At The Edge

I have always been deeply affected by the theater of the absurd because, I believe, it shows the world as it is, in a state of crisis. It shows man having lost his fundamental metaphysical certainty, his relationship to the spiritual, the sensation of meaning – in other words, having lost the ground under his feet. This is a man for whom everything is coming apart, whose world is collapsing, who senses he has irrevocably lost something but is unable to admit this to himself and therefore hides from it. -0- The kind of hope I often think about (especially in hopeless situations) is, I believ, a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t. hope is not a prognostication – it’s an orientation of the spirit. Each of us must find real fundamental hope within himself. You can’t delegate that to anyone else. ~ Václav Havel , Czech writer and dramatist. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and the first President of the Czec...

The Machiavelli of the mid-20th century will be an advertising man; his Prince , a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time. - Aldous Huxley -0- Any trace of literariness in an advertisement is fatal to its success. Advetisement writers may not be lyrical, or obscure, or in any way esoteric. They must be universally intelligible. A good advertisement has this in common with drama and oratory, that it must be immediately comprehensible and directly moving. - Aldous Huxley, Essays New and Old -0- Aldous Huxley once tried his hand at writing advertisements. Charles Lamb and Byron also did so. So did Bernard Shaw , Hemingway, Marquand , Sherwood Anderson , and Faulkner – none of them with any degree of success. -0- Recommended read: J G Ballard reviewing Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual by Nicholas Murray

M. H. Abrams , the American literary critic in his A Glossary of Literary Terms says: “an allegory is a narrative in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the settings as well, are contrived not only to make sense in themselves, but able to signify a second, correlated, order of persons, things, concepts or events. There are two main types: He further defines two types of allegory: (1) historical and political allegory, in which the characters and the action represent, or ‘allegorise,’ historical personages and events, eg. Dryden’s Absalom & Achitophel , in which David represents Charles II, Absalom his natural son, the Duke of Monmouth, and the biblical plot allegorises a political crisis in contemporary England. (2) the allegory of ideas, in which the characters represent abstract concepts and the plot serves to communicate a doctrine or theses.(eg. Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress , much of Spenser’s Faerie Queene .)” -0- Each phenomenon on earth is an allegory, a...

It is not the dark authoritarian vision of Orwell’s 1984 that is coming true but that of chilling indulgence adumbrated by Huxley's Brave New World. In Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history; people will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. Orwell feared those who would ban books; Huxley feared no one would want to read one. Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us; Huxley feared it would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance; Orwell feared we would become a captive culture; Huxley feared we’d become a trivial one. In Orwell’s prophecy, people are controlled by inflicting pain; in Huxley’s by inflicting pleasure.

The human conscience can subsist on very questionable food. No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect. The shirk, the duffer, the malingerer, the coward, the weakling, may be put out of countenance by his own failures and frauds; but the man who does evil skilfully, energetically, masterfully, grows prouder and bolder at every crime. The common man may have to found his self-respect on sobriety, honesty and industry; but a Napoleon needs no such props for his sense of dignity. If Nelson's conscience whispered to him at all in the silent watches of the night, you may depend on it it whispered about the Baltic and the Nile and Cape St. Vincent, and not about his unfaithfulness to his wife. A man who robs little children when no one is looking can hardly have much self-respect or even self-esteem; but an accomplished burglar must be proud of himself. In the play to which I am at present preluding I have represented an a...

The Thinker I was lonesomer than Crusoe's goat. - O. Henry The image of the thinker as a withdrawn figure, wrapped up in himself, is hopelessly out of date. Today, when ideas have to compete in the market place, they have to get out of the books, learn to look bright and inviting, and the person who has thought them up has to make sure that they do not age too soon. That there is always some pawing, and even mauling, is only to be expected since this is part of the game. The promise of a wider circulation more than compensates for the risk. When the words of a philosopher go singing and screaming into the media, who wants to find out what he really means? Even a cult figure like Sartre often loses track of his own thoughts in the thick of publicity. This is an entry in my cousin brother’s diary which I stole. Writer unknown. -0- A philosopher while going on a morning walk saw bulls with bells tied in their necks. Growing curious, he enquired of the farmer walking behin...

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his word’s! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words ― 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man ― the biography of the man himself cannot be written. - Mark Twain Had Mark Twain been still around, he would have assumed that blogging is an activity dear to nudists and equally dear to people who are perpetually bottomed up.

'Cocktail Time' by P.G. Wodehouse, Illustration by EH Shepard ( of Winnie the Pooh fame ) about Partition of India “There may have been men in London”, writes P.G. Wodehouse about a character in his ‘Cocktail Time’, “who thought more highly of Sir Raymond Bastable than did Sir Raymond Bastable, but they would have been hard to find, and the sense of being someone set apart from and superior to the rest of the world inevitably breeds arrogance.” More and more as one looks at the characters in the Indian political pantheon, one sees a resemblance to the dramatis personal of the world of Wodehouse. The only difference is that the real world of Indian politics, which is often ridiculous, sometimes to the point of being grotesque, is not harmlessly funny. It is deeply flawed in its moral seeting. Nevertheless, the ludicrousness of many of its leaders, their pomposity and pretentiousness, and the inflated sense of self importance of even some greenhorns makes them mimic the like...

Guru Dutt, The Romantic in Hindi Cinema If ever there was a passionate romantic in Hindi Cinema, it was Guru Dutt. He was perhaps the only one to create something of a personal cinema within the commercial format, complete with song and dance. He is the one who came nearest to a form fashioned out of drama, story and song, with one complementing rather than interrupting the other. He also combined the most romantic elements of both Urdu – Muslim and Bengali- Hindu culture. I found these lines scribbled in a diary of a dear cousin brother of mine. Searching for the source of these lines about Guru Dutt, I found that these lines were written by Chidananda Dasgupta , filmmaker, film critic, film historian and one of the founders of Calcutta Film Society along with Satyajit Ray in 1947, a man passionate about Cinema of Guru Dutt and Ritwik Ghatak . The source of the lines turned out to be an article written by Chidananda Das Gupta titled New Directions in Indian Cinema , leven pages...