The Flâneur in Me

Posted on February 12, 2014 by Rahul
Paul Gavarni, Le Flâneur, 1842

Paul Gavarni, Le Flâneur, 1842
(Intellectual curiosity about the word ‘Flâneur’ led me to Wikipedia, from where I
have shamelessly copied this image)

The long walks that I so often take or have taken in the past, in the cities I have lived or am living, has a word for them. The word is flânerie and the one who keeps himself interested in regular flânerie is called as flâneur. Recently, I came across an article titled The Weekend Flâneur, and read it with great interest. Not that I am off to New York for a weekend flânerie, but the word ‘Flâneur’ interested me greatly. Not only did I come to know about a much-needed word for my weekend excursions in the city streets, but also the fact that flânerie is a much intellectually and philosophically explored subject. I am obliged to the author of this article, since through his article he has instilled, in me, a certain sense of ‘pride’ regarding strolling about the streets of a city, an activity which I so often do on weekends. The author of that article has called flânerie being an act of classy laziness. And I agree. It is indeed an act of laziness. To stroll about a city and watch the people, buildings, streets, cafe, and other happenings nearby with intellectual curiosity is indeed an act of classy laziness.

I have been an ardent and passionate flâneur throughout my life until today and would continue to be so. I have always preferred a slow lazy walk [my slow lazy walk is faster than many people’s average walk] towards a destination than hiring a cab or getting into a bus to reach there. These walks are always full of taking random roads, going through less known streets, eating at lesser known outlets, and discovering new routes. I vividly recall my long walks to my alma mater, Imperial College London, when I was a student there. And London has a certain charm about it that no other city has that flânerie appeared to be a very natural activity, and not something forced on to me by myself.  While I was studying at Imperial, I stayed at three different places. Once, for a brief period, at Stratford, then at West Kensington and finally at Sussex Gardens.

While residing at West Kensington, I could afford a daily walk to Imperial. The shortest distance from my flat in West Kensington to Imperial was about 3 KM via Cromwell Road. In future sometime, I would describe my typical Cromwell Road walk to Imperial. It was regular for me to change route either while going to or coming back from Imperial. While coming back from Imperial, taking High Street Kensington, stopping by at Patisserie Valerie for that cup of Hot Chocolate, and then again continuing the walk along the bylanes and into the little streets that joined the famous high street of England was normal.  Each time taking a different road, a different street, sometimes the one along the Pizza Hut while walking towards the Holland Road, and once I entered Kensington Palace Gardens [without knowing that it was KPG] and it is a pitch dark street after the sun has set, because of little illumination on the street. I “boldly” strolled through the dark street just to find myself on the Bayswater Road. Another of my favourite flâneries was the one from Shepherd’s Bush [from a library there] via Uxbridge Road via Hammersmith Park to my place at Sussex Gardens. There were many walks that I took sometimes in favourable light of the day and sometimes during the odd timings at the night, all intellectually enriching and dipped in the sweetness of solitude and laziness.

Owing to its pleasant weather, walking in Bangalore is pleasant too. The Indian cities are not adapted for a passionate flâneur like me. But to my good luck, for most part of my sojourn at Bangalore, I stayed at its outskirts or near to outskirts – but not exactly near the main city- but near to place of my work. And here, yet again, I walked to office. While I couldn’t take different routes every day to office, but while coming back from office, and after the gym, I would often go on long walks and strolled about the city, mostly on Fridays or Saturdays or sometimes on Sundays too. However, while walking in Bangalore, I was not alone, I was solitary walker but not an alone walker.  I had a company. I also have had fortune of flânerie in Mumbai, apart from in Delhi. In Mumbai, I was mostly accompanied by my roommates and these walks were mostly in the night, especially the ones we took along Marine Drive and Colaba. And while securing my admission at an evening MBA course of a top-notch B-school, I would often stroll about that area of city and through my walks alone I explored South Mumbai like someone living there for at least 5 years would have. I am willing to wager on my claim that I know more streets/routes in South Mumbai than someone living or travelling there daily for five years. Currently, I am living abroad once again, and I have been on flânerie, at least 10-15 times along different routes and streets, and mostly on weekends.

