My first weekend after quitting my job and i was stuck at home in rain and a not so very great mood i picked up the " The Last Burden" by Upamanyu Chatterjee. It certainly did not help my mood.
Its a book to be read to realize why art films will always be that…..art films….Truth personified but for a working class person it is what we dont like to look at or rather why a normal middle class person does not find it not worth the time
and money.It explains why Bollywood potboilers and everlasting Television teary sagas and the no good fiction like M&B's and are infinitely more interesting or rather seem more worth spending time and money.
They help you escape , they give you hope or rather they just blot out the present and when the present is a dark and unrelenting pain this isn't that what the majority would like.
The reason is stark and simple. Who wants to go and see on a 70mm screen or read for hours or days together of a dreariness, of a hurt that on lives through day in and night out - reflected and picturised again and then spend time and money on it….unless you are a soul looking for refuge in the compassion that you are not alone suffering the same.
"You'll notice, Jamun, money's never within your reach when you need it the most. I've witnessed how the itch to hoard dominated both my father and yours. I merely hoodwinked myself - that if i spent bountifully on deserving things then somehow my kitty would be replenished."
"Instead over the years while Jamun has grown up observing his parents squabble…while he's witnessed their marriage paralyse his father and slowly butcher his mother, he's begun to believe that living is elementally a petty , indecent, punishing business; its value lies in struggling against its meanness."
Most of it if not all is about the everyday middle class fare that we live through and struggle with. The finances, the hatred, the guilt ,the sense of duty, the helplessness compounded by the frustration of with /for the people around you.
The forces that pull you down when you try to make an escape.One should read this book to understand why its so difficult to simply read those new age books on positivity and leading a better life are so useless in so much of our world and why so many of our brilliant and not so brilliant people escape as a last refuge to that land of promise USA and others far enough despite criticizing all about it and its culture.
I come across such books once in a while and to say i enjoy them would be too nonsensical. There are mirrors you dislike and this is one of them. But for people who like mirrors however truly they reflect the darkness around and within them
this should be just fine.
"belu was the sole person in my family who cherished me, and not the salary i carted home-……….living together merely to thrill in unkindness…"
"But you oughtn't judge all marriages by the corrosion of ours. I know - that you don't wish to marry because you dread that you'll tail off like us."
Then there was Chekov egging on the cynic in me as i read his "Three Years"
"You'll fall in love and you'll suffer, you'll fall out of love and you'll be deceived, because there isn't a woman (I happily read it as woman/man rather than criticizing Chekov) that wouldn't deceive you, you'll suffer, fall into despair and you yourself will deceive. But the time will come, when all this will be just a memory and you'll reason coldly and consider it utterly trivial…"
"He remembered the long conversations in Moscow in which he had himself still so recently taken part, conversations about how it is possible to live without love, how passionate love is a psychosis, how finally there is no love…..but now …..(some stuff about how he fell in love at first sight) …he would be at a loss to give an answer"
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P.S: Loved the Vodafone ad with the Kabhi Kabhi song.I guess its because its pretty much of what we grew up like and some did end up just the same way if not all.
This post is almost a week old as i just felt too lazy to complete it and in just a week i find my mood is different enough.
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