The Ergonomic Relationship between Humans and Language

“What do words mean to you?”, someone asked me. The obvious answer would be ‘whatever they mean’, I wondered. Do we feel words or do we just see or read them as text? Can we stretch their boundaries in the tangible world to mean something more than their lexicographic meaning? How do we process them while saying, or in more sophisticated terms, uttering them?

After much thought and time, I attempt to answer some of these simple-appearing but miraculously complex questions through the prism of my experience. First one first. Yes, we feel something while stumbling upon a word in question. But that’s not the word but its meaning. We feel the underlying meaning in its entirety; going into it are our neurons, hormones and the like. It’s as if the brain constructs a story around each word which it unfolds the moment our eyes encounter it. That is to say, if there’s lack of imagination, there’s also the accompanying lack of cognitive ability to retain a vocabulary.

Can we bring words alive? I’d prefer to answer this question following an instinctive chain of thought in my mind. And the answer, as it appears, is ‘No’. What we can pump life into are not words but thoughts and emotions. They are the purest manifestation of the human brain. By thoughts, I don’t mean conscious thoughts, to think which it is necessary to depend on words. The kind of thoughts I mean are subconscious in nature. These are felt in their distilled form without the eventual contamination of words. These are the ones that trigger corresponding emotions. In brief, we think and emote – two juxtaposing phenomena without the intervention of words. 

All said and done, what goes into speaking words? Well, words, at both a superficial level and deeper one, appear to be nothing but symbols (written) and pronunciations (verbal) that we are expected to mug up. An extrapolation of this statement would be to say that learning a language is mugging up. The smarter you are, more is the alacrity with which words find themselves at your disposal. In a way, it appears to me as if there are two entities residing in one human body. One is the linguistically conscious self and the other is the one which the world perceives. It is ‘this self’ that actuates the spoken or written word. For instance, when we quote someone while speaking, we mightn’t consciously recognize the meaning of each word but we do keep a tab on what the whole thing means. While doing so, the former self processes the meaning of all words discretely and forms an idea of what the whole sequence of words means while the latter self transforms this mental image in an outward manifestation in the form of mechanical narration. One entity thinks while the other acts rather robotically – the first one is analogous to a desktop and the second, a printer.

I am not sure if it’s a touch complicated or it only appears to be so. Regardless, it is what my mind feeds me up with day in day out. The wonder is if we are so adept at the act of rote-learning, what gives some people a distinctive sense of good language? The bigger question is, if by way of evolution we become telepathic in the sense of conveying thoughts and emotions in their most pristine form, words will cease to exist. At that point, you’ll ask, “What do thoughts and emotions mean to you?”. And that’s going to be a difficult question to answer.

The Revival of my Ramblings

The feeling I’m feeling at this moment is the one that you’d get when you stumble upon a souvenir or an animal’s bone, for instance, that, as a child, you buried in the backyard. Literally speaking, it’s not the thing but the place that reminds you of what’s beneath the little mound of wet earth erected to bury it. You considered hiding it probably because to you it was a piece of treasure– something you didn’t want anyone to see for reasons known only to you, or otherwise completely unknown. This blog feels to me like that disinterred treasure, long lost and forgotten.

For all practical purposes, I wasn’t even expecting this blog page to show up. Only after it popped up did I realize what I’d heard through hearsay can’t be relied upon at all, for I was informed that Blogspot had closed down. As if my treasure had vanished just like that or dissolved in the soil around. Although I presumed it lied untouched where I’d left it the last time, the agony in my heart upon failing to locate it would’ve been unfathomable. It actually depends on what that buried thing I talked about means to you. To me, it is the manifestation of my literary growth over a couple of years; a sapling which I watered and bred. I certainly can’t see it withered and wilted.

Now that I am reunited with my old friend, I wish to nurture our relationship and ascertain that our bond prospers symbiotically. “My friend, you’ll always be my voice and the petri dish on which the culture of my thoughts resides, grows and evolves. Thanks for finding me once again.”