On my lazy walks, I have tried to see the people, to admire an oddly built cafe, to admire a small time restaurateur, or a small time barber, or a roadside vendor of delicious burgers. I have seen through the hypocrisy of mankind and I have also seen through its magnanimity. I realise that magnanimity may be a one-off expression, hypocrisy and frivolity is what is natural and is in permanent flux. Through my eyes, I have seen a small time restaurateur feeding a dog, but beating a hungry child, and then next day same restaurateur being beaten by some younger and better-off young men. Through my eyes, I have seen a part of a day in the life of a street dog, the one I followed along a long walk. I had no idea where to go and I was particularly looking to go somewhere totally unexplored, and followed this dog. Through my eyes, I happened to see how a small shop transformed into a bigger business over 7-8 months by sheer hard work of that shopkeeper. I have seen transformations, regression, progressions, success, failure, sadness, happiness, anger, bitterness, violence, peace, camaraderie, fall and rise of supposedly insignificant men and women, sometimes trees and animals. I have seen certain plants growing to a respectable height, giving much needed shade on a hot day, only to be rooted out for paving a new road/street/pavement, perhaps, for flâneurs like me.

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Saudade

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Rahul

Is there anything or anyone that may be actually indispensable for any human? Without which or whom he/she cannot survive. Without which or whom, he/she will stop smiling, being happy, and rather be in perpetual saudade. Is there really a feeling as strong as saudade? Is it possible for someone to feel incompleteness forever because something or someone was lost in the rigmaroles of existence? When I look at the past and when I look at the present, I find that the people who came in my sphere, especially those who could touch me and breach my heart’s walls and went past it and made tall claims, big promises, and deep commitments, are all able to live a rather happier and peaceful life without me. I have been forgotten and not remembered anymore. The slight pain of separation, if any, that they might have borne has been soothed by newer people, newer relations and newer claims/promises/commitments. There may be two reason to this – Either I am easily forgettable, or the other people and their tall claims/commitments/promises are all frivolous.

I can recollect a few examples of saudade from my memory and both of them are part of history. One that I recall is that of Radha, beloved or lover of Lord Krishna, a Hindu God. Radha and Krishna could never marry. Krishna had 16000 consorts and 8 queens, but he never married Radha. Radha also got married to a local guy of her village. However, depiction of Radha has always been that of someone in saudade, someone in perpetual state of incompleteness, someone in perpetual state of longingness. She did not feel complete without Krishna. She never could. Her feeling for Krishna remained same as or rather grew stronger than those she had for Krishna before their marriages. Krishna too yearned to meet him. Krishna, at many places, has remarked about his incompleteness without Radha. Krishna had promised Radha that he will not die before meeting her at least once. The other example that I recollect is that of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, who went into a state of mourning for a decade or so upon death of her husband Albert. Even after discarding her seclusion for suppressing the “republican sentiments”, she could never fully ‘recover’, she had saudade for her husband throughout her life until her death.

The above two examples are extraordinary. And they are of extraordinary people, capable of extraordinary feats, had extraordinary achievements to their credit and, perhaps therefore had extraordinary relationships. In my experience, I have felt that saudade is experienced but by only a small minority. No wonder that the word has not been explained ‘rightly’ yet. I have read many people describing it differently. And only those could describe it who are going through it. Let me explain saudade to my readers.

Saudade is a very deep and sincere feeling for something or someone lost in the life’s churns. It makes you want to go back, and relive the past. It makes you want to correct some silly mistakes that led to giant repercussions. It makes you think of such overarching, over-ambitious and perhaps ludicrous inventions such as time machine or time travel. It challenges your current happiness. It challenges your current laughter. It challenges your current “completeness”. It makes them all appear fake, or at best a facade put up to chase away the world. It is a deep feeling of longing. A longing earth might have on the day she doesn’t see the sun. A longing flowers might have for the season of spring. A longing that is probably ineffable, but it can be seen by some acute observants in the eyes of the one in saudade, in his voice or his regular walk towards home, and mostly in his empty laughters and vacants stares. Saudade is not love that remains. Saudade is a part of you, which you were while you were with that thing or the person, that remains. Saudade is your history that you live every day, every moment or perhaps with every breath or thought. Saudade is your living history, living inside you, through you. Saudade is your living past. Saudade doesn’t give birth to suicidal instincts, rather it leads to inspiration to excel and achieve. When new, it may give some withdrawal symptoms, and also the two examples I cited are those of achievers or influencers of world history.

