Write Concepts #28

I think I have written enough and mostly don't need to write much anymore. I wanted my body of work to be about health and medicine and fiction but I ended up writing about psychosocial and sociopolitical realities of the country we live in. I have my plans of writing the novels, novellas, short stories and flash fiction that I have already conceptualized and if my cognitive bandwidth allows I will execute my plans. I don't do poetry anymore, at least not of the public sort and I'm kind of done with psychosocial and sociopolitical writing and will be using this place for them very infrequently from now on. I want to focus on my first love that is fiction but that depends on my cognitive bandwidth. Two things that I might post on this blog other than infrequent psychosocial and sociopolitical writings, are gonzo and prose poetry and I hope to write a couple of prose poems and one gonzo per week. I'm not giving up on fiction, I just realised that I am more incapable of writing it from the imagination point of view than I was in 2013. And although I might churn out a bunch of flash fiction once in a while, short stories, novellas and novels need planning and dedication, and above all imagination which is hard to find in the current political economy. My output then is going to be a bunch of flash fiction once in a while and a couple of prose poems and gonzo a week. I will try to work on the novellas I'm already working on and have started posting on my fiction blog. 

Vyomanaut

The space, the universe, is something that I was genuinely interested in. I grew up with TV serials on Doordarshan, like Brahmand, The Great Experiments and Captain Vyom and magazines like Vigyan Pragati. Developing scientific temper is one of the fundamental duties in the constitution. I read books like Children's Knowledge Bank and Encyclopedia Britannica was sold those days by traveling salesmen. In the Matrix the machines designed the Matrix to simulate the late 90s and it was inferred in the movie that it was the peak of human civilization. Looking at the present it seems true. In Matrix humans were farmed for electricity and today the resource is data. This realisation didn't have the capacity to surprise me until I realised how invasive this data farming and mining is. The Kafkaesque scenarios that began in my life in 2013, and on retrospection at a low intensity since quite before that, and I realised all four things that I had aligned myself to: my religion, my culture, the civilization and the constitution have been defiled and just exist as a programming and while one can trip on existence of these things, this is the bottom line. I still think Indian constitution is one of the most beautiful documents in the world, though I am not very savvy about the civilization, the culture and the religion anymore as they don't retain the depth and warmth of earlier days and are only present as dogma and a hyperreality. When I had my realisations I decided to align myself to nature. I am a homeopath by training and it's the art and science I have dedicated my life to, and it is in itself is about aligning yourself to nature. Gentle healing arts don't survive in a setting of making people sick and then selling them the cure. In the early 2000s when I was watching Discovery channel shows and The Jetsons I had really thought we will have flying cars today but instead we ended up getting a prison with a panopticon. This realisation when it struck me, failed to surprise me and this is because I had been seeing the truth of this nation throughout my life it's just that I chose to believe in the national narrative while ignoring the truth that I saw with my own eyes. The space or the universe is out of reach of majority and going to space for common people would be not unlike girmitias going to West Indian sugarcane fields. When one realises the truth of the situation it becomes increasingly important to have fun. Grow flowering and fruit plants in your balcony, get that griller from Amazon and make chicken or if you are vegetarian, paneer tikka in amidst your garden in balcony. Freedom is foreclosed for the majority, and needless hustle except when it comes to money, is futile. I write diagnoses because I like to let people know what's wrong lest they blame themselves. Since mid 2010s I follow the rule of only helping people when they ask for help, and this is the way to go in this country. If I write two things that this country is run with in the depth, they would be hypocrisy and jealousy and this is a deep policy decision, it is intentional. The depth of existence in this land is the same as driving on the road the only difference is that on the road you can see the assholes coming at you with Thar, Fortuner or Scorpio. Discovery channel promised flying cars and this country delivered Thar, Fortuner and Scorpio.

