Skip to main content

From Camus's Absurdity to Zorba's Santuri


 Life is a mystery to be experienced, not a puzzle to be solved. However, experiences can be terrible and terrifying more often than not. Life is not a fair game. It's a rugby of bullies. It turns a deadly battleground occasionally. Nevertheless, it has its music, its moments of awe, its sweet orgasms. 

I'm participating in this year's A2Z Challenge thrown by Blogchatter just for the fun of writing something non-political and possibly more exciting if not inspiring than politics. Life is the theme. But life is too vast a topic for a blogger to handle. Life is an infinite and eternal ocean with relentless waves and winds, as well as corals and pearls. A blogger can at best look at a tiny fraction of that infinity, that eternity. And I'm gonna do just that. 

The series is tentatively titled From Camus's Absurdity to Zorba's Santuri. It is going to take a deep look (as deep as a blogger can go, of course) into life's ocean starting with its absurdities. We'll move through such phenomena as the bandwagon effect, fictional finalism, Kafka's prison, serendipity, utopian chimeras, to the secret of Zorba's happiness. 

I said it was going to be "non-political". Well, can you really discuss life without touching upon politics? Isn't politics an integral part of the game called life? Isn't it politics that makes life the misery that it often is? Isn't our entire history from the most ancient civilisations onward about our kings and their henchmen? Do the workers who actually built the monuments and mausoleums find a mention anywhere in your history books? 

April won't be political anyway - not too obviously, at least. I shall try my best to keep politics away with a barge pole. I hope April will engage you meaningfully here in this space and thanks to Blogchatter team for their support. 

PS. I participated in this programme last year too and the result is still available as a free e-book titled Great Books for Great Thoughts. 


Comments

  1. In politics, I feel that 'the more things change, the more they remain the same'. It does not work on rules, ethics or anything deeper, I suppose. Personally, I could not learn anything worthwhile from political discussion, in spite of being a native of the state (U.P.) where politics and political discussion is the primary occupation of nearly everyone.

    Nevertheless, I read your each and every composition, whether political or non-political. All your commentaries carry a fresh and new perspective to the concept. And personally I am an admirer of your non-political compositions -- there is so much to learn and discover there. They are my all time favourites.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm excited by this comment coming from an eminent scholar. Glad you expressed it so openly.

      I don't enjoy writing politics. I don't usually discuss it with people either. There's something detestable about it. Yet the way our country is turning citizens against one another, making one the enemy of one's neighbour in the name of religions and gods - this is extremely wicked in my opinion. Much worse than what the Congress or the British or the Mughals did.

      Delete
  2. Loved your theme on life. And as I recently learnt in a session with a writer, even a fictional setting is politics since it comes with a set of rules and baggage. Looking forward to your posts. All the best!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you.

      Can a writer actually do away with politics? You're so right: even fictional settings are political one way or another. I have to set my story somewhere, some time, and that place as well as time has its politics. How can any writer worth his salt escape that politics?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Country where humour died

Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X.  The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room . India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament. I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post . In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting.  The last day taught me some subhashit...

Lucifer and some reflections

Let me start with a disclaimer: this is not a review of the Malayalam movie, Lucifer . These are some thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the movie today. However, just to give an idea about the movie: it’s a good entertainer with an engaging plot, Bollywood style settings, superman type violence in which the hero decimates the villains with pomp and show, and a spicy dance that is neatly tucked into the terribly orgasmic climax of the plot. The theme is highly relevant and that is what engaged me more. The role of certain mafia gangs in political governance is a theme that deserves to be examined in a good movie. In the movie, the mafia-politician nexus is busted and, like in our great myths, virtue triumphs over vice. Such a triumph is an artistic requirement. Real life, however, follows the principle of entropy: chaos flourishes with vengeance. Lucifer is the real winner in real life. The title of the movie as well as a final dialogue from the eponymous hero sugg...

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared. Except O Abdulla. Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala , a fundamentalist organisation. ...

Violence and Leaders

The latest issue of India Today magazine studies what it calls India’s Gross Domestic Behaviour (GDB). India is all poised to be an economic superpower. But what about its civic sense? Very poor, that’s what the study has found. Can GDP numbers and infrastructure projects alone determine a country’s development? Obviously, no. Will India be a really ‘developed’ country by 2030 although it may be $7-trillion economy by then? Again, no is the answer. India’s civic behaviour leaves a lot, lot to be desired. Ironically, the brand ambassador state of the country, Uttar Pradesh, is the worst on most parameters: civic behaviour, public safety, gender attitudes, and discrimination of various types. And UP is governed by a monk!  India Today Is there any correlation between the behaviour of a people and the values and principles displayed by their leaders? This is the question that arose in my mind as I read the India Today story. I put the question to ChatGPT. “Yes,” pat came the ...

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...