Republic Day

During his mad school days, Republic Day was one of the rare festivals that he celebrated at his hometown; as during rest of the festivals he was in his boarding school. To describe that day of 26th January as a festival or even as a celebration might be an exaggeration, but yes it was definitely an event of a certain sort for him.

To give you all a background, our protagonist's hometown is a small town in Bihar with a bare minimum literacy rate, sex ratio, human development index and basic issues of good roads, fresh water and electricity supply. Whenever there was an extra hour of electricity provided in the houses, one could easily infer that either there was some minister visiting the town or that the poor Govt. electricity official found in his office would have been beaten by the unemployed town mob.

Anyways, Republic Day celebration in his hometown was limited to a school playground (which was also used as a grazing ground for buffaloes) with a full volume microphone playing bollywood desh-bhakti songs amidst some speeches by the principal and a chief guest (spreading the town with jingoism). He had done his nursery education from the same school which played the host to all this nationalistic pandemonium. He was like their favourite alumnus. An alumnus who now owns a DSLR, a blackberry phone, had traveled abroad (even be it only Bhutan) and wore a sweatshirt with IIM inscribed in it.

So every republic day, they used to ask him or politely and emotionally persuade him to deliver a speech on that same loud microphone. A speech nicely placed between all those Bollywood deshbhakti songs. The mandate given to him was that the speech should necessarily be in English language. Every year he tried to make the same futile argument that he should speak in Hindi as hardly people in the audience knew English and also Hindi made much more sense of patriotism.

But he had to budge and instead go on the dais and throw all English words. The loudspeaker was so loud that the whole town would listen and even his parents sitting on the terrace basking the winter sun were further warmed by the pride of their son giving speech in the English language.

In the midst of his speech, he would look at the blank faces of the students, their parents and the smiling teachers listening to him while he threw at them: words like humanity, democracy, secularism and fraternity. And then to response to such a cold response, he would close his eyes and assume his mother sitting on the terrace, hearing but not listening to her son with that joyous smile of pride and gratification of an English educated upbringing of her son on that very Republic Day of India...

Jai Hind!

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Prepossessing beauty of ordinariness

Dear students,

Welcome to the first lecture of 2014. Lets me start this year by introducing to you, my brilliant students, the concept of "prepossessing beauty of ordinariness".

Now look outside this class into the sky and imagine there was a rainbow. Ok, wait, let us all imagine that it was snowing outside. Wouldn't there be dazzle in your eyes? Dazzles due to beauty outside? But what is the probability for it to snow or rain outside?
It is the very rarity of that event called snowfall which is making it beautiful. Beauty here is something extraordinary, something rare for I am sure that in a class in Antarctica, snow would not be beautiful because it snows every day. A kashmiri student would look down upon you when you guys would all raise that cry on a snowfall because for him or her, his or hers rarity is much more beautiful than your rarity.

Students, that was marketeers and advertisers idea of beauty. Yes, an easy sell. A blackberry was beautiful because it had a blackberry messenger and now it is not beautiful because all the smart phones have them.

Now take a deep breath and look at the tree outside the class. And those students sitting away from the windowpanes please leave your desks and come close to the window. Look at the the uppermost branch. Can you see an equilateral triangle? Look at the branch below that, its the same equilateral triangle, look below it.  Yes? Now look at yourselves, can you see a dazzle at each other. It is the same tree which you see daily outside the class.

Its the mind which is a source of all the beauty. Its the mind which is bored of ordinary and seeks extraordinary. When you train your mind so much that in every ordinary you see extraordinary and  thus the ordinary and extraordinary becomes the same. That sort of beauty is called prepossessing beauty of ordinariness.

Go tonight, look at the stars and pity those cities where the students can't even see the stars due to pollution. Create your own shapes and geometries in those stars. Look for lions, hunters, bears, spoons in them. And then you will understand what did Calvin mean when he said to Hobbes: " If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently".

With this lecture,I wish you all not only a beautiful 2014 but also a life filled with beauty. Yes, Dostoevsky was right when he said "Only beauty can save the world"!

We will discuss this poem "The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider tomorrow:

The Patience of Ordinary Things
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
- Pat Schneider, Another River

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