People spend their whole lives learning to do what I’m doing right now, learning to write, to act, to live. Then there are others, geniuses of sorts, if not they know, certainly know how to act, how to do the little dance with their words, their actions, their thoughts and voices. It’s easy to believe that they have truth on their sides, their successors included, who, I proclaim tonight, act as if truth is indeed their own possession, as if truth is not something at all moments to be discovered, as if it is not inherently human. Forgive my vitriol if you sense it, but I daresay, you are not the sole judge of what is bitter or sweet. If I believe that the state has never changed in essence, you will rise to the occasion to proclaim this is false, and that in the past things were divinely ordained, and a thousand thoughts arising as a Brahminical discourse, as a type of holy thought world, as a democratization of thought. My essay was intended in response to, and is influenced by, the film ‘Pink’. It’s easy to believe the above things, but the one thing that I will never give up is faith in the face of all reality, because ‘social construct’ is a mere word, and words and thoughts mean nothing. That is why I am not a champion of the lgbtq and the feminist camp, nor do I concern with them, for the same reason. And so with the truth. But, I will indulge a bit in this ‘gray’ affair of cinema. Cinema has a power to transform, but most of all, it is an event, an arousal in a public setting. And events shape discourse. ‘Pink’ is a mirror. It adds nothing more to the discourse known as reality. Therefore, it is not pink, it ought to be gray, because it is more befitting of a tragic event. Pink is an insinuation, an arrival into the cosmos, open wide, for the first time, though it is entirely woman-centric. Must I not try to arouse your sentiments too, by painting a picture of the gray, and join “the party”? I already know this. I will act according to it. So far as Man is a product of his, not directly upbringing, but the various images and the articulation of his thoughts which is known as his education, the function of society becomes this very value inculcation. However, with time he realizes that values are not enough for fulfillment, he must look inwards, and a natural reaction to this is his taking up arms against the very values that make him, and a dual personality arises, one of construction and another bent on destruction. This duality of one’s own nature divides him in these two aspects, and there is a tearing apart from society and, hence, oneself. He does not know what to do, not only do his actions possess dual meanings, they are also divided by his side of personality that wants at the same time to contribute to society and at the same time understands that this ‘contribution’ is necessarily immoral, and that to act means to rebel, either positively (through ‘crime’) or by means of the intellect (anarchists or people with mental health issues). Literature, always and everywhere, is born of this impulse, when self-gratification becomes a cause rather than a cause for happiness, and that is where sublimation arises, a tearing apart from oneself; but literature today is institutionalized, and that is why young people turn away from its true cause: a resolution of the personality through rebellion: all true literature is a rebellion. Making a choice, a real one, and all that fear and sickness, time and death, danger and hope, that goes with living. We become, in other words, alive for the first time, with a real sense of life and the self, and all our interests are dissolved, and we begin to really learn, our interests and their impressions arise in our journey chosen to learn which no longer becomes a choice, and so on until oblivion. This fight with ourselves is perfectly well described through religion, that is why religion is as important in our day as all other literature. I chose the title gray out of: aesthetic sensibilities (or lack thereof) whose idea was to paint a picture of the great gender issue of our time, necessarily a question of narrative rather than an experience, which sometimes reverses roles. The film pink talks about gender issues and the intent of the emotion conveyed is to depict the tearing up of our social fabric in individual pieces. Just as soon as the film released there were articles all around the Newspaper in the Sky that, inspired from the film, took either a feminist perspective (no less an objective social construction than the patriarchy) or raised questions about the authenticity of thinking that arises after experiencing the film, for the film is an experience rather than an expression. No I’m not implying a view point of perspectivism at the heart of experience, or at least, and this is where you smile, not intending to. What is the feeling? What is reality? Is it a shade of colour: pink, blue, gray, white, black? I do not, firstly, speak from a blues point of view, though I’d very much like to. My perspective is gray, the colour of insanity. I see many shades of the spectrum falling out of a prism, meaningless as their original counterparts, Earth and Fire. There is a certain neurosis in me propelling me to be away from all that is frightfully right. I don’t even know why I do not kill. Yet, colours fascinate me, are stuck in the forefront of my consciousness like a sexual object. Perhaps that is the reason I don’t know how to write, and write what is divinely ordained, what you might argue (since you’re an atheist), is chance. Art too is stuck, not as a type of valuable obsession but as a wish-fulfilment. I don’t know how to think anymore, know reason but it’s very ill, and since I’m not dull I know very well how to crucify myself. Drunk as I am on my feelings (which you might argue are born of my social interactions and past friendships), I present a case from the fringes of society’s and hence my own, consciousness. I don’t fear anyone or anything, and my emotions are easily aroused. I am a secessionist, a word made fashionable by Arnab and the self-proclaimed defenders of integrity. I was born on the exact day the Babri was brought down. I have attempted Novels and Books, and failed; and though it was clear in the past that the method I was using was flawed, took four years making notes, and continued attempting it, four years of notes, no reading, no writing, making notes. I also questioned on a daily basis, for four years, who I was, and what I want to do in my life, whether I was Artaud or a literature student. Went with Artaud. There is a feeling that creeps within me every time I see unjust narratives. I begin to live, in the shoes, my own shoes. The rest is in your hands,
There is a feeling that moves me within my own self, transforms me,
Each night I dream about my past as a kind of social situation in my childhood,
It is a feeling that I get makes me believe in God; and in loneliness and fall from grace, I take to a theatre, a theatre that is my life.