Dear Sarvanama:
Every time I close a post, I promise not to complain about people. And every time I begin one, the first subject to nag me into scribbling happens to be people. I was making futile efforts to erase humans from my mind. In fact, there is no exigency befitting a response if there is no human being doing some mischief. I am echoing Lloyd Bitzer here in different words. In fact, human instincts for fallacies or follies are the roots of responses like my epistles. You might as well brand writing a post on follies a form of folly in its own merits. Or call it demerits.
My Sarvanama epistles may explore the extent of hubris I carry about the anomalous world around me. I therefore remain wary of these connotations. Am I not overtly grumbling about souls that will scarcely transform? Am I not wasting my energy and that of my readers by talking about trifles that have infested human civilization for innumerable centuries? My readers may point to this aspect if any of them find motivation to dissect my posts. On my part, I will keep myself busy deconstructing the things and their imperceptible patrons.
I quite often premise my gossip on this confession: I have a hamartia of looking at things in their pieces. I see people, their attributes, and their emotions in as many splinters as are visible to me. So, nobody is absolutely right or absolutely wrong in perception of things. Such absence of understanding of absolutism enables me to trace the aspects of convergence simultaneously with those of divergence. This also consoles me into believing that I am neither fully rejected nor fully accepted by the same criteria, as I neither fully reject nor fully accept people and things.
I am thinking of the ‘ladder of abstraction’ Roy P. Clark so beautifully metaphorizes in his seminal book Writing Tools. Perhaps the ladder has taken hold so much in my personality that I slide back to or remain with the exigencies that carry trivial sagas. The ground that holds the ladder happens to involve gossip, sarcasm, curses, and even an ill design. This is why I cannot gamble my persona into being an ostrich. If these banalities targeted only me, I could confront or cower or let things go. But when they target an innocent soul, playing an ostrich is a crime. I respond with a verbal slap like this post or a face-to-face scuffle, like what a person carrying an eventful upbringing occasionally resorts to.
Again, to the ladder of abstraction. Academics like me should be on the top of the ladder, more inclined to revel in great ideas like serving the nation, writing a treatise of lasting influence, making a world tour to educate reactionaries, and founding a cosmic religious philosophy that eradicates all sorts of ideological rifts. Being a professor, I am probably expected to remain engrossed in groundbreaking recommendations and make my graduate scholars contribute to their extensions. But folks like me who are trained to break the ground remain on the ground, harboring and mending the emotional peels caused by one against another. The bottom of the ladder is filled with god knows what. You can be engulfed there by canteen gossip featuring celebration and sarcasm about papers and metrics and talks and remunerations. You are a connoisseur of Chiya Bar that slanders the imagined or real Munas and Madans and Romeos and Juliets, Gabbar Singhs and Rate Kainlas. You are at the Monsoon Cafe venting and overhearing curses about being deprived of this position or that. Reaching the abstraction above the everyday trifles seems like a far cry, at least to date.
If speculations about irrelevant occurrences could be called the exercise of abstraction, we are already good at it. I sympathize with those souls who make speculations suitable to their pipedreams. I sympathize with them because pipedreams are very likely not to become realities, and they are very likely not to be happy.
If you are waiting for the fallouts of a contest you did not partake in, you are investing in a misplaced project. It is not in your capacity to win and bring the desired reward. Your faith surrenders to someone’s likelihood of losing, leading you to dejection and distrust of human potential at large. Or it could equally lend you disillusionment from your own ability to believe in and wait for a superhero who can satisfy your craving for the occult. If your desired reward is not based on your power to contest and conquer, just invest in doubt and fortify it with the preparedness to dump it as a bad gamble or a curse. That’s all.
The matrices of success and failure appear to me so designed that there is not a fixed timing for investment in and return from them. In institutional settings, some individuals enjoy the return long before they invest in the path. In this case, they may have to continue investing time, resources, and good faith before the natural time of getting the rewards of actual investment. Some individuals continue investing and exhaust themselves till they drain all the zeal of enjoying a delayed return. It is because both their initiatives and faith are overshadowed by the majority built by the former type. If you are the former and disregard the latter, you are likely to project yourself as a defaulter, a leg-puller, a rule-violator.
I ask the former to wait because you were rewarded long before you deserved the reward. You were mistakenly handed the harvest long before you landed on the farm. I ask the latter to recognize the shadows and outshine them through renewed zeal, upgrade, and communicative ardour. Being and remaining nice suffices in the status quo. Outsmarting the ‘gainers without investment’ requires becoming nicer beyond the status quo.
I have learned to outrun myself before envying my competitors’ paces. I have practiced running without trespassing their trails. This idea might as well help you. But I do not mean to invite you to imitate my maneuvers. I do not carry anything imitable. My trail remains invisible inside the mass of mundane entities. Just start correcting your strides and nourishing your enthusiasm to run faster and higher. Make your trails untraceable and maneuvers mundane in their own ways. You do not have to teach the world how you win or lose. They will invent their own tactics without you.