Dying with Dignity

I enjoy autumns a great deal, for they test the efficacy of newly tarred roads. No sooner than I locate self-formed miniature rivulets or rainwater logged along the edges of footpaths, I begin calculating how much the local corporator “churns” out of these tainted deals and slick civil projects. However, one reason why I loathe autumns is that the early-morning rains, prevalent during the season, keep joggers from rambling out of their cosy homes. Even if the rains take a hiatus, water accumulated along the streets deters people from putting their tracksuits on. I detest autumns for this. I really do.

One such morning, I was woken up by a spurt of raindrops that let itself on my face. I reckon it was probably ushered in by the breeze through the bedroom window. I was too vexed to think how it dashed into my room and splashed on my haggard face. I am certainly not habituated to such impertinence. Anyway, with extreme reluctance, I got out of my bed to shut the window lest another atrocious spray of rainwater might find its way through to my face. Cursing the wind which I otherwise savored, I gripped the rusted handle to pull the glass. As I turned it, I spotted a couple two storeys below, taking refuge under a tree in the relentless torrent. Their reddish pink cheeks and faces striated with wrinkles were overt indicators of their senility. The woman held on to her bandy-legged man’s left forearm with both her hands while he rested his other palm on her left shoulder, drawing her face towards his heaving chest, as if trying to shield her from a monster. I was amused by the warmth they still shared. In fact, I was growing increasingly fond of them.

After a minute or two, the downpour ceased dramatically as my eyes remained fixated on the two obscure persons waiting beneath the dense foliage. The rains sufficiently reduced; rather acquiesced to let morning-walkers reach their abodes without necessarily getting drenched. Gushing streams along the promenade reduced to twisted, snake-like deposits of glimmering sand brought by receding waters. Followed by the withdrawal of the precipitation, the couple gadded out of the green cover.

Before both the figures reached as far as the tree allowed me to see, I discerned that the stream had also carried something else, apart from the sand, which it deposited right beneath the tree. For a brief second, I wondered what it was. Something harlequined with pink and dark brown: a young bird. It lay still. Its naked pink skin appeared rough and bore deep cuts. Sparse dark colored feathers clung to its clipped wings. I thought it was dead. To my utter bewilderment, it started writhing instantaneously, splashing the water around. I hollered for the chaukidar but my continual efforts went in vain. Exasperated, I dressed up as quickly as it was humanly possible before rescue operations for the hapless creature be undertaken. By the time my face sneaked out of the window to appraise the bird’s condition, I saw the old man and his spouse sprinting desperately towards the tree to tackle the crisis.

For a split interval of time, the old man seemed utterly baffled. He stood by the bird, his hands swinging like rags left to dry in the wind, indulging in violent to and fro motion at one moment and limping lifelessly in the very next, as if they had an autonomous brain that went down with apoplectic fits. The lady followed him too, panting. Not long after she arrived, he immediately swung into action, as if her presence reassured him of his abilities. He bent over the bird and held it gingerly in his cupped palms. Its convulsions ceased suddenly, rendering the body lifeless. The man tried resuscitating it, sprinkling water on its moribund eyes. His failing attempts to revive the poor bird showed up as perspiration on his brows in the breezy morning. All this while, the woman witnessed the battle between life and death over her man’s shoulders, praying and snivelling alternately.

It was dead, which they didn’t take too long to realize. The man thrust the insentient body to his heart and pushed on to bury it under the wet earth they had spotted adjacent to the monolithic trunk. They dug a grave and covered it back after the burial. The downpour commenced again wetting the man and wife while they stood there, still like rocks. Funereal silence ensued.

Everything is just the same now, but for the mound under the tree. Although quite a few weeks have passed since that morning, I still get a lump in my throat whenever I see the old couple ambling in immaculate mornings. They always look at the bottom of the tree. They smile a pining smile or shed a tear or two sometimes. It seems the old man still recounts how the poor bird had beaten early death, waiting to die in his own moist hands.

