A few thoughts , and the book
Its been such a busy past few months that i feel so tired .Its good i kept a day off with no work and no one at home.I feel so much better.I tried to write down all those strange things troubled me.None of them i can do or would do anything i guess.but as much as id love to write all my thoughts its hard.These are actually a memory of those thoughts.
Well what was i doing on the Republic day ...hmm well what else shopping.Did i feel guilty no not at all....i worked hard enough to earn that money but the sick part is this marketing....I dont get why they do this but it helps no one i feel and it sucks.You walk into a big store offering end of season discounts all decked up for the republic day welll upto thats its ok.Why do they play the music from the patriotic songs inside.I mean its sick when you are checking out earring and dresses and all they plan ...all that set of our standard hindi patriotic songs.I find it sickening.Worst was when they played Ae mere watan ke logon......its too sweet a song and too touching to be played like this and it will make no shopper feel any good....so why play it like that.I almost felt like grabbing the idiot who was playing it and smacking some sense.....but i guess my understanding of marketing is bad.
Then there was a day when while going to office in a an auto there was some drainage problem and the whole road was filed withh drainage.It was sickening. i litterally shrunk inside the auto and even the autowallah was dead careful that he not be stained by a drop of that filth.But then i think i saw something so very sickening.There were officials gathered to clear it out and it was being cleared by a tall man neck deep in this drainage.I really felt sick.There simply are no solutions .I know its useless because my thoughts are nothing ...I really admire peoplewho do something about it...but honestly i think ....this world is in such a sick state....beyond repair.One of my very fav songs for such thoughts is always....i mean i think god has messed it up completely ...and he has moved on to some other project.....unable to bear his failure.
"Aasman pe hai khuda ur zameen pe hum
Aaj kal vo is taraf dekhta hai kam"
In this horrible mood with my office making me feel miserable at heart.......even with my tight schedule i am trying to read ......(Stories have a way of taking care of you).The only trouble is the book i have started reading is borrowed from a library to be returned and its a voluminous book and it is not making you feel any better but only more hopeless about this world.This is not to say its a bad book.
Its a very classic book and i think the writer has done an excellent job.I did write about it earlier..."Maximum City" by Suketu Mehta is said to be non fiction.He actually met all those underworld gangsters, hitmen, police its said.I ve only managed to finish half of it.His writing is brilliant but the whole descriptions leave you with a deja vu feeling.
Not that we all dont know it ...its just that we walk around in suspended animation as though its not us.The whole descriptions of common people as gangsters...(no its not the movies...a movie is 3 hours ...it seems fine...bearable.... but when you read such a voluminous book on it)...their decsriptions and thoughts about god and killing.He tells how in his knowledge he says the cheapest rate of life was 50 rs when a rag picker chopped a man he helped kill to buy a plastic sheet.
One part in the book goes like this.He speaks with shakeel on phone and then he gets a favor
"Any trouble you have in bombay.One work free.Bhai said so"
"later when i repeat this story to close friends in bombay, in new york a wistful look comes into their eyes, they start making lists of people they would eliminate if granted such favor.They are half joking...and i am genuinely shocked by the list of names they give--ex-lovers, colleagues................Most of the names they have in mind are those of people they once loved greatly and now hate with equal pasion.Each one of us , I am begining to discover, has a circle of people close to us whose deaths we fantasize about"
Among many other lines as you read and identify is
" The notion of what is luxury and what is a basic need is upended in Bombay.Every slum in jogeshwari has a TV...The real luxuxries are running water, clean bathrooms, transport and housing fit for humans............""The greatest luxury of all is solitude."----This line even when i dont think of bombay i feel in general.......its such a good feeling to have your room....to just be.Somehow its so hard to get it ...people crowd in so much.
The book would be very special to any bombayite i guess but even for a non-bombayite the book is classic...because somewhere bombay is really the amalgam of india...Its just that in Bombay everything is in extremes.there is no judgement of rights, wrongs...its just the truth of life and the inevitable truth that there is no real escape.You hate so much in this country and so run away abroad and then those abroad will tell how they cannot escape the charm of this hated country and start loving it even more once they go abroad.
I have managed to finish Part-I Power and hopefully Part II -Pleasure would be better....but i have to make time to read it.I have to make time....for everything these days it seems.
2 comments:
Maximum city - now thats a good book. But towards the end i didnt feel the same kind of connection that i felt at the start of the book. maybe too much of extremes isnt that good :) Compared to the people in the book there is hardly any excitement in our lives!
yes thats true the first 100 pages or so where the author describes his own life you feel the connection after that its all about the extremeties.
As for the life of the characters being interesting well if blood, death , exploitation is interesting life what do i say.The book is basically dark........and the author brilliantly uses the darkness of those lives to create drama.
Our lives are more like those families he describes Harish and others and all though not literally .... saving up to buy a flat then a house and so on.
I have yet to finish the last 100 pages.While the book creates drama and lends an unreal beauty to those dark, underground lives......(its from an authors eye that you think that its interesting ....in real time would you be able to satnd it)he does describe the truth to a great extent when he's speaking about normal and general people and thats what we find boring.
Overall a good book i think because it talks about all the good and bad,horrible things of this country(the mental, cultural conflicts in all minds, double standards) too and not in a preachy mode and yet how people live by it.
Its the authors skill and research though that shines through though only real book lovers will read such a voluminous book.
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