Long Jottings

Having the blog dead for a long time, I thought of thinking not too much and writing the largely un-happening things in short paragraphs.

We went to the Fourth of July celebrations. Families, Music and Fireworks. Heard and actually made sense of the music of the band there – thanks to a former university music student amongst us. She told us that both she and her husband now teach at an international school in Mussoorie. With Susa’s composition playing in the background, all of us ended up talking about the inevitable mixed feelings of loving and hating certain things as one lived in another world after having lived for so long in one. And some of those likes and dislikes just stick to you. Glued memories make dreamy eyes and fascinating conversation. Pointing to the instruments played around by the band, she explained to us - the newly arrived Indian folks, with awesome patience the difference between a bassoon and trombone.

The weather in Mid West (in end-summer now I guess) is just about perfect. One could sometimes do with a little more of the breeze perhaps. Thursday night movies at the mall and the walk back home are pleasant. Thursday nights are the party nights.

I recently read a colleague’s auto-ethnography. The story there went like two South-Asian straight men apparently when they were returning from the mall walking; a couple of drunken college kids yelled at them as being “Fags”. When they later went to a restaurant that same night, and were waiting in line to order food, another incident occurred which made the incident a story for reflection, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. A boy and a girl couple came and were looking at another boy-boy pair there with a kind of look in their eyes. The boy-boy pair just reacted, “We are not gays.” The whole Heteronormativity thing plays out in interesting ways – eyes tell tales too. One of the South-Asian boys who witnessed it and then wrote the auto-ethnography also mentioned, “We could not afford a car and were labeled. The incident, which followed later made us think we could not blame it completely on postcolonial and race etc stereotypes. Cultural codes take a different turn and remain ambivalent too.”

A resilient fetish of the society with the “norm”. Auto-ethnography continues to be regarded by some as navel-gazing, similar to blogs. Coming to think of what stopped me from blogging for such a long time, a couple of thoughts had perhaps contributed to the hesitancy – some views that blogging is just navel-gazing, selfish self-sensitivity.

Some other quite striking incidents related to me by my friends could also have played the role.

A would be father-in-law dismissed his would be son-in-law – a guy his daughter loved, on the grounds that because he blogged, he was selfish and would be preoccupied with himself to take care of his daughter.

My writer friend told me that she quit blogging because she was unable to write any good five pages of a fictional story while she was writing blogs. She introduced me to blogging when apparently she enjoyed it and now she has not only stopped blogging but finished a novel as well. I can’t blog much anymore and instead of writing fiction, I am still investigating the tragic loss of my novel of my pre-blogging days. Obviously these are stray incidents and one could argue against the presumed interpretations drawn from these perhaps more idiosyncratic mentioned cases.

To end these jottings, I recently watched some fantastic films belonging to what could perhaps be called post-Third-World Cinema (I hope I did not use an extra hyphen). Relatively contemporary ones included Sissako’s “Bamako”, which made me remember Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Even if they speak, are they heard? Can their statements/expressions be comprehended? From the position of the subaltern, the incomprehension in the face of people who are even willing to listen to them, perhaps makes even wanting to express difficult. Suicides are expressions too.