The shadows of goodwill.

‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’

Tennessee Williams. New Orleans. USA. The movie was amazing too. Marlon Brando. Vivien Leigh. So much drama. A streetcar named Desire. I know what I am about to say has nothing contextual with that beautiful line. But words always convey different meanings to each one of us- we understand and percept it differently, we filter out whatever we don’t want to percept or sometimes we even delimit our perception for our own well-being. Being someone who has this penchant for writing sappy things, I have always wondered what the point of studying literature was, you know, like there’s the circus and the joker has a role in it, and there’s life and some say literature has a role in it. Mind the analogy, I don’t want to hurt any feelings.

Since you like specific identities, I will tell you this- I am a science student, and since you like categorization I will tell you that I have been a lot around literature students- most of them were pretty girls. 

I have always wondered what the point of literature was and this was surely unchartered territory for me. For I am not supposed to wonder about these things. What do I know about the realists and the post modernists? What do I know about the catharsis and hamartia? Fancy words I must have come across somewhere. People make careers out of those words. So I sat in this lecture hall and listened carefully to everything this US University literature professor was saying. I could hardly understand much, but I did have an idea about ‘Modernism’ and the likes (thanks to this creative writing course I had back in IIT days). I did feel a sense of comradeship in some of the names he mentioned- like Joyce, Baudelaire, Flaubert (he mentioned Madame Bovary- there’s this entire Julian Barnes book dedicated to that novel which I had the good fortune of reading and wallowing), Eliot, Woolf, and the likes. I wondered if everyone felt like that too. Did they feel their bone shiver with the mention of their names, did they smile in acknowledgement or were they still busy hardwiring their brains trying to decode the ‘–isms’ that words didn’t convey. 

Oh how great those names were- who captured their age and place in their own way and here we were discussing them over power points in closed auditoriums. What would posterity know about power points? Who were we then? What were we doing? Facebook literature? It won’t last a year. And then there were names I haven’t heard of. At the end of that academic talk I felt that my level of intellect had risen a bit which was all good until something happened that made me a little sad.

Compassion has never been my strongest suite, it is hard being compassionate I accept, and this is a selfish world and we are all out here making careers, minting money. But sometimes I try to be principled and I try to feel. It bothers me how the world works at times. I don’t know if I pretend to do that, I have always been hard on judging myself so I will leave it for the ‘other’. Here I was standing outside the auditorium, two books dangling out of my hands when an old man with missing hairs and missing teeth walked up to me and in broken English he told me-‘this is something new. Want to read?’ It was a booklet in Bengali and it contained five or six, what you would call tiny stories.   You know I normally don’t practice philanthropy. On bitter days, I despise beggars. But I do eat in small shacks or tea shops by the roadside because I feel I owe this much to these people who don’t have much. What more can a privileged dreamer do? This old man was no beggar. He was selling stories for twenty bucks. I looked at him through the lens and wondered if that’s how I would end up. I bought his booklet. I had already made the judgment of supposing them to be bad stories even before reading them. Such strange creatures aren’t we? I don’t know if it was compassion or a sense of helping out a fellow who claims to write ‘different’ stories that led me into doing this. But whatever it was, it felt real good. Everything always points back to the ‘I’, doesn’t it? I felt good. It was about me. I bought it and walked away and you know what made me sad, rather surprised me-

‘We are not interested’ said a few literature students whom he approached. (I am sorry for this categorization but I had to do this because I have a point to make.) But it only costs as much as two standard cigarettes, I thought. Perhaps they were not rich like me.

 I wondered if being ‘disinterested’- in your age and time, in your surroundings or in the stories of an antediluvian figure is the theme and heart of our age. Is that what we as youth collectively represent in this free flowing material world? Disenchantment and a singular vision of a wealthy, healthy and a banal life – is that the dream?

And therefore, I beat myself in the head and wondered into those labyrinths of useless thought-did literature not teach human values anymore or did I just do a better job staying away from ”-ism people” and getting wasted with those who never read much books but would rise and fight against everything that was wrong with the
world.         

‘But I have always depended on the kindness of story tellers.’
I hummed it to her while I walked away from the semi-lit quadrangle of a place that was once known as Presidency College.