LETTERS TO MY DAUGHTER : Discovering Art

---- "You might ask me what ART is."

She tiptoed for sometime, then found out that it's a better option to let each of her entire foot carry her weight way. That way she found it easier to sway and twirl in rhythm to the beats she seemed to be listening to keenly. She was completely oblivious of what lay outside the little bridge where her feet follow in rhythm, to beats coming out of nowhere.

Today as she turned 2 years 6 months 10 days, did she try to dance? I don't know.

As I watched my daughter finding rhythm even in a blast of beats, I remembered that just the other day I'd found her discovering melody in a barrage of noisy notes that blasted out from those ever-enthusiastic amplifiers, ready to jump the gun on any festive day.

-----"Now that you read these words, I ask you : Do you love to dance? Do you feel the Freedom in Dance? Do you hum tunes still? You used to, you know..You were discovering the Feeling when Art reaches out to touch.
You might ask me what ART is. I am not an Artist, neither have I studied Arts!"

Though Formal Art is not my cup of cold coffee -- I haven't pursued Art as a subject of vocation -- I am fond of Art just like any other person, I love to savour Art in certain specific forms out the infinite forms Art manifests itself (graciously saving a few finite forms for human senses).

Incidentally the art-forms manifested, that captured my heart to rule my senses when I was a child, old enough to 'Feel Gratified' are the ones that still pamper me with the most and the best and the deepest of pleasures.

Gratification led to Greed. And Greed led to want of Time.
The Want that would leave me pining for the moment, for "the next". I simply waited greedily wanting Time to pass by quicker. Yet it was Time that I realized the Infinity of Art... well, it was rather a juvenile concept that made me believe, than "realization".
Time led to Realization.

I am still on my way, edged on by Realization
(Surprisingly Knowledge turned out to be the worst guide. At times it needed guidance, and Realization provided that )
I know that Realization would be there forever, just like Art manifest for a 3 year old me pleases me still.
Realization would lead to Grace. Finally.

I guess it is the quality of the interface, where Art and its Lover meet to give and take, that matters, and makes up the most of the reason why the forms of Art that a child is exposed to, remain (or should remain if allowed to thrive in natural ways) remain as pleasant to the senses as ever.

The most effective interface is the child's Mind -- kept un-corrupted, unblemished from the dirt and stain of the adult world ; a heart that knows no tricks, no hidden corners, no dark depths. Art gives its Heart. The child promises Truth.

Gifts, generously given and promised to be sheltered under Truth, never withers away, as Nature Creates on, The Artist behind all things beautiful and timeless.

Gratification led to Greed.

Greed led to want of Time.

Time led to Realization.

Realization would lead to Grace. Some day.

Grace would make me believe.

I don't know what Art is. But I do believe this
: Art is Truth manifested and Time immortalized.
Go out and find your Belief. I might not there, but these words will be there with you forever.
Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone ------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, MBBS
Consultant Physician,
Mumbai, India. ------------------------------------------------------
"It is important to just listen for a while instead of speaking." -- My teacher ------------------------------------------------------

PATIENTLY PLAYING CRICKET

17/10/2011 : 11:40 pm

* "Much ado about" : THE Ongoing One-Day international cricket match series in India, between England & India.
* Series status : India 2 : England 0
• 1st ODI : Margin of defeat > 100+ runs
• 2nd.ODI : Margin of defeat > 8 wickets

* Personal Commentary :

"Now, whatever happened to the Brits? Where are the champion warriors that mauled an exhausted, injured, depleted to effectively an India - B side to a 4-0 white-washed subjugation in Hyde Park?"

A starting sentence like this aimed at the English side or rather the cricket they play on field, (which is actually a rub-it-in query, soaked in sarcasm, dripping wet in caustic vengeance), should demote me from a cricket-lover to a blind, loud, aggressive, illogical fanatic. Fanatics hardly bother about promotions & demotions of their support-profile status. And history does give me a fair right to do so if I remember what was being written in the sports pages of Indian newspapers and British tabloids when the 4-0 mauling was being white-washed.

As an Indian cricket - lover who supports his national team, I'm here for some boisterous celebration of India's victories and not to sledge England on every defeat. I acknowledge their goods and appreciating their cricket with due respect.