Oregano

When I realised that deep adminstration of this nation relies on petty things like preventing people from eating foreign food items like pizzas and croissants bought from their own money and gatekeeping them from Western media and music, it changed my worldview completely. You see symptoms of this on Instagram, people drinking matcha and calling croissants Prashant and while it is a laughing matter, things can get quite serious about these things. When I realised the arrangement it is then I realised why poor people do not go to Pizza Hut or Dominos or McDonalds, I ended up realising that reason is not purely financial. It gave me insights into the kind of individuals who rule this nation are, no not the government, but those who actually rule this nation. It is then I decided to align myself to two things that are free of co-optation and hegemony, that is the nature and the night sky. Exploitation and persecution can be retrospective and so all that you have bought, experiencd and learned and gotten entertained from can be presented as favours despite it being result of hard work of your family so it makes all kinds of pop culture and material comfort redundant. What remains without any blemishes is, however, the nature and night sky. Take heritage hotels for example. People go to these hotels, pay for them, to experience a particular lifestyle for as many days they have paid for, the same applies to five star hotels but the way this nation operates you have to treat them as a pilgrimage and put it on social media. This country doesn't even know how to do capitalism properly. If I talk personally I haven't really had any material ambitions except for financial security of my family and this is why probably I was able to see through this bullshit. My idea of a good time is sitting in a goan taverna drinking chilled beer, and discuss pop culture like comic book movies with friends. I don't really like upscale pubs except those which play rock music, like Hard Rock café and there was one which I wanted to visit during my college days and which shut down called Blue Frog. It's curious that indigenous rock music is totally extinct from the national narrative and is now only accessible in upscale pubs and concerts. It's sad because I'm a hardcore rock fan and have followed Indian and Pakistani rock bands since my teenage.

Write Concepts #27

In the late 2000s and early 2010s I wanted to be a novelist. I had my ideas about my first novel and at present if you'd ask me about the kind of novels I would want to write my answer will be literary quality pulp novels. From early 2010s to now I realised that novels are structurally impossible in this nation now except for rich housewives. Or maybe it's just for me, but I don't see many novels in popular culture since the early 2010s. I was motivated back in the day and I could've written the stories that I wanted but I was waiting to get better and I realise that that time never really arrives. I have my cognitive handicaps but then I see social media, Facebook, Instagram and X and see that majority of artists are rehashing their old works instead of creating something new. I have plans of two or three novels and a couple of novellas and a bunch of short stories and flash fiction and I am hoping that despite my cognitive decline in the past decade I am able to execute the plans. I have stopped writing poetry because I am not as romantic as I used to be before and at present my poems are just for one muse. I, however, write prose poetry based on my experiences and imagination which more often turns out to be surrealistic and with political subtext but I don't need to fret because all art is political and unfortunately all life too. I have seen and experienced kafkaesque scenarios and when that happens to a person regularly they first see the biopolitics of the world and then their eyes open to the necropolitics of the world. It's hard to find good stories anymore except the ones that I have already read, but since I love comics, graphic novels and superhero movies I keep myself occupied with entertainment whenever I feel the need to get entertained. I wanted to be pulp-literary novelist and a comic book writer and I recently saw a doctor, an ophthalmologist, writing Hindi comics though I have realised that time of comics in this nation has passed and I say this because in the past decade I got acquainted to the root of all problems in this nation. Though whoever is getting involved with indigenous comics has my best wishes.

C Major

There are things that you do for money, that is your professional competencies which you become better at by doing and then there are things that you are interested in and are naturally good at. The trick is to never desert things that you are naturally good at and to practice them daily. It's better to have more than one professional competency, I have two. You might be average at your professional competencies but things that you are naturally good at prevent you from exploitation and that's why regular practice of what you are already good at, what comes naturally to you, is important. Artificial Intelligence has made a lot of things redundant but that is isn't an excuse for being lax about your competence. AI art can never match the real art. AI writing, although grammatically accurate can never have the soul, struggle and pain of real writing. The most important thing is to never be demotivated by family about what you do. Family is the only entity that genuinely loves you for you are but they don't know who and what you are exactly, what they know however is how the world works through their experiences and accordingly they tell you what they think is the best for you. I have taken advice from family about my life, I did what they wanted me to do, but I made sure that I also do what I really wanted to do even if there is less time for it. This helps you in not being bitter. A person who ignores himself for others, takes advice from others be it even their family, is seldom content and ends up being better. Do what makes you happy even if the time you get for doing it is half an hour. In modern times knowing one thing is extremely important, the old method of repetition making you good at something doesn't apply anymore. It is why individuals diagnosed with dyslexia or ADHD fail to be better at the things they do. Being diagnosed as dyslexic is a privilege, most of the people who suffer from dyslexia are seen as incompetent just like most of the people suffering with mental health issues are seen problematic. Mental health issues mostly affect good people because they refuse to make others the victim of their suffering. The core of this nation is demonic and it wants you to propagate your suffering though one can choose to have catharsis in a controlled environment and choose to sublimate their suffering in higher forms. Repetition only helps in becoming better if it is done mindfully and that too only if there is not a neurological component to it. However try to read or if you can't read try to be aware of the world around you through social media. Awareness is the key to not to get exploited.