A rare minority goes through this feeling, and this feeling itself is never past. It is perpetual. Most humans barring that rare minority are frivolous and lack perseverance to love and stay around, or to rediscover the thing or someone that they lost. They lack perseverance to stay true to their tall claims, big promises and giant commitments. Saudade is perhaps the proof of perseverance in a particular human. It perhaps reflect on honesty and sincerity of their commitments, promises, attachment and feelings. It is certain that this sincerity of commitment, promises, attachment and feelings is all for to see in other spheres of their life too. Just like the numbers of perseverant people are limited, the numbers of people in saudade are also limited. World is, after all, full of frivolous people making frivolous claims carrying frivolous relationships with frivolous heart with frivolous motives, changing them from one to another, from another to another, while at the same time blaming those who are perseverant and making a victim out of themselves. Well, minority is mostly under threat in modern human society!

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Of perseverance and being a misfit!

Posted on February 9, 2014 by Rahul

On this WordPress forum, I have come across a brilliant sonneteer and a poet, David Emeron. And when I asked the secret of his strong imagery, beautiful rhymes and musical sonnets, he told his secret to be love AND perseverance. I agree with him. Everything superior about our life or our skills come from perseverance. Many people claim to love, only a few have the perseverance.

I have come to believe that I, essentially, am a misfit in the world. In saying so, I mean to say that I find it hard as well as ludicrous to adjust myself to the casual ways of the world and its people at large. In fact, I find it very tough to even appreciate the frivolity that spans the world and its people. World lacks perseverance and what it has in abundance is frivolity. This frivolity has led to unprecedented increase of mediocre aspirations, mediocre people, mediocre careers, mediocre marriages, mediocre relationships and all that spans a modern human’s life. There is nothing superior or first-class about modern human’s life, everything is mediocre. No wonder 99% of human population dies as mediocre with mediocre marriages, with mediocre jobs, with mediocre life stories and with mediocre burial or cremation. Why are there fewer rich people? Why are there fewer entrepreneurs? Why are there fewer scientists? Why are there fewer leaders? Why are there fewer poets? Why are there fewer artists? Out of a population of 7 billion and growing, we can count number of world leaders or scientists or entrepreneurs or poets or artists on our finger tips [figuratively, when compared to the population]. Why are there fewer people with superior business, superior marriages, superior love, superior relationships etc.? Why is 99.9% of the world and everything about it is so mediocre?

However, this blog post is not about world, this is about perseverance, me and my experiences with the world. I consider myself a misfit because I refuse to be casual about the words that I utter from my mouth, or the feelings that I express from my heart or the work that I do with my hands, or the patent specifications that I draft from my intellect, or the languages that I use for communication. And to not be casual and frivolous, and to attain superiority in at least select spheres of life, takes a lot of perseverance. For example, I never text using “sms lingo” or whatever fascinating name has been given to the usage of ‘u’ in place of ‘you’, ‘4’ or ‘fr’ in place of ‘for’ and many such atrocities that my favourite language is subjected to. Consider this: I send a text to a person X -“Hello, I will be available to meet you at Patisserie Valerie at High Street Kensington between 4PM and 6PM, else I can meet you tomorrow at your office. Please inform me accordingly” and the reply that I receive is- “k, ossom, i’ll lt u knw”. In reply to my reading delights, the receivers of my texts, almost all the time, send me such eyesores. I have stopped texting them altogether. And instead, prefer to call, and subject my ears to their casual attitude. And the most ludicrous part is that out of these people, some have gall to “mock” me for being ‘pedantic'(never mind the abuse of the word ‘pedantic’ by them though). This frivolous and casual use of language has led to mediocre communication, casual communication or the communication just for the sake of it.

