Where the blood became white

I have learnt in my high school biology that cockroaches and some other creatures have white blood. But let me tell you, human beings can also have white blood. What if a man is stabbed and the redness of the blood made white through some intelligent optical manipulation? If that is done on every person stabbed (and possibly announced in CNN or BBC) the world will slowly start believing that blood is white. Is it not?

And there was an emperor in India, the land known for its rich culture and heritage, who did the same and managed to become famous for the technique he did.

Ok, let me end this rhetoric here….That emperor was none else than Shah Jahan, who amputated the hands of some 20,000 workers, who constructed his ‘white building’, called the Taj Mahal. This is the monument which declared that human blood could be white. Some historians (probably the western historians who first elevated this white building with a criminal background, to one of the seven wonders of the world) advocate that Shah Jahan cut only the main mason’s hand(s) of; that too his right hand alone. Hmm…what an intelligent consolation!

Anyways, even I don’t know the truth. Regardless of the quantity of hands, I ought to believe this widely known fact. I can’t afford to make myself disbelieve this genocide just because the world around me cherishes the Taj as the ostentatious archetype of love.

For me, this is a brutal tragedy; a red-handed truth of human massacre; a totally unnecessary and very much avoidable killing, just executed for the sadistic advantage of petty human ego and selfishness. Added to that comes the colossal loss of the rich artistic and cultural heritage of that time, through the elimination of those artists. None of the history text books known to man might mention this; for the history is just a story written and publicized by the powerful and the successful.

The Taj is not the symbol of love; but of the vicious annihilation of love; for, love by any definition means, not the self centered love constrained to the familial boundaries comprising of one’s wife, children or to a few selected people within the limited range of one’s perception. To love a wife and to murder (yes cutting the hands is equivalent to murder, to me and I am sure that most of them would have just perished; because they wouldn’t have been able to work without their two hands to find enough food to keep themselves alive!!!) 20,000 others, for the selfish (which is often portrayed as the greatest and unique merit of Taj Mahal!!!) motive of maintaining the uniqueness of the Taj is the greatest atrocity in disguise, I can ever manage to find in the history of mankind, I have known about.

For me, Shah Jahan was just a brutal murderer and a cold-blooded perpetrator of human genocide, who doesn’t hold the minimal eligibility to be presented by the history as the magnanimous constructor of the marble monument epitomizing human love. It is one of the biggest faults of the Indian and the world history to have not demoted the name of that person to the notorious list comprising of Hitler, Idi Amin, Narendra Modi and the infinite others. And it is one of the biggest ironies in the behavioral history of human beings that, the world enjoys and glorifies the whiteness of this monument and consciously or ignorantly shut their eyes and heart towards the red-naked truth of the blood that would have covered the entire Agra, when the 40,000 hands, trembled with their last life and played the rhythm of the most horrible form of death. But the avalanche of their tears would have swept the lava of their blood away, facilitating the hands of power to imprint their euphoric stories about the Taj onto the minds of the insensitive and illiterate world outside; a world which can function only on the stories of the powerful and the successful; a world of human beings whose existence itself is a quintessential function of the gallons of blood shed since the advent of mankind. Yes, this ‘bloody’ Mahal will cast its cruel white glow forever to overshadow the periodic red bloodsheds on this planet...It was created to cheer at the great American genocide of the red Indians, the genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Nanking, Ukraine, Nandigram, Godhra and Iraq, the two big world wars, 2008 Olympics in China and whichever going to happen to sustain the future of mankind. It will exist forever to proclaim this ‘blood’y eternal truth about man and mankind.

Courtesy: To Amit, for an (lazy) afternoon discussion on this topic.

Reading Kundera

Reading Kundera has ever been a self-discovering experience for me. Excuse me for talking more about myself, while the title, bears the name of one of the greatest philosophers ever lived and gives the impression of a discussion about his style of writing and other artistic and humane virtues.

I should say that it has been more of self-reflective in nature than a discovery by itself. I am the same human being, I was before reading Kundera. SO it is more of a self-reflective experience. Being listened is a very individualistic desire in every human being, I believe. Sadness occurs when one is not heard or listened to, by anyone around him/her.

