From the diary of a blunderer

 

If you have an option to tell something to your younger writing self, what would you tell? Writer Damyanti Biswas raised this question recently. I was fascinated by the question if only because I would have liked to be an entirely different person in my youth (or at any phase, in fact). I have often described my life as a series of blunders. I am not much wiser today either though a lot of summers came and went with many sparrows chirruping various melodies. If only we could start all over again to begin with whatever semblance of wisdom we have acquired so far.

I think it was a sheer coincidence that Damyanti’s question came just as I put down the book I was reading, Reality is not what it seems by Carlo Rovelli. This book is about the uncertainty of reality from the point of view of quantum physics. Rovelli is a physicist. It is a serious book, very serious, but a particular page of it made me laugh out uncontrollably so much so Maggie began to wonder whether I had gone crankier than usual. I closed the book and continued to laugh because I couldn’t do anything else until Maggie insisted on my telling her what was so funny about quantum physics.

 Rovelli says that Paul Dirac was the greatest physicist of the 20^th century after Einstein. But he is not well-known enough. “This is due, in part, to the rarefied abstraction of his science,” says Rovelli, “and partly due to his disconcerting character.” Dirac was an acute introvert who remained utterly silent in company. He was incapable of expressing emotions. He couldn’t even recognise acquaintances. Ordinary conversations made no sense to his mind that moved with electrons and fermions.

Rovelli went on to mention an anecdote. During one of his lectures, a colleague said to Dirac, “I don’t understand that formula.” Dirac paused, remained silent for a moment, and then continued as if nothing had happened. The moderator interrupted to suggest that Dirac should answer the question that was raised. Dirac was sincerely astonished. He said, “Question? What question? My colleague has made an assertion.”

I stopped reading then and there, mid-paragraph, unable to control my laughter. I narrated the anecdote to Maggie and said, “Genius is more absurd than the mediocre.”

I needed a break from reading and picked up my mobile phone. It was then Damyanti’s question flashed on the screen. This is the coincidence I mentioned earlier. Perhaps, without the bafflement of Paul Dirac, Damyanti’s question would not have bothered me much. I couldn’t have been any wiser as a young man than Paul Dirac could have been less genius in that episode.

Paul Dirac, you, and I, we all have our personalities forged partly by our genes and partly by the environment in which we had the (mis)fortune to be brought up. Dirac’s mind was far from normal. He was virtually autistic and palpably abnormal. Albert Einstein was provoked to suggest that Dirac’s mind traversed a “vertiginous course between genius and madness”. My youthful roguishness was as natural to me as the ‘vertigo’ was to Dirac.

Looking back I know how inane, absurd and futile the whole enterprise was: my writing and most of the other things I did as a young man. Life teaches harsh lessons to such people. Life doesn’t tolerate rogues as much as it does fools. Dear Damyanti, life taught me a lot, a lot more than you would imagine. If I were to tell something to that silly young writer that I was, it would be a few volumes.

This doesn’t mean I regret all that I was. No, not at all. This just means how helpless I was: I had no choice about my genes, my society, my religion and its pathetic god, all of those things that chiselled through my being relentlessly. It happens to everyone, of course. The only difference is that I was not even clever enough to dodge undesirable chisels. Can cleverness be taught? If yes, I would tell that young writer-self of mine to learn some cleverness. That would be the briefest lesson I could give him. The volumes could wait.

But it doesn’t work that way, Damyanti. A friend of mine (a rare species) told me the other day with the candidness that only a drink could have provoked: “You’re so naïve that you wouldn’t have survived so long hadn’t you cocooned yourself in your own carapace.” In other words, even life has failed to teach me some of the most essential lessons. What will I teach my younger self?