My life as a Curious Autodidact

Stories, stories everywhere. From cradle to grave we tell stories with hardly a pause from work, play, and sleep. We read bedtime stories to children, concoct stories about our fishing exploits, and confide “you’ll never believe this” stories to friends, and hairdressers. We shed tears over Love Story, titillate with the Story of O., devour inside stories, and flock to see the sequels to The Neverending Story. We rehash triumphs at work as quest sagas, failures in romance as Aeschylean tragedies, and holiday hunts for that no-frills Athens hotel near Omonia Square as mini-odysseys. Late for work, we feed stories to the boss from the hallowed repertoire of traffic snarls, ailing relatives, and automobile malfunctions. Late at night we even dream stories, sometimes in beta-wave equivalent of Panasonic and Technicolor.

Beside ubiquity, our propensity for storytelling has other characteristics. First of all, it is universal. Every culture we know has developed its preferred range and type of stories. Matter of fact, oftentimes we learn much of these chronologically or geographically distant societies through the stories they preserved in their versions of Thousand and One Nights or the Eddas. Second, the impulse to tell, invent, make up, construct, create, write, recite – in short, narrate – stories is inseparable from being Homo sapiens. We string words into sentences, sentences into plots, and from then we’re off on life’s journey to add our own stories to the stock of those that came before.

—Of Literature and Knowledge, Peter Swirski (pg. 1)

I think pens are great things. You see I’ve always liked them. There is something about holding one and moving it as you form the words, the intimacies of your grip on it, its weight on your fingers, the sway of its long body, the sinuous cursive it helps you craft. All this adds to my love for them. To be able to form letters from just a tip dipped in ink, power emanating from the nib – I wonder if there ever was anything more wonderful. An extension of the human intellect in the palm of your hand, a magic wand that weaves with words stories and poetry – spells that can be cast across centuries. I think I will buy another one today.

— Ikram [A bit of freewriting I did during ToV training.]

जिनके आँगन में अमीरी का शजर लगता है
उनका हर ऐब ज़माने को हुनर लगता है

Jinke aangan mein amiri ka shajar lagta hai,
Unka har aib zamaane ko hunar lagta hai

—Anjum Rehbar

Behti hawa sa tha woh
Udti patang sa tha woh
Kahan gaya usse dhoondo

Behti hawa sa tha woh
Udti patang sa tha woh
Kahan gaya usse dhoondo
Hum ko to raahein thi chalati
Woh khud apni raah banata
Girta sambhalta masti mein chalta tha woh
Hum ko kal ki fikar sataati
Woh bus aaj ka jashn manata
Har lamhe ko khul ke jeeta tha woh
Kahan se aaya tha woh
Choo ke humare dil ko
Kahan gaya usse dhoondo

Sulagti dhoop mein chaaon ke jaisa
Raigistaan mein gaaon ke jaisa
Mann ke ghav pe marham jaisa tha woh
Hum sehme se rehte kooein mein
Woh nadiya mein gotey lagata
Ulti dhara cheer ke tairta tha woh
Baadal awara tha woh
Yaar humara tha woh
Kahan gaya usse dhoondo
Hum ko to raahein thi chalati
Woh khud apni raah banata
Girta sambhalta masti mein chalta tha woh
Hum ko kal ki fikar sataati
Woh bus aaj ka jashn manaata
Har lamhe ko khul ke jeeta tha woh
Kahan se aaya tha woh
Choo ke humare dil ko
Kahan gaya usse dhoondo

—Three Idiots,  Behti hawa sa tha woh (Lyrics), Swanand Kirkire

We need to be alert to the thin line between being a bit of fun, light, quirky, provocative, mildly irreverent, and being silly, a waste of time, self indulgent.

—Cassius Fernandez

“The birthday of my life 
Is come, my love is come to me.”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti, A Birthday (1894)

Note: Nonsense, I hope this was true. Sigh!

The idea of “identity” was born out of the crisis of belonging and out of the effort it triggered to bridge the gap between the “ought” and the “is” and to lift reality to the standards set by the idea—to remake the reality in the likeness of the idea.

—Zygmunt Bauman, Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi

…individuality is an illusion wrought by the Western emphasis on objectivity and rationalism. Western understanding requires that things be analyzed, dissolved into parts, distilled into fundamental units, and, finally, isolated from the larger ecology that sustains and nurtures them and may even provide their reason for being. The Western ego ideal is strength, independence, and self-sufficiency. Although we certainly have relationships, we do not require them, for relatedness entails dependency, and dependency entails weakness. Our scientific theories have inherited this bias. Even a notion that many psychologists would take for granted—that personality is composed of smaller units, or traits—can be viewed as a cultural distortion.

—Personality disorders in modern life By Theodore Millon, Carrie M. Millon, Seth Grossman, Sarah Meagher, Rowena Ramnath

I do my thing and you do yours. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, then it is beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.

—Frederick Perls

Intelligence maybe attributed to those who have a great memory and the ability to calculate. Knowing the difference between a fluke, a guess and an estimate, that is wisdom.

-Me