एक बात कहूँ...कुछ नहीं...

Hmm..Long time no see..

I am in absolute awe of Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi! I have been reading this book by him The Last Song of Dusk and last Sunday, HT Brunch carried the cover story on Shanghvi! What a big co-incidence, considering he ain't that famous as compared to other authors. Shanghvi wrote an essay on his stay in Matheran, where he chose to live alone, away from the hullabaloo of Mumbai. He writes about his way to deal with loss and failure..Oh! What a superb essay it is..candid, honest, moving, troubling..add other adjectives but the sheer pleasure of reading it gave me so much satisfaction. I have read something so beautiful after a really really long time.. Below are some of my favourite lines fom the essay..

Events need their invitation, writes James Salter in Light Years, dissolutions their start.

There are three chief reasons I decided to leave Bombay: the failure of aesthetic, the failure of conversation, the failure of love. 

Mostly, though, I decided to leave Bombay after something like a friendship, by which I mean a kind of indefinable love, failed. This was an equal, an ally of solitude, lonesome and shy, a familiar of novels, someone who sat hunched in cafés writing, strolled through small towns and their ancient temples, forever transformed by beauty witnessed and sensed as inextirpable truth. 

I became a student of literature, which is to say, a student of solitude. The fear of a lion alone was calmed by imagined lives and their choices, anxieties, failures, reprises. I felt literature had come into existence not to perform for critics but to lay bare the disquiet of fate, to parent us across the waves; it was the art of experience, collected and communed, before it was ever literary endeavor. 

Time, like a harmonium, stretched out, releasing note and melody. 

The hills made me see more with my eyes closed. 

I had come to Matheran chiefly to think about the nature of loss. People, over the years, had repeated to me trite truisms: Time heals all. You’ll get over it. All you need is closure. So I waited, I wrote, I photographed, I travelled, I took long walks. I watched obscure Iranian cinema, I cared for men around me who were dying, I sat on a bench on the seashore. In this way, time passed. But, after a few years of being unable to give up the ghost, it occurred to me I’d have to learn to live with the loss of my friend; it was to be permanent, unyielding, like a battle scar or birthmark. The idea that there was any closure, or healing, seemed repugnant, too easy to be true. What truth, after all, might be closed as easily as if it were only a door? 

Early in life we come to see it either as a tragedy or a comedy; great literature is a result of these choices. Speaking for myself, I veered to the tragic mode: there was consolation in the essential impermanence of things, a relief in knowing it would all come to end. The tragedy was not the end but a knowledge of the end foreshadowing all things. However, my brief time in Matheran makes me believe that life might not be as tragic as I had originally believed, but comic – possibly even a total and complete farce.

The complete essay is here..

http://www.hindustantimes.com/Brunch/Brunch-Stories/In-a-clear-darkness/Article1-816409.aspx

Siddharth has written two novels and said he doesn't plan to write more novels. I wish he would write more. As he says, he is driven to the tragic mode, his book, The Last Song of Dusk, similarly has an underlying tone of extreme melancholy and pathos. Somehow, I am also driven to the tragic mode. There is something that pushes me towards utter grimness. Not surprisingly, my blog was earlier called Inheritance of Loss (before I changed it to Dichotomy of Irony). 

Hmmm..so yesterday, a funny thing happened..I send a quote of the day to my friends from my old office everyday and also to M and J in office..so some people got to know that I send a quote to M and J only and why not to them..everyone literally pounded at me that why I don't send them the quote of the day :{ Ok, I told them I will send it to all of them. The world is a really small place. Wherever, you go you find some connections. M is very good friends with some of my batch mates from school and knows them really well. The entire team calls me Pankazzz, all because of her. So, yesterday, M was telling me the same thing which everyone else says..stop deprecating yourself. She threatened me that she will send a mail to the entire team to conduct a poll in the team whether Pankaj is the most adorable person in the team. I was so embarrassed that I had to literally beg her to not to do it :( I always think that people think of me as bhola-bhala, which means dumb, but I am not dumb :( I understand everything, I just don't say it.

Anyway, too much digression..and I have to thank D. Last week, he put this as his FB status.

This came as such a big surprise. I was actually embarrassed and also felt good at the same time. Thanks so much ya :) So I have told him to start his own blog and write something of his own as well. 

Ok..today on Sahara One, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam was coming...and the eternal love for that movie made me stop everything I was doing and watch it all over again. Just watch this scene again ya :( What a scene..

I have so many things to write but I will write later...very busy the next week..so much work to do :(

Dialogue of the day:

कभी कभी इंसान कुछ न कह कर भी सब कुछ कह देता है - नंदिनी, हम दिल दे चुके सनम