PlinkIt

Identity can be a tricky thing. I have always been sure of my identity but I have also seen what an identity crisis looks like. I focus on bottom line truths of this nation which can also be bottom line truths of the world and the bottom line truth about the question of identity in this nation is: your family. This is where you should derive your identity from. The nation will try to confuse you about your identity and if you are from backward places like Purvanchal, Bihar or Jharkhand, or for that matter any place else caste will play an important role in determining your identity. You have to be clear that that your caste is more or less a community of shared culture and habits. In places like Purvanchal, castes are used as covert rape gangs. After my return to Purvanchal, I realised that while everything looks fine on the surface in Purvanchal, the core of existence is rape which is brilliantly hidden by religion and performance of culture, which is more or less dead by now except as a hyperreality and the same can be said for the rest of the country too. At the core this country has Pakistan style feudal and tribal mindset which I would assume has been learnt from the tribals (and no, not the Jharkhand or North East kind), first thing to do when you get power is giving yourself the right to rape people. I am an Indian and Purvanchali and I know my culture intimately and I know that my culture is not tribal, it is or was a highly intricate, refined and sophisticated culture and mode of being, which by now has been totally destroyed. Exploitation psychology is rampant and I am sure by now that true friendship is not really possible in this country anymore unless you really click and instinctively decide to sacrifice for each other. Caste at this point is just a technology for divide and rule and, eugenics and discrimination but I ended up realising that in this country it flows from a deeper place, deeper even than the government. Casteism is in the bones of these motherfuckers and is irreversible. The word feudal represents to me a sort class, but unfortunately these classless motherfuckers are essentially mafias and not even the Yakuza kind. All bets were off for me when I saw rape as the core of existence, external spiritual drama matters shit to me. Misogyny is rampant, and I used to wonder how can these motherfuckers hate women when they consider them inferior until I realised that it is inherent and deeply entrenched in their bones and for no reason at all. I realise that lower class women of Purvanchal are actively deprived of nutrition and nutritious food and as much as I love my region I realised that in past twenty years it has been made into a gutter. One important thing that you should always remember is to retain your personal faith, it helps you channelize your will and helps you in tough times; it doesn't matter whether God exists or not. 

Soorajmukhi

People can trip on ideas all they want but my focus remains on bottom lines. It is midway through my college that I realised that this country is linguistically stratified and that English is not just a language but a mode of being in this country. To me English is just a language and despite being a colonial language it is one of my favourite languages because because it is the most traveled language, most of the literature in the world is in English and it brings cultures together as it is the lingua franca of the world. The best part of English is that it allows for naming exploitation happening with you which the working Hindi, the Hindi of common people has been disarmed with. My grandfather spoke a mix of administrative, literary and shudh Hindi. In all respects it was Shudh Hindi but shudh Hindi, if you speak, you become an object of ridicule. How odd it is, isn't it. In a majority Hindu nation Shudh Hindi is ridiculed and persianised Hindi is what people think of as classy. Hindi tinged with colloquial affectations is still fine. I gravitate towards literary Hindi because I know that writers, except propagandists, are mostly good people. Literary Hindi has been murdered in this nation. I write my blogs in English because if I wrote them in Hindi no one would read them. I don't believe in linguistic chauvinism and I think Urdu is a beautiful language, and it is indigenous to India, but it is beautiful because Muslims ruled India and made it beautiful, made its register high. Shudh or even literary Hindi is a highly evolved language and it has been disarmed of its emotional component and now it is not even in the common narrative except being in the administrative documents of North Indian states. Here is an assignment: Go on YouTube and search for the song Soorajmukhi by Bhupinder Singh, listen to it. You would get what I am saying about disarming of emotional component. As far as colloquial languages go, they are at the bottom. I wouldn't even say that my mother tongue bhojpuri has been destroyed, I would say it has been raped. And it all happend since the economic liberalisation of this country. I don't know whether what rules this country is extremely evil or extremely incompetent.