But I should gun for the 'Connoisseur Coterie' -- the cynics who wrote off the world champions as an overhyped, spoilt, unprofessional, cash-hungry, over-paid bunch of players who needed a good spanking, particularly writing off "Brand Dhoni" to an eternal exile in oblivion? This bunch of cricket appreciative analysts should be spanked and debarred from public expression. Perhaps cash payments for appearing in the A-V media should be stopped.

Denouncing T-20 cricket as the guide to Armageddon of Indian Cricket at the drop of a hat or a poor performance of a player is their forte. Going for the throats of national players who play in IPL is their philosophy. They are ever-ready to demean lavishly every act of glory Team India has performed. They see cheating and swept-under-the-carpet conspiracies everywhere which supposedly provide millions of ill-gotten cash to defaulted cricketers. They readily diagnose out-of-form cricketers as money making betrayers, villains who are here to get rich and not to play for the country.

It seems these pathetic paranoids have surrendered a Virtue to a lust for instant gratification, of the T-20 kind. The Virtue of Patience, an integral part of the king of games, or the game of kings. They want Persistent Instant Success. It stinks of a 'colonised Indian mentality'
which should have been extinct by now.

A note of advice for these Pundits with an eternal frown : Cricket is not baseball or American football. While I empathise with modern jet-speedos trying to catch up with the rushing hours of a day where Speed is the mantra, you should first learn about a word called RESPECT before proceeding to comment on 3rd millenium cricket & cricketers.
Precisely speaking, : SHUT UP. FOR GOOD.

Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone ------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, MBBS
Consultant Physician,
Mumbai, India. ------------------------------------------------------
"It is important to just listen for a while instead of speaking." -- My teacher ------------------------------------------------------

ME, SHE, AND MY FRIEND

This year in the midst of all the pre , intra and post - Puja , greetings, pleasantries, I reconnected hiatus of 10 years, with a friend - a medico who was my colleague when I was working - my first "job in the private sector" (1994 : Kothari Medical Centre, Alipore, Kolkata). I was especially pleased to see that the son of a gun had posted all the way up from Queensland.

He was one of the most vicious animate objects to engage in any conversation with. An inborn armoury of the blackest humour that supplemented a tongue that turned increasingly caustic over the years, built for me, a repertoire of sharp one-liners, each new and fresh, that could jab and stun, more than an Ali or a Tyson.

Anyway ...

He had written in our regional language, in his own inimitable way. The First sentence was not a statement. It was a Question. It, if translated in the Queen's Language, crystallizes to : " ANI, HOW'S SHE?" (the rest of the words, mere reinforcements to the query don't need translation. And shouldn't, too. Ethics.
The first question is this! Yet I wasn't surprised or shocked at all.

There was a time when She was in both of our lives, simultaneously.. She, at that age, had captured a fancy for both of us. And Boy! Did she seduce us! She played second fiddle at times, and dominated at times. We just gave in to HER. Soon She 'Had' us.
She bedded us both, giving us our First 'Taste'.
She did it endlessly, almost like a Maniac, like a 'she-dog', with an Obsessive Passion -- which neither I nor my friend could override even once.

Both of us were frank about our privacy, talking about HER Promiscuity, and Jealousy or Masculine pride never intervened. In fact, we did empathise handsomely, while sharing our Amorous episodes. How She would get us 'Up and High' like never before, only to get us slumping and dropping dead, exhausted completely.
Her Passion simply overpowered us, and none of us had the masculinity to 'subjugate' her, to a slave, whom we would have in our way, the way the Primordial Primal Primates -- our forefathers --- would have done eons back.
So after all these years, as my old friend asked 'how is SHE', I smiled wryly. I wondered how passionately deep she'd controlled us that he remembered her so as to ask about Her, ahead of all other questions which we both wanted to know, about how things have been since.

I remember a casino waiter asking : "Shaken or Stirred?" to which Daniel Craig muttered coldly,
"Do I look like I care a damn?"

No wonder.

I wrote back, " LIFE IS STILL A BITCH..."

