A Thought came to My Mind Today..

Suddenly a  thought came to my mind today when I was starting my meditation before sleep that I should jot down something on myself and the activities that I underwent today. This urge for writing  was clearly inspired by my reading of Pamuk's 'Black book' which I have been reading for the last few days. I am finding it to be voluminous, engaging, philosophical and sometimes abstract work. This intriguing novel deals with the person Galip who finds one day that his wife Ruya has left him. The novel's central theme is related to finding Ruya but this cannot be the simple interpretation of such a novel having many philosophical strings attached to it. Half of the novel I have finished and one thing that I notice is that the novel is exploring the role of identity and making it fluid again and again in the various characters.

Pamuk asserts a very poignant role related to identity which most of us face. The desire to be that someone 'other'. This primal desire of becoming from one to someone 'other' can be considered an inate desire of every human mind. This 'other' which can be defined as the refined,prosperous and  better part of the  present self (self as a singular person). But this makes me think that this is the play of the mind whose core nature is to make a person restless and fool itself of the other which is illusive. The illusion arises because we are prey to the folly that the other 'being' is  necessarily better then  me ,not understanding things in  totality.

Here I think I am getting abstract but I think this 'other' which leads to all sorts of complexes makes a person a pathetic being from what he can be. The truth is whatever we are is perfect in the right way even if it may seem irrational or pathetic in many ways.It is unintelligible mind that cannot grasp the perfectness.

What is the most illogically consistent thing that a person can think about? The spontaneous answer that hit me was 'Life !!'.  

My Perception on Antaheen.

Antaheen is a Bengali movie which got the National Award for Best Film in 2009.

A refreshing movie but with a somewhat poignant take towards the end. The film cannot be said to be poignant in totality as it was a beautiful movie portraying the inner feeling of the characters. There was an overall subtleness in which the movie was operating with some great cinematography. The ending now I realise was quite effective doing justice to the unconventional message it was trying to potray. Life may not be refreshing and joyful in the linear conventional way (with marriage) as most of us think. This could also be alluded by the single characters in the movie. Every character in the film had a different take on life but love, wait and loneliness (more optimistically solitude) was common to them all. The central theme of the film can be captured by the sufi line written by Aparna Sen in the Rumi's book that she gifted to Ronno (her husband), "The closer you get , the more you become elusive...the further you go, the clearer you become". 

There were two stories operating simultaneouly. First story which was the dominant story of the movie  operating bw Rahul Bose and Radhika through there virtual chat ; whereas the second story was bw Aparna Sen and her husband 'Ronno' where both of them were living separably. It seemed quite clear that the story was quite inspired by the wise words of Rumi where his metaphor on god was translated to human relations. Distance is essential for the eagerness or love to blossom but too much nearness may not be that pleasant . Elusiveness with anything (here relations) has the beauty of its own as it always keeps the mind craving for something more.  

How can a really great work be 'produced'?

Or to put it the other way round, can it really be ‘produced’? I had been somewhat consumed with this question for a while and have been trying to understand the dynamics behind it. Einstein was the one that came to my mind. How did he produce such great corpus and what common nature such great minds have ? Was he having some special gifts that his fellow peers or normal human beings didn’t have? 

The truth is he was not a Mozart type early prodigious talent. On the contrary , he was ridiculed to be a useless fellow in his school days and he didn’t even find the job of a school teacher after his graduation. The greatest gift or talent that Einstein had was his unrelenting stubbornness and  to think abstractly. He used to visually try to find solutions to the problems that he was confronted with and to persist with a problem till he got a satisfying solution to it ( He got his famous E=MC2 equation through his persistence and patience of ten years). This nature can be found common in Beethoven, Kafka, Feynman etc. 

The thing that really comes out common with great scholars is their ability to meditate on the problem that they are confronted with and to pursue it till its completion with consuming passion. The word “passion” here is very important because for getting the right question, perseverance is required but to produce a great work, passion all the way is required. Passion can be replaced by the word ‘intense pleasure’. The indomitable spirit towards their work that  these masters had  can be considered as an  aggregation of all pleasures that a human being can desire.

The human mind or ego lives with various forms of pleasure or to put it precisely normal human beings consume eclectic pleasures. However, scholars or people who produce great work (genius) have singularity of pleasure. Their work is for them their greatest pleasure or passion. But then a question that would obviously confront us is – Can a person following the above procedures produce great work. It can be  done but that requires dedication like a zen monk or like a unrelenting maverick. This was shown in the case of Susan Polga the first female chess grandmaster. Susan's father was a psychologist and he believed in the concept that genius can be made. He trained Susan and his other two daughters to make chess their second nature and he made them to be just consumed in that from early childhood. All the three became the first three female chess grandmasters. It is the sustainable passion for the work that is important.  The production of a great work  is not a pure logical process , rather the concept of intuition plays a crucial role to achieve the end process. The subject and the object gets diluted when a great work is produced. It’s like the Zen story in which a pupil asks his master of how to produce a great sketch of a tree around, the master tells him to meditate on the tree to undo the plurality i.e to become the tree.