I have an unwavering commitment to the words I say from my mouth or the feelings I express from my heart. I want to live for them and I can also die for them. And once again such commitment requires a degree of perseverance. And this has hurt me regularly because the world around is casual about the words that flow and feelings that are expressed. It is full of frivolous people, with frivolous sentiments and frivolous aims. Many people fall in and out of relationships periodically. They go through periods of sadness and grief while coming out of one but are able to overcome it and enter a second one, with equal passion and without any memories of past. More so, they repeat same words, express same feelings, and since the other person is casual too, this will be just fine for him too. I have come to the conclusion that if you are not the “casual” kinds and cannot find someone exacting to your standards of perseverance, don’t go for relationship and marriages, because if you go, you will end up in a mediocre marriage, mediocre life and a mediocre family or you will eventually have a heart break. It takes perseverance to realise the words/feelings you utter, 99.9% people lack the perseverance. They may have abundance of love [that they can share with n number of people], but they will have absolutely zero perseverance, which they will have for nobody.

Since I am too fed up of world and its casual and frivolous ways, my mother is assured that I will not be able to find a girl fulfilling my such aspirations or expectations. So, she has taken upon herself to get me “arranged-married”. After months of expeditions of my mother and her perseverant persuasions, I finally ‘shortlisted’ a girl about whom I felt that I can be genuine with and honest to, and which I was while I appreciated her over the phone, and expressed how I felt about her, that I found her simple and elegant and just about the woman I would want in my life. However, the talks got derailed [it’s Indian arranged marriage you see]. And then, as it happens, everybody, including my parents, the girl and the girl’s parents, did a “move on”. Since I was being genuine about my words and honest to the way I felt, and wanted them to “mean” something in long run, to hold a definite “value”,  I found it all so superfluous and therefore, was the only one left wondering. All these high sounding words, dreams and aspirations require perseverance to put them to life. Now, I have taken many steps back from this whole business of “arrange” marriage, in fact, from entering into any relationship at all. I want my words to matter, therefore, I refuse to utter same words to different people all the time for same objective and that too without meaning them, without the yearn to be perseverant about them. That would lead to mediocrity in life and relationships [business or personal].

In language, when I stress on such minute details as use of comma before ‘which’, or when not to use ‘that’ and when to use ‘which’, or how a sentence in a technical document should have essential elements of English sentence i.e. subject, verb and object, or when to use ‘said’ and when to use ‘the’ and the difference between them, I know I am thought of as “Grammar Nazi” but their lack of perseverance to perfect their skills annoys me.

In all this casual and frivolous behaviour of the world at large, and my constant fight with the people around to not be casual about what they do, what they speak, what they express; I find myself a misfit. It’s true that more often than not, we hold no control on our lives, and it’s usually a sum total of the circumstances playing around us, but then again, this is so because of the casual attitude of the people in our immediate environment, who feed on frivolity and who lack perseverance. If you love someone, then don’t lack in perseverance, stand through. If you are committed to your career, then too don’t lack in perseverance. If you are committed to an art, then too don’t lack perseverance. If you want your words to mean something, to hold a value, a worth, be perseverant about realising them, be truthful to them. Being perseverant is being truthful to your own words, sentiments and goals.

If you do not lack perseverance, then you are a misfit, and just the person who will be counted amongst the fewer superior leaders, fewer superior entrepreneurs, fewer superior poets, fewer superior artists or among those with superior marriages, superior relationships, superior careers, or superior business or just about anything superior. The world is not going to change anytime soon, be a misfit, evolve a perseverant gene in your genome and stand out, if not in all but at least in a few spheres of your life that you choose. Let’s be such a misfit, a pain in the neck of the people around, that they are forced to reorder themselves to fit with us, or else let them wallow in their mediocrity, while we enjoy the superiority!

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Blocked!

