Skip to main content

My Romanticism

I’m quite convinced that I am a Romantic.  The last of the Romantic poets (William Wordsworth) died in 1850.  He was the first of them, in fact.  Yet I call him the last simply because he lived longer than the others.
Most of the Romantic poets died young.  P B Shelley lived 30 years.  John Keats died at the age of 26.  Byron managed to make it to 36. 
I often wondered why they died so young.  One of the books of Will Durant told me a few years ago that the Romantics died young because they dreamed too big. Durant was not a literary critic.  Literary critics are not supposed to look at the biographies of writers; they are only supposed to analyse the written discourses.  Durant was a philosopher and so he was free to look at the biography (just as he would have been free to look at anything else).  He thought that the Romantics died young because the world they dreamt of could never be materialised.
The Romantics tried to run away from the society, from the city, from science and technology, from reality itself.  They wished to withdraw to the shelter of the inner experience, of imagination, and of nature.  They kept fighting the reality to the desperation of death!
Given an option other than death, I too would opt for that sort of withdrawal.  I know it’s an escapist act.  What’s wrong in escaping hells, if you can? 
I escaped one such hell when I ran away from Shillong more than a decade ago.  I landed up in Delhi.  My Romanticism of Shelley’s kind (Shelley wrote the famous line: “Hell is a city much like London”) was already on the deathbed when I bid farewell to the (Romantic?) hill station of Shillong.   Shillong had become un-Romantic for me because any place will be un-Romantic for a Romantic in the end!  Romanticism is essentially escapist.  Wordsworth lived long because he understood the lethal nature of Romanticism and gave it up to some kind of acceptance of reality, albeit with scorn.  “I could have laughed myself to scorn...” he wrote [Resolution and Independence].
Scorn is a good tool for the Romantics.
Nature is a better tool if it is still available to them.
It is still available to me.
I went on a brief ride today to discover the Romantic side of Delhi, because the city was becoming a Shelleyean hell for me for some funny reasons.  When the reasons are funny, you can escape easily.  And you can live long if you learn to find it all silly.
Here are some photographs from the Romantic side of Delhi, from the place where I live.  The place is called Bhatti.  It’s on the outskirts of Delhi, bordering Haryana.  Just about 10 km from the Qutub Minar.





Comments

  1. Romanticism will prevail that is what I feel.Well written thoughts !!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Romanticism, strictly speaking, is an integral part of classicism, a part which dares to dream, to imagine beyond the limits... So it will prevail to some extent!

      Delete
  2. Sir, the reason why we don't find romantics today is probably because they dont have the luxury of Bhatti's pastures :D. I envy you(not implying that I'm a romantic wannabe).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sid, nobody becomes a Romantic by choice. As a priest once told me about Christian faith, it is granted by Grace :)

      Delete
  3. The almost featureless photograph casting the shadow of the powerline pole is the best of the lot.

    I just felt like grading them and I stopped after the first!

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Glad to know you liked the pics to some degree or the other. One thing I like very much about my workplace is the environment. I can say that it was the place that I fell in love with when I came here to take up the job.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Chitrakoot: Antithesis of Ayodhya

Illustration by MS Copilot Designer Chitrakoot is all that Ayodhya is not. It is the land of serenity and spiritual bliss. Here there is no hankering after luxury and worldly delights. Memory and desire don’t intertwine here producing sorrow after sorrow. Situated in a dense forest, Chitrakoot is an abode of simplicity and austerity. Ayodhya’s composite hungers have no place here. Let Ayodhya keep its opulence and splendour, its ambitions and dreams. And its sorrows as well. Chitrakoot is a place for saints like Atri and Anasuya. Atri is one of the Saptarishis and a Manasputra of Brahma. Brahma created the Saptarishis through his mind to help maintain cosmic order and spread wisdom. Anasuya is his wife, one of the most chaste and virtuous women in Hindu mythology. Her virtues were so powerful that she could transmute the great Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva into infants when they came to test her chastity. Chitrakoot is the place where asceticism towers above even divinit...