Thank you for reading

All the unedifying and incoherent rambling is to tell you guys that I love you.

Note: I published a version of this a couple of days ago but changed my mind about its raison’ detere. Nonsensical Nemo was never meant to be a personal blog as my learned pater pointed out, so I deleted that post. Perhaps we will revisit that someday.  

Four days ago, the rock that I inhabit completed its 36th revolution around a main-sequence star since I came into being. That’s one more year than necessary, if Kurt Vonnegut is to be believed. Vonnegut, who studied anthropology after World War II – the last war that America won (and only with a little help from Communists) – wrote in a speech that was sadly delivered posthumously: “…the physical anthropologists, who had studied human skulls going back thousands of years, said we were only supposed to live for thirty-five years or so because that’s how long our teeth lasted without modern dentistry. Weren’t those the good old days? Thirty-five years and we were out of here!” 

Like Vonnegut, I too, am annoyed by the time I’ve spent on this planet, that the cigarettes that were ostensibly supposed to be fatal have turned out to be duds. Our existential angst is only exacerbated by social media. People were always stupid, billions of ninnies living in a civilization designed by a few thousand savants, but they didn’t have social media to broadcast their stupidity across the world at the speed of light. Where’s a black hole when you need one? 

Either way, when did birthdays become a cause celebre! Who was the idiot who decided to celebrate the conception? Most probably the Romans. Or the Egyptians. I have never quite understood why a birthday should be celebrated. Birthdays are like being Kim Kardashian for a day: people just give you stuff for being you. I mean, my parents are the ones responsible for my existence, for procreating and subjecting this deeply problematic individual – and by extension his ponderous writing – onto you. 

But let’s digress.

Recently, the fake account of this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics – which, like the Holy Roman Empire, is completely misnamed since there’s no such thing as a Nobel Prize in Economics – announced Amartya Sen’s demise. While most publications fell for the misinformation because fact-checking these days means just propagating one’s propaganda, Suman Ghosh, an Economics Professor and filmmaker, shared an interesting tidbit, about the hallowed economist who even makes the Prime Minister spout crypto-Marxist theory (hard work better than Harvard). 

Ghosh, who has directed a documentary on Amartya Sen, revealed that the nonagenarian often stays up late at night writing things, much of which remains unpublished. Professor Sen said that writing often helped him clear his thoughts, especially on topics he didn’t understand. Like Sen, I too often am beleaguered by many thoughts, and I write to clear my head of demons, but they are far more mischievous than Titivillus, the patron demon of writers, which is why I have summoned a Holy Ghost to exorcise him (that’s an inside joke for the Holy Trinity). 

Abrahamic references aside, my two takeaways from the Israel-Palestine conflict, about which I am deeply informed because I’ve seen You Don’t Mess With The Zohan 10 times have been:

 1) Most environmentalists are profound hypocrites, who don’t celebrate the reduction of carbon footprint brought upon by conflicts, and

 2) The average non-Muslim Palestine supporter across the globe would be treated like a projectile by Hamas if they ended up in Gaza. 

One has to admit that it takes Gandhian levels of morality to support a potential aggressor, but that’s what groupthink does. That the trans activist who needs hormone replacement therapy with an Israeli-made medication supports Palestine. It’s the sort of moral clarity I’d like to unlock at least once in my life. 

Either way, back to Professor Sen. 

Now, I might disagree with his politics – and frankly lack the faculties to comment on his economics – but I’ve always admired him as a writer and keen observer of the human condition. And his love for parentheses. In fact, I remember the day before my Class XII biology exam, I was reading The Argumentative Indian under the guise of revising the syllabus, and my mother totally lost her cool when she saw what I was doing. 

One of my favourite quotes by him is on identity that goes like this: “There can be a great variety of categories to which we simultaneously belong. I can be, at the same time, an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a nonreligious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin, and a non-believer in the afterlife. This is just a small sample of diverse categories to each of which I may simultaneously belong - there are, of course, a great many other membership categories too which, depending on circumstances, can move and engage me.”

I am often drawn to the thought of identity because, for my entire life, I’ve always felt like an outsider.

As I wrote earlier, in an ode to Bombay before I left: “In Chhapra, I was a Bengali who couldn’t speak Hindi properly. In Kolkata, the Bihari who couldn’t read Bengali. In Singapore, I was the lad who spoke in broken English and in Gwalior, the NRI who could barely understand the dialect. Everywhere I’ve lived before Bombay, I’ve felt like a Camus protagonist.” 

I feel it particularly strongly during the Durga Puja season when my non-Bengaliness – from not venerating Tagore to supporting England instead of Brazil or Argentina in football – becomes more apparent than it ever has been. I don’t understand Mahalya, the only Bengali song I know which isn’t the national anthem, is Ami Chini Go Chini. And I have absolutely no urge to fight with non-Bengalis during Navratri, as many Bengalis are wont to do.

That’s a big thing these days, fighting for the right to eat non-veg even on the few tables reserved for veg people, which frankly doesn’t pass my Frying Bacon Hypothesis.

What is the Frying Bacon Hypothesis you ask?

Well, simply put, people seem to have trouble understanding the concept of free will. As I explained: “Anytime you wonder if your free will infringes on another person’s free will, ask yourself this question: Is it kosher to cook bacon in front of your Muslim neighbour’s house during Ramadan? Any sane person will say No. However, if someone were to quietly eat bacon in one’s own house without forcing the smell on one’s neighbour, would it be alright? Most people would say Yes.” 

The desire to eat chicken at vegetarian tables is bizarre, and apparently a big thing these days, a gustatory battle playing out in institutes of higher learning that produce product managers who refuse to get anything done with JIRA tickets. I mean it’s a remarkably dumb way to spend one’s youth. Youth should be reserved for playing computer games, dreaming about coitus, and pushing one’s limit when it comes to taking mind-altering substances or reading books that alter one’s mind. Who the hell spends time arguing about what one ought to put in one’s digestive system? 

Everything seems to be a battle these days, which makes you thankful that some things, like our childhood, came out earlier. Can you imagine the outrage if Radha Kaisa Na Jale was composed and sung in 2023? You’d have follicle-challenged idiots outraging about Muslims singing about Hindu deities. The same goes for the movie I consider the greatest piece of cinema ever made, which would’ve seen Anurag Kashyap branded an Islamophobe for showing internecine Muslim fights during a time when the world needs to resist Hindutva hegemony. 

Either way, all the unedifying and incoherent rambling is to tell you guys that I love you. As a kid, I had one dream: to write. Of course, the first novel hasn’t sprung out yet and I tell myself that’s because I’ve a fulltime job but that’s really a function of my laziness with – as the product managers would say – an interdependency of my tardiness. Even though my self-residual image is one of Kafka, where all I crave is time to write and get sustenance, I lack the discipline to metamorphose into that creature, but I promise I will keep trying to achieve my K-shaped growth. Anyway, dear readers, I wanted to thank all of you – well all three of you who read everything diligently – for making me want to write. For giving me positive feedback (and negative). In fact, speaking of feedback, my favourite one so far was the one where an individual described my writing style as Shobha De meets Salman Rushdie. That was much better than the feedback I got for an esoteric essay I wrote where I argued: Why we must get over our Panglossian-Kafkasque discourse about Modi. One reader replied: “Bhai sun ke to accha laga padh karna kya hai?”

Either way, thank you all for reading so far. I hope there are many more words left in this hound. To paraphrase Neo’s epochal lines from the last scene in The Matrix: “I don’t know the future. Where we go from here, I leave up to you.”

Thank you again for your time.