In my mind, I always consider myself to be some sort of a writer.  I may not have been able to become a writer in the real sense, but I don’t care.  It’s enough for me that I have a great deal of reverence for the printed words.  Ever since I was in a position to do so, I have bought, curated and surrounded myself with books.  I find myself instinctively attracted to anyone who has got the gift of writing beautiful prose.  Whenever I see the name of the author on the title cover of the books I have, I can’t help thinking what a tremendous high it must be to see the sum total of your wisdom, for better or for worse, immortalized in written word.  Now that I have acquired some modest experience of reading quite a few books over the years, I think I can relate to the moods and emotions of the writer.  There is one aspect of this thought process that I very much relate to.  It has something to do with procrastination.  You see, I want to get a lot of writing done, but besides the physical limitations imposed on me by my situation; I also tend to be a lazy person when it comes to putting down my thoughts.  The overwhelming feeling is of lethargy.  I hate to love, or you can say that I love to hate the word ‘procrastination’.  Sometimes I know that I have a germ of an idea in my head about some things to write about and tell myself to do it as soon as possible before the idea disappears.  But due to one reason or the other, I would let it keep simmering in my mind and not do anything, in other words, avoid taking a decision, for instance like this post.  It is only marginally reassuring that a lot of people who are a million times more resourceful and talented than me also go through this phase all the time.  There is always this paralyzing fear that you are about to lose your ability to put into words what is consuming you from inside.

It happens like this.  I am thinking about writing something, but I wouldn’t act on it right away.  I would let this train of thought coming and going for quite a few days not knowing how to begin.  In the meantime, if I am reading something, I would tell myself I should be writing instead.  And when I am writing, I start thinking maybe it would be more productive if I enrich my mind and soul by reading something and in case I am enjoying some show or a movie, then the guilt would be all the more embarrassing.  At times like these, I would even rationalize myself in the most strange of ways.  I would tell myself that I am not the only one who keeps looking for excuses not to put down my thoughts.  A great many people have undergone similar experiences and they are none the worse for it.  In fact, the great V.S. Naipaul has admitted on many occasions that after finishing one book, he would be crippled by the agonizing fear that how is he ever going to write another book in his life!  But he did all right, didn’t he?  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I am not about to commit the ultimate blasphemy by even remotely comparing my predicament with the great man, but you get the drift.  Yes, I would say that people like Naipaul and quite a few others are a source of immense inspiration and learning for people like me.  Their way of being and doing things are constant reminders to me that once my monitor is up with a blank page and the cursor is blinking, somehow, I can produce a serviceable prose. 

I have always had a kind of mixed feelings about Karan Johar as a filmmaker.  At this of my life, I am not a willing consumer of mainstream commercial Bollywood movies, so I generally stay away from the kind of films he’s been renowned for.  In all these years, I have only watched a couple at most.  However, it has also never stopped me from trying to find out about what movie he’s going to come out with.  You could say that even though I didn’t like the actual movie too much, I certainly admired the style and the scale of his production.  The beautiful people, the technical finesse, I mean the whole aesthetics of the enterprise.  Even otherwise, I have found him to be an intriguing personality, primarily because of all the baggage he has carried with him regarding his private life and I was always looking for the opportunity to discover more of him as people and not so much as a top tier movie maker.  When I learned that he is coming out with his autobiography, it naturally piqued my curiosity.  But at the same time, I was pretty skeptical as to how honest he would be given that he has become such a big brand and is constantly in the limelight.  Nevertheless, I picked up my copy in a perverse way thinking, “Let’s see how hypocritical he gets”.

    As I finished these 200 odd pages of this book written in collaboration with a well-known entertainment journalist and writer Poonam Saxena, the realization hit me that how wrong I was in my judgment and in my pre-conceived notion of the man.  Reading this memoir has been a revelation for me.  I never expected the author to be so candid and upfront about not only his life in general but also about the hopes, fears, the insecurities, the anxieties and the heartbreak which he has gone through, something we also experience from time to time.  I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the kind of candor and honesty that shines through the book.  Indian celebrities, in general, are not given to baring their real self to the public.  Most of them are cagey and have big egos, especially in the entertainment industry.  So, in that sense, it’s a wonderful departure from the norm that someone like Karan has given us an entry into the most intimate spaces of his life.  He has been as candid and truthful as he possibly could have been considering the media environment in this country.  I know a lot of people would be wondering how he has dealt with the constant conjectures about his sexuality.  Even here, without giving too much away, I would just like to say that he has confronted this head on and comes off with a lot of dignity and pride.  In any case, when someone who is as successful and recognizable as he is, tells you where, when and under what circumstances he lost his virginity, you really know you have forged a bond with that person.

