That could be anything, ranging from a shared liking for a particular thing to appreciating the movie Four Lions.

I have always deeply cared about the well-being of my friends, and their successes—according to the parameters they set for themselves—have made me immensely happy.

I have four sets of mutually exclusive friends—early childhood, school, BHU, and IISER Mohali—with a few fleeting overlaps among the sets because of physics. I have always been fiercely loyal to my friends, and in turn, I expect their loyalty. I can't let go of even a minor contravention in the unwritten tenets of friendship. Whenever any breach has occurred, I have subtly distanced myself from that friend. It has become fairly easy for me to walk away from people. I don't like that, but I have come to identify it as my strength. Maybe it aids in self-preservation.

It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend. 

- William Blake

मैं बुझ गया तो हमेशा को बुझ ही जाऊँगा 

कोई चराग़ नहीं हूँ कि फिर जला लेगा 

— वसीम बरेलवी

The Darkness Under The Sun

Today, I was sitting on a bench in the park behind my school, soaking in the late afternoon sun. I heard a chink. I couldn't care less and didn't bother to turn around. A dog had just gone around the bench, and I presumed it must have been that dog kicking things around.

Within 10–15 seconds, I heard another chink and turned around to shoo away the dog. I hate dogs.

As I turned, I didn't see any dog. Instead, I saw a kid, about four years old, picking up a crushed beer can from beneath the bench. His little hands were already holding one can, and with much difficulty, he picked up the other and held them close to his chest.

Our eyes met, and he looked scared. I smiled at him. He came to the front and picked up another can lying in front of me. After a couple of seconds, he managed to hold all three cans with the support of his chest. He walked away, smiling, toward his mother, who was a few yards ahead. She had just put down the heap of trash she was carrying on her head to rest for a bit.

I got lost in my own futile existence.

धूप में निकलो घटाओं में नहा कर देखो 

ज़िंदगी क्या है किताबों को हटा कर देखो 

— निदा फ़ाज़ली