Posts

Ageing Spine – Harbinger of An Unyielding Nature?

  Neurophysician, whom I consulted for backache, ordered MRI scan of the spine. Scan threatens to reveal much more than the I had expected to learn. Spine is the seat of a man’s character. It is subjected to superlative praise and humiliating slanders in social parlance. Ignominy of being called spineless – although, often behind your back – chafes endlessly. A ramrod spine hugely elevates the stature of the person. Spine bears the weight of the body and the spirit, alike. My changing spine might presage remodelling of my nature. This worries me. Radiologist said, my spine has lost the natural curves. Does my straightened spine foreshadow a staid, unchanging behaviour, robbed of its naturally meandering nature? This condemns me to an insipid life of inflexible dreariness. Wise aver that chameleonic personality is a blessing in our world. Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz, German mathematician, and philosopher of early eighteenth century, opined that we live in the best of all possible
2 comments
Read more

Parents or Parenting: What Makes Us Who We Are?

A friend, now nearing sixty like me, has had a guilt-laden conscience for decades. Her daughter who is a successful professional, married, and in a well-paid job, blames her mother for what she perceives as failings in her nature: fastidious personal habits, intolerance for views of others, inability to trust friends, capricious mood swings, and even her obsession with eating healthy food. Her main grouse – reinforced by similar opinion of a psychotherapist she often visits – is that my friend did not devote enough time to her when she was young, as she valued her job more. The friend cannot rid herself of the remorse - Were it not for her demanding job, would her daughter have grown into a happier, more contended, and a self-assured person? Children spawn a new life for their parents. Birth of a child is an epochal moment in their lives. Young child is dependent on the parent for all her needs for a long time, stretching for years, perhaps the longest in the biological world. It is th
3 comments
Read more

History: Re-imagined vs Re-told

  George Orwell begins an essay in his column ‘As I Please’ with an arresting apocryphal tale. When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent inquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about: whereupon, so it is said—and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be—he burned what he had written and abandoned his project. Story seems to imply that objectivity in history is unachievable. This was not Orwell’s opinion. He wrote further in the same essay that ‘a certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it’. Cynicism about historical truth, apprehension t
1 comment
Read more

A Thousand Desires - Glimpse of the Margazhi-Kutcheri Season

Image
Life is an ever-growing collection of unfulfilled desires; each alike Ghalib’s thousands, worth dying for: हज़ारों ख़्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख़्वाहिश पे दम निकले   Last month I gratified an old longing - For three days I witnessed the annual festival of music in Chennai, The Margazhi Kutcheri. Utter solitude of the unit where I was posted after internship, more than three decades ago, had forced me to look for means to while away the idle hours. As I wrote sometime back, I discovered Kishori Amonkar in these fumbling efforts. Then, a young officer from Kerala often saw me sprawled on a lawn chair, reading, and listening to music, as he walked across the corridor facing my room. He suggested that I listen to Yesudas’s Carnatic albums, which he said were popular in Kerala. A few weeks later he brought me two cassettes of Yesudas’s music, seeing I had not heeded his advice. I liked the music: the fast pace and the fascinating drums.  India Today had launched Music Today then, a presti
Post a Comment
Read more