   While reading this book, I could hear the chatty, conversational voice of the author and yet at the same time, you can’t help but notice the inherent honesty and the sense of humor with which he has allowed you into his world.  Once you cross 40, you have lived half of your life and the other half can be contemplation on old age, loneliness, and death.  And in that sense, I could feel where he’s coming from.  One other important takeaway for me is how we as people particularly here in India are quick to judge people with whom we have not spent even one hour of our life, but act as if we have the right to brand and judge anyone we feel like.  I know next time I will look at KJ, I will not let my perception of him from the past color my view of him in the present or in the future.

Even as the world is about to witness a somewhat tetchy but absolutely peaceful transfer of power from Mr. Obama to Mr. Trump in the United States; a poor west African nation of Gambia at this very moment is living the classic definition of a banana Republic.  The incumbent president Mr. Yahya Jammen fairly and squarely lost the general elections held last month, but he has refused to accept the verdict and hand over power to the opposition leader.  As the deadline to relinquish office has come and gone, in a bizarre move he has not only imposed a state of emergency across the country but has also got his loyal members of the legislature to extend his term for further three months!  When the neighboring countries and the international observers like the United Nations warned Mr. Jammen that this state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue and that he must respect the will of the people and allow the incoming president to assume office, he has reacted in the most baffling of manners.  The defeated president has got an airplane up and ready with a full tank on the tarmac and the pilot on standby to flee at short notice taking away all of the loot with which he has enriched himself over the years at the cost of the impoverished people of this unfortunate nation.  It will be interesting to see what happens next.

The important thing to note is that no matter how much Trump gets annoyed with the likes of the New York Times or CNN or Buzzfeed, he cannot do a thing because the media in the United States enjoys protection guaranteed under the Constitution.  In India, the media enjoys no such luxury.  Just try to be uncompromisingly critical of any government in power, be it the Gandhi family in Congress party or prime minister Modi in the BJP, and see the iron hand of the state come down upon you like a ton of bricks.

There has been a sickening regularity about it.  New Year’s Eve, young women just wanting to have a good time at some of the popular watering holes in the cities across India, letting their hair down if you will.  Suddenly, a bunch of men materialize out of some dark shadows and start pawing and groping them with an astounding sense of entitlement.  It doesn’t matter that there are so many otherwise nice people around, but nobody is coming forward to help these women as if paralyzed with some primordial notion of shame, complicit somehow in their own debasement.  I often wonder what sort of sexual frustration raging inside these ruffians that even a hint of skin on the opposite sex can turn them into a depraved animal.  Every time something as gross as this happens, it kind of strikes a terrible blow against every other decent man that I know.  I don’t even want to get into any discussion about what those women were wearing or how they were conducting themselves.  If these men can’t control their libido, it’s their problem and not women’s, who have got every right to dress, party and do whatever they would like to do at any hour of the day or night.  What kind of a beast would try to get physical with anyone without their express consent!  The coercion, the violence, and the ugliness is absolutely nauseating.

   I hope that women in India will not take this as a sign of times to come and cower in fear and make themselves invisible.  I want quite the opposite.  I would dearly like to see more than more women coming out in numbers at all hours of day and night everywhere wearing anything that catches their fancy.  All of you must claim your public place without any fear or apprehension.

This has been a revenge of the underclass.  This angry group of disaffected and many would argue, also disenfranchised working class predominantly WASP voter has come out in numbers and voted with its feet.  It was more of a Hillary Clinton’s election to lose and she hasn’t disappointed on this one.  This election will be dissected and analyzed by the social scientists and political pundits for years to come.  Make no mistake; Donald Trump has been a rank outsider if ever there was one.  He has never held any public office at any level in his life, but was able to cynically harness the collective rage and dissatisfaction of a large chunk of electorate and propelled himself to the highest office of the land.  Sitting oceans away, it is difficult to make an accurate assessment, but just a couple of points. 