** Note: the title of this note is the English translation of a Bengali movie. I did it myself, and have not checked about 'Copyright Issues'.
The fertility of my brain (a paradoxical self-contradicting pseudo-reality) told me that it fits. Anyway I never put a befitting trust on it.. (I never trusted the oft-loathed jelloid!)

Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone ------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, MBBS
Consultant Physician,
Mumbai, India. ------------------------------------------------------
"It is important to just listen for a while instead of speaking." -- My teacher ------------------------------------------------------

BOTANY 2.0 3/25

A few days back here in Facebook, one of those brick-head conversation was on .. One of those typical out-of-the-blue irrelevant ones that I start off here, compelling my indulgent friends to add comments however bizarre the topic and my starting observations might be.

Anyway, in some convoluted way, at one stage I revealed this statement about none too glorious episodes when I was in school in the 11th. Standard : "In one of the class tests in class 11, I had got 3 (THREE) out of 25 [ 3/25 ] in Botany." Seriously! I did get 3 out of 25..

I'd been thinking about 'Botany' since then, someting like Botany 2.0 . And I came to this conclusion :
I think my Maternal Grandmother, my beloved cute DIDA, was a good 'botanist' of her times... The seeming eccentricity in the statement (as always, nothing new huh!) requires a bit of "detailing" (even by my standards.. Ahem..).

In the early and mid 70s, middle-class life in f Calcutta were in an oscillating mode : Most of the times dull, insensitive and Unfair. And at times, brightly understanding, benevolent and Giving with a Big Heart.

Whenever it oscillated across two smiling points, tender and favourable, Life would gift to me Prized Occasions, weekend nights that would ensure that I would sleep at night beside her. The location would remain the same -- It was a dreamy, beautiful, awfully constructed 2-storey eye-sore of a dwelling, my Palace of Wonders.

It had moist, algae infested walls with a nauseating dampness, the smell of which still remains the most common theme of my aromatic deja vus.

The steps were painfully high for me which I climbed one step at a time. Every step exhibited, with a bit of Adult Stocism, nasty cracks (which told the adults : Time's up). It was an excited spirit of adventure that added to my royal self-pride every time I climbed them with its nasty cracks -- the beautiful rocky heights capped by a Gothic tower where a princess slept....I called it MAMABARI.
I still do.

Sleeping the nights there with DIDA meant, for me, that I could repeatedly press her, without adult interference (that seemed obsessed with Discipline) for her detailed personalised narration of ghost stories of rural Bengal. She would continue to narrate with that beautiful, quivering pitch of hers till she saw me off as I would board my (MY) Dreamland Express, which stopped at Station Dawn.

All her accounts included Trees. And She knew Special Trees like the back of her hands (which, by the way, belonged to a Culinary Genius). Special Trees hosted unpleasantly Special guests. Ghosts.
She knew exactly which tree hosted which 'ghost'. And there was a time when I had a rather formidable knowledge of some deep enlightened truth of Botany.

So no wonder Botany 2. 3/25 reflects my pristine innocence, not any ignorance. I am not ignorant. I can't help if my 'Brain' ignores me persistently..(And no! I'm not going to take any "First Steps" to warm up to that narcissistic self-obsessed jelloid.) Reminds me of a chair umpire -- At the beginning of war, he sits up there and declares just once : "LOVE ALL". Later, throughout the war when points, games and sets are conquered, quipping in with "Quiet please", nodding to "Fault"s and inferring : "DEUCE" between unequal warriors...

During that test, I explored an eight year old half-grown brain, trapped inside a botanically challenged 16 year old budding man, who, by the way, was taking extreme care that the answer sheet retained its pristine white (oh c'on you paranoid comedians! I did respect Botany!)

Botany, thus for me, means the knowledge of an uncorroborated fact that Special Trees hosts Ghosts.

प
Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone ------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, MBBS
Consultant Physician,
Mumbai, India. ------------------------------------------------------
"It is important to just listen for a while instead of speaking." -- My teacher ------------------------------------------------------

Macabre

Each of us naked and bare inside,
Vile an animal ready to kill,
Each of us rendered merciless,
Brains on leash by the reptilian complex
That hides behind Neo-cortical camouflage.