Hazel Oceans

Shafts of light pierce through dense woods,

to fall upon the petals of her fragile skin.

Her diamond necklace melts into her silk gown

and shimmers she, brighter than the hoary moon.

Golden wisps of bougainvillea run down her shoulders

Veiling her naked spine, touching it, swaying.

Her hazel oceans swindle despondent ferries;

fetter them to the sympathy of her tempestuous will.

They ebb with the resonance of her beseeching hymn,

laying bare pristine treasures, unsung, unheard of.

Rocky caverns dilate to let her soul out,

and shrink amidst her sinister notes.

Ghosts of the past, they threaten her to world’s end,

to fall back to their graves, destroyed.

She remains oblivious to the decaying flotsam, to everything,

as her oceans dissolve the earth beneath.

Her stream of consciousness just draws her nearer.

She arrives. And waits.

A Tribute to my Forgotten Past

It was a usual Thursday evening. Dark clouds and dusty smog blanketed my city, and this smothered me a bit. It often happens to me. I think I’ve incurred some kind of an asthmatic disorder. Nonetheless, I ventured out of my house against grandma’s persuasions. I sauntered down the street along a park near my house. Everything felt distant, and antique. The streets, the park, the dank benches turned green by peremptory moss; all stared into my eyes, the way they are known to do to newcomers, or bastards who shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I felt ostracized, estranged.

There’s this sprawling marketplace in the older quarter of my city. They call it the “heart”. It pumps, not blood, but people, in and out, all three hundred sixty-five days a year. To me, it looks like an unconquerable fortress. You need a great deal of work to enter its outer bounds. And once you do it, you are overpowered as the dense mob pushes you along its central street.

Although that place had been yearning for my attention since almost fifteen years, I can’t fathom how this blighted brain of mine drove me in there today. Fifteen years is too long a period, and it can make you forget everything you left behind. However, some things just can’t be forgotten, rather, they aren’t supposed to be. Ah! My ancestral home! My legacy! It lay right in the middle of the market. Grandpa had sold it to a certain someone engaged in the jewellery business. My family vacated it when I was just three years old. Consequently, my memories of that place are vague, but intact.

Unlike any other Thursday evening, I felt an irrepressible urge, that day, to feel the walls of my home, my battered past. To paint them with chalk that the tailor across the lane used to gift me, to breathe in the whiff of age-old concrete, or to slide down the banister of its shattered staircase. I wanted to sit by the door and wait for mum until she came home from work, to run down the road and cling on to her saree, or endure the punch of air that hit me in the face as she yanked me up in her arms.

I pined to go visit the place, one last time, if not more. The evening, albeit, was in its fullest gloom, the prospects of my parley with the abandoned place seemed bright. Deep down my soul, I heard its entreaties, which had been unanswered for fifteen long years. I called upon a friend and set forth. We reached the market and turned left to follow the lane that led to my home.

I rolled my eyes around as we reached the place, until they refused disengagement with a dilapidated structure. It supposedly lay unattended. The bricks showed amongst concrete, like bones from a fractured limb. I went closer to imbibe the warmth of the walls, the memories of my childhood. I was wetted with water dripping from an auxiliary construction which looked new. The trickle was lukewarm, with ground brick mixed fairly into it, thus giving it a reddish tinge. To a beholder, it might have appeared like blood, of my forefathers, finding its way into my palms, their child’s palms, merging into mine, making it sublime, again.