   Never mind all that pre-election talk as to how someone like Trump could never hope to win in a changing demographic profile of the American population.  The fact of the matter remains that the United States is still very much a conservative, white Anglo-Saxon protestant country and it’s going to be that way for some time.  A majority of people want to live in here and now, like what’s in it for me and who can I blame for all my troubles.  I think Trump has offered simplistic and disingenuous solutions to the complex economic problems that every industrialized country has to deal with.  He has led so many people up the garden path and they have finally bought into his eminently outlandish ideas.  All through the campaign he has taunted the Clintons and the Obamas of Ivory tower elite having little idea how tough it has been for common folks on the ground in all these years.  One should not forget that he’s very much part of that same elite that he keeps deriding; the only difference I can see is that where their elitism is compassionate in nature, his is the ruthless one. 

   As far as his downright obnoxious and misogynistic views go, who knows, subliminally a core of Trump’s support base might be in tacit agreement with all that shit.  Now that he has been able to pull off one of the biggest political heists of all time, he should be given the chance to succeed.  Trump has promised so much and has projected the image of someone who has got all the answers to every question that you can’t help thinking that he’s setting everyone up for a severe disappointment.  The proof of the pudding would be in the eating.

    Personally, I don’t like Donald Trump for a somewhat different reason.  I don’t think he has got any time for people who are on the margins of society.  Being a person with physical disabilities, I consider myself very much on the margins of society.  He has an undisguised contempt for anyone who does not share  his worldview.  His whole life so far has been a result oriented industry and success is the only currency that counts no matter how unaffordable the cost.  We shall see.  

A few days ago, I happened to watch a video on YouTube.  It was in Istanbul 2010, a literary get-together of sorts.  V.S.  Naipaul was sitting in a chair on a raised platform alongside the host of the evening.  She was trying to draw him out to talk about his lifetime of work as a writer and what drove him to be so utterly consumed by the craft of writing.  I could detect an undertone of humor in Sir Vidia Naipaul’s responses.  Maybe it was my imagination, I’m not sure, but the passage of time and age (he would have been 77 at that time) had certainly mellowed him down.  The asperity of temperament was missing.

   I relate this because I had just finished reading his 600-page book ‘India: A Million Mutinies Now’.  This was his third and final book on India during the course of his extensive travels across this vast land, meeting and listening to all kinds of people from every stratum of society between 1962 and 1988.  I don’t intend to do any kind of review for I am hardly up to the task.  The imagination would not support the effort.  Every time I read anything written by Naipaul, it impels me to examine and come face to face with my deepest emotions.  I think when the integrity of the writer shines through and the personality of the writer recedes humbly into the background, what you are left with is the most distilled aspect of the human condition.  Coming back to that interaction in Istanbul, the video which I referred to, I couldn’t help noticing a distinct lack of articulation.  Some obscure inability to give verbal direction to the life of the mind.  Sometimes it does happen in life that you cannot clearly express what you’ve been doing so diligently all your life.  There was a question about the shift from fiction from early years to the nonfiction in the latter part of his writings.

  Growing up on the small island of Trinidad in the Caribbean of the 30s and late 40s, the despairing feeling of having come to the end of the ‘material’, as he put it, there was this realization that he was not equipped to accurately and truthfully write about other societies whose soil he was not properly rooted in, the inner dynamics he could only feel superficially.  Then, what does he do?  He knows only one fact, that he’s not equipped to do anything but writing.  The passion is all consuming, the burden of ambition is pressing down upon him.  Leaving that small island and the people there with no sense of history or ambition was more than relief; it was also a kind of release.  More than 50 years of relentless travel, undertaking the searing examination of the making and unmaking of post-colonial society, the genius of Naipaul perhaps lies in his great success in overflying the limitations of his own social mornings and turning it into a moment of renewal and liberation.  You take the dark soil of tradition and transmute its energy into arguably the most vigorous and challenging voices of our time, or as he put it ever so simply, ‘’ making my way into the world’’.

   Vidia Naipaul is a master of clean cut prose.  He doesn’t use big words in his neat sentences, and yet he can express the most complicated of ideas, the most profound of human emotions in the simplest of ways.  If you have the ears for it, you can hear the authentic voice of the writer.  You can only know him through his words, there is no other way.  I feel a strong kinship with him.