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Rahul

These days, I am going through “writer’s block”. Whenever I get down to write something, I feel it has already been said and is not original. Moreover, the work pressure is building up, and I am rescheduling my days/weeks. But amidst all this, I am sticking to my new year resolutions. I have joined gym, watched a film- The Wolf of the Wall Street, have put an end to procrastinating, improving language skills [this shouldn’t have been in list of resolutions because I do that anyways], making myself laugh more often and also religiously following my “austerity” drive. I am yet to go for deep sea diving and sky diving, but I have a whole year left yet, to indulge in these luxuries.

The only thing I am struggling with is the ability to come up with thorough narrative on some of the original ideas that I have.  I have many topics to explore and I eventually will, but I am seeing them through different prisms of perspective and the thoughts are not crystallised enough to be blogged. In the mean time, I do keep in touch with WordPress community and read interesting blogs of my followers and the people I am following, for example, David Emeron’s sonnets, Book of Words, Astronomy and Law, The Byronic Man, If Books Could Blog and many more! Hopefully, some fine day, I will write my view on these blogs and all others whose posts regularly spring up in my WordPress Reader.

One issue that I have identified with this “writer’s block” is that my blog has no single theme. I think if I restrict this blog to a theme on a single subject matter e.g., books, music, art, literature, sonnets, review, essays, etc., I would easily overcome this unfortunate block. And then I also wonder that being a “non-themed blog”, gives me much more independence and I can always cover these subject matters at length under different categories that I have created. So as of now, the blog is specialist in being generalist!

I will soon stage a comeback to the world of writing and blogging!

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New Year Resolutions

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Rahul

People make new year resolutions either on the eve of new year or on the first day of the new year. I wanted to be certain. 20 days into the new year, and I have come up with following resolutions:

1. Read 50 books

This is one resolution that I am most likely to stick to. This year the genre of choice of my books is going to be politics. From some of Voltaire’s 20000 letters to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to Plato’s Republic. All. Another genre that I am considering diving into is that of fiction. I have not read many fictions. Perhaps less than 10. A book that I will be reading is Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence. To my list of reading, I also wish to include some “parasite” literature i.e. Literary Criticism as referred to by a recent article somewhere on web. Last year too I made these as part of my readings. Further, I will be including at least 3-4 books on poetry.

2. Time Management and To Not Procrastinate 

In 2013, I got afflicted with this horrible disorder [I am not sure whether this is really “horrible”, for I think I strive under stress and pressure and procrastination works for me] of procrastination. In 2014, I have decided to fight it. 20 days into 2014, and I have done pretty well. No last minute deadline horrors until now. I want to live smoothly. So I will be doing what is called as “Time Management”. Of course, I won’t become slave of time. But I won’t become slave of deadlines either. I will kill the ghost of deadlines and plan my work smartly. 2014 is all about being very active, running here and there, going places, and touching new heights.

3. Sky Diving and Deep Sea Diving

This is my long standing dream. I have now enough finances to easily accommodate me of these experiences. In 2014, I will fly in the sky and dive into the sea. D.E.F.E.N.I.T.E.L.Y

4. Improve Language Skills

This is my life long resolution. I will continue to improve my language skills, and skills of eloquent conversations through reading, reading and reading, and by interacting with interesting people who have wits, charm and are well read.

5. Watch Films

I am not a film buff. Not at all. But in 2014, I plan to watch one film every month. This week I will go for “The Wolf of the Wall Street”. Of course, all by myself. Do not have misfortune of hitching with a pretty colleague, or being in a relationship etc. But by now, many readers would have guessed that “all by myself” is my preferred state of mind. Natural.

6. Travel, Travel and Travel 

If my finances help me right, I wish to travel at least 5-6 countries this year. I want to make one visit to my alma mater, Imperial College London. And also visit the exotic locations of South East Asia.

7. Gym

During first six months of 2013, I was regular in the gym. Change in job and countries have made me miss work out in last six months of 2013. In January of 2014, I have joined the gym once again. I resolve to be regular at gym for at least 10 months.

8. Keep Walking and Keep Laughing

This year I will walk away. Apart from that, this year I want to laugh a lot. I don’t know how that will happen.

9. To spend less

Last year I spent a lot. This year I would get on austerity drive.

10. To blog regularly and write sonnets!

Of course!

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