I inquired about the unrecognizable status of the building. An old acquaintance informed me about the refurbishment work being carried out. The new owner had decided on face-lift of the building. Its façade, that bore the brunt of nature’s atrocities for seventy-five years was completely distorted, save for the frame and the green door that still stood unharmed. I neared the door and touched it. It was dusty. The dust deprecated parting ways with my fingers. Every grain whined in my ears, for all the reasons I had lived in negligence for so long, for all the time I had turned my back on the place I frolicked as a toddler in. I believed I had sinned and had been paid in kind. I understood I didn’t feel asphyxiated without a reason. It was too overwhelming for my heart to sustain. And one could easily observe my eyes glistening in the dark.

P. S.: My friend, thank you very much for accompanying me to such a beautiful place.

Fire

Gone are those days

When my bones began to rust,

The time of the blaze has come

As it rides me into the light.

I straddle upon as it takes me off

Only to lose the ground I’ve known so long,

I look down over its mane and realize

What I’d lost will all turn mine.

We rub over bumpy grounds

And run into eagles,

They tell me “We’ve known you better!”

Well, I guess that bloke has plundered my everything.

The fire roars and commands me

To be baffled at the clouds and the Sun’s reach,

To drink in the vigor of my beaten past

And whip it with renewed frenzy.

It tantalizes me to return to the lost faith

For it knows that I’ve fallen in,

My harridan is seen on distant farms

As I soar to God’s own feet.

Delhi-6: Film Review

Well, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra has produced a masterpiece again! One of his earlier successful conceptions was Rang De Basanti. And it has been proved yet again that his bohemian thinking and socio-political themes work wonders. Set in the Chandni Chowk area of Delhi, the film, mainly, is a culmination of two stories of its lead characters.

Roshan (Abhishek Bachchan) is an NRI who comes to India to drop his grandma (Waheeda Rehman) as she wants to spend her last years and become one with the soil here. He is intrigued by the customs he witnesses in India, and more so, by the warmth of the intertwined relationships people share in their neighborhood. The other protagonist, Bittu, played by Sonam Kapoor is an aspiring Indian Idol who is hamstrung by her father (Om Puri) and old traditions prevalent in their house. The notorious Black Monkey, who made news a couple of years ago in Delhi also incurs interspersed mentions but remains in the perspective for a greater part of the movie.

Delhi -6 exhibits striking resemblance to Gowariker’s Swades. From an NRI coming back and rediscovering his roots to fall in love with the place and its people, to the lead girl trying to break free from societal customs and chasing her ambition, the two movies indeed have a similar setting. The Ram Leela sequences, albeit unnecessary, reinforce this similarity.

To be certain, Prasoon Joshi and Mehra have effectively portrayed all the vignettes in the first half. The communal harmony and brotherhood which initially prevail in the locality have been intentionally brought to the fore by Mehra. Moreover, the screenplay and the way the camera manoeuvres to capture some scenes is truly incredible. The story, nevertheless, becomes sluggish in the middle, clings on to the theme, and doesn’t seem to lose track until the end. However, the turnaround towards the climax is something which you could never have predicted, and indeed makes the film stand apart.

On the other hand, the story just remains an attempt to perfection. Abhishek’s put-on American accent feels like a spike in the flesh. In addition, unlike Swades, the story-tellers have failed miserably to strike good chemistry between Abhishek and Sonam, let alone intense. Besides, Amitabh’s cameo in the end is totally redundant and fatuous which could have been easily done away with.

Now comes the heart of Delhi-6: the music. All the songs are superlative compositions supplemented by brilliant lyrics and intense renditions. Although some of the songs don’t merge well with the flow of the script, those such as Genda Phool and Dil Gira Dafatan become only bearable to watch, thanks to the unique techno-rustic fusions. The ones that steal the show of course are Masakali, Rehna Tu and Arziyan, which are justifiably destined to be the audience’s favorites for a long time. The music, as a whole, commands a five star rating.

All in all, Delhi-6 is an out-of-the box and a worthwhile film to watch. Undeniably, after dog’s age, it is one of those sensible films which will make you think. So go grab some popcorn and enjoy your ride through the lanes of Delhi-6!