I breathe Pure, thrive yet conspire
To kill each day, the Mother's Hapless Child
That comes from the same womb as I,

One day shall see no green, no thing left,
but me in the arena to massacre,
The Mother shall witness Macabre Fratricide,
As I shall kill without Mercy the heartless,
With them Rose Hearts that loved once too.
Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone ------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, MBBS
Consultant Physician,
Mumbai, India. ------------------------------------------------------
"It is important to just listen for a while instead of speaking." -- My teacher ------------------------------------------------------

GRASS BLADES I TRANSPORT

Each of us naked and bare inside,
Vile an animal ready to kill,
Each of us rendered merciless,
Brains on leash by the reptilian complex
That hides behind Neo-cortical camouflage.

I breathe Pure, thrive yet conspire
To kill each day, the Mother's Hapless Child
That comes from the same womb as I,

One day shall see no green, no thing left,
but me in the arena to massacre,
The Mother shall witness Macabre Fratricide,
As I shall kill without Mercy the heartless,
With them Rose Hearts that loved once too.
Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone ------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, MBBS
Consultant Physician,
Mumbai, India. ------------------------------------------------------
"It is important to just listen for a while instead of speaking." -- My teacher ------------------------------------------------------

URBANE CHAT

The other day a good friend of mine was discussing virtues and vices of man in contemporary times, a discussion loosely philosophical by urban standards. Nothing serious at all if one doesn't put philosophy and seriousness in the same bracket. In fact I would be repelled by the type which doesn't exactly need the stoicism with which luminous intellectuals offer viewpoints, with self-contradictions so polarised that the average brain gets shocked to silence.. And the seriousness persists...

Unfortunately a friend of my friend appeared from nowhere. Actual it was mere coincidence (that which happens coincidentally), but this frail figure, luminous definitely as I could see a faint halo behind his head in the roadside-discourse that followed. Hearing the word "Virtuosity" (I don't remember which one of us uttered the word), but he started on a monologue :

"The stage of evolution that human consciousness has reached with a lot of philosophical fanfare, has witnessed, in the last 97 years, two well-planned, well-conspired, well-cheered episodes of the most cruelly nauseating mass genocide our lot has ever concocted. Each of them have been 4-5 years long , each of them having been injected with a lot of patriotic fervour by cheerleading women, the elderly and children (no matter how much they might have been influenced by subconscious acts of transglobal "mass suggestion") to serve "political purposes"..

At this point I had the urge to cut him through, but the suspectedly seeming veteran of many a dialogue was too quick for me, and continued :

"On that note, As I curse to myself often, "warring means to serve politicking ends" by an animal species capable of performing the most dangerous act of predation driven by physiological reflexes other than hunger and preservation of species& self-sustainence, in battle-fields or private bedrooms... We have long abandoned Virtuosity in our journey forward...."

I dropped dead..
Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone ------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, MBBS
Consultant Physician,
Mumbai, India. ------------------------------------------------------
"It is important to just listen for a while instead of speaking." -- My teacher ------------------------------------------------------

THE BLADE OF GRASS I TRAMPLED

Each of us naked and bare inside,
Vile an animal ready to kill,
Each of us rendered merciless,
Brains on leash by the reptilian complex
That hides behind Neo-cortical camouflage.

I breathe Pure, thrive yet conspire
To kill each day, the Mother's Hapless Child
That comes from the same womb as I,

One day shall see no green, no thing left,
but me in the arena to massacre,
The Mother shall witness Macabre Fratricide,
As I shall kill without Mercy the heartless,
With them Rose Hearts that loved once too..
Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone ------------------------------------------------------
Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri, MBBS
Consultant Physician,
Mumbai, India. ------------------------------------------------------
"It is important to just listen for a while instead of speaking." -- My teacher ------------------------------------------------------

PURSUING TAGORE

"I've been passing my time,
Every hour of it since Dawn,
I've Yearned to hear the notes Of Thy Melody
That Thou Created At the beginning of Time,

It is Dusk now;
And I still find myself in complete awe,
My mortal soul trying to harmonise
With the Celestial Notes of Thy Primordial Music
that resonate In all things Divine by Thy Creation...."

--
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