Life has taken me to a new environment; New human beings, new culture and strange things happening around…The mortal bindings of love has made it impossible to talk with the loved ones, many of the bare truths of life. It might take many years, till I gain the familiarity of human beings in my new habitat, who would listen to me and whom I would listen to. The desire to talk my heart out, has been growing, with increasing pressure. The world around me has diversified and the people have changed; their needs have changed; many among who had been in my life are busy traversing in the new realms of their life. The world is running in time, and ideas which don’t talk about euphoria, development and success, are generally not heard. Nevertheless I can’t blame anyone for not listening to me! It is a very helpless situation.

There came Kundera to my rescue. When I read him, I read my mind; a conversation with myself.. a very slow conversation without any haste, or constraints of time..a conversation well listened to, properly interpreted, so as to obtain maximum satisfaction..

In this process, I discover a similitude of thought process between mine and Kundera's. As for any human being, I too started getting the satisfaction that many of what I have been thinking about were all not mere waste of time and thoughts; but that there had been many immortals who wrote, sung and played with the thoughts similar in emotion to mine, though of obvious superiority and strength in quality.

I discovered that the negative qualities like pessimism, sadness, etc have their significance and the whole world is shadowed in the so called positive qualities, while in reality, it is immersed in sadness. That is the truth. Yes, Kundera helped me see and feel the bare truths of life; which often, we human beings neglect to acknowledge.

I have never seen any other writing as strong as his (you can count on my limited familiarity to world literature). His is the writing that redefines the concepts of morality, which is often a man-made set of rules, created for his own convenience to simultaneously practice immorality and preach morality. He explores the meaning of love, which is invisibly binded to the mortal pleasures of human consciousness. His writings are the truth incarnated. The truth in its total nudity…this truth is bold..it is the strongest atom bomb, I believe... It can break apart anything, a relationship; a culture; a race...

Still my desire for being listened continues with its fullest pressure. It may make me do the strangest things in my life. Quite recently I have discovered music to be incapable of helping in an explicit communication with the souls around us, with whom we wish to communicate. Music has many limitations like religion, rules, culture and tradition, which arrests its degrees of freedom….

To be contd…

Palghat Mani Iyer

Another melancholy evening...Thoughts about mridangam and Palghat Mani Iyer, churned out musical emotions in me…If ever I could have changed the destiny of my birth to a few years earlier. I would have at the least landed on this earth, when PMI had been alive.

If I had consistently thought about anything in my life, with utmost sincerity and it would have been about Palghat Mani Iyer and his glory; the history which created him and the history which he created. Thousands of things to be said about him; to be glorified, without a scintilla of exaggeration; thousands of anecdotes, potential enough to drive an atheist to a believer in the “Mani iyer’ God; Yes, He was the God of Rhythm incarnated;the impeccable idol; an immortal visionary of music and art. To me, he is the frame of reference for everything; every music, every art...

In one of his very few public speeches, (Padmashri felicitation for MDR) the reticent Mani Iyer said, “The job of a musician is a difficult one. If you want to score a rank in your school sudies or so, you can work hard for a few months and succeed. But if you don’t play well today, it will be said that you played well yesterday, but not today. So the job of a musician is a difficult job, that involves an examination on a daily basis. So there is only one way to succeed in it. Keep thinking about the great people. So you will ask me, ‘Saar, you lived in an era of great people and you have accompanied all of them. But we are not as fortunate as yourselves..’ But there were many great people whom I too haven’t seen. So the success in my life is because of the blessings of the great people …”

Our rational intuition will be to state that one can never become a great artist if he keeps thinking about great people instead of doing dedicated and meticulous practice. But I believe that, adoration is what is primarily; for a mridangist, the finger will obey him once he can adore a great mridangist sincerely. Talent is in a way a state of unconsciousness when you don’t know what you are doing, but undoubtedly, you are doing the best. If you can measure what you do, it is not talent. A genius doesn’t know that he is a genius, that’s why he is called a genius.

To be contd….

(A writing experience of full personal satisfaction, will require many days of thinking and editing. It creates a big void in consistency in writing, when I wish to make an article appear perfect to me; use the best words to bring out the charisma of the personality, whom I talk about; So I guess it is better to post out the scribblings, so atleast a momentary satisfaction is gained, even though the article remains unfinished and immature. It’s like a movie shot in a single take; but it has it’s own beauty I believe.

The ‘to be contd’ should excuse my discontinuity in thoughts and inconsistency in writing due to innate sluggishness.