Atticus - III

The words, the sentiments, the emotions were always there, somewhere lurking at the back of the mind. But, in today's distracting world, it is difficult to reach out to things you love the most - words, feelings, memories, life in having the sense of 'being'. I was caught on in a bit of the cricket World Cup, especially among two of my favourite cricket teams - England and Ireland. My predictions coming right in World Cups continues - Ireland does indeed beat Pakistan, for almost all people a bolt from the blue, not for me.

There's not a greater pleasure in this life, when you pick up a book and you get a solid hunch that this is going to be a great book. And most of the great books have it, just as most of the great films have that in their teasers and trailers. But, the hunch of a book goes subtler, and often I am at great pains to discover the connection. Sometimes, the binding, the paper used in the book, the font style and size, the margins and indentations, everything so much jells in with the book itself - and then you not only love a book, but you love the book itself. You cannot read that same novel or story now in any other version - that book has become a part of the atmosphere of the story in that book. Everything! Right from the author's foreword to the critics' comments to the notes at the end of the book - everything only serves to make a perfect whole, to attain the apex.

Though I have had never a wrong hunch, I have had no positive hunches sometimes. A case in point - To Kill A Mockingbird. I still remember buying it from a small bookshop that I sometimes used to go to in Vashi (Navi Mumbai). I have spent most of my life honing myself on the classics - it was time to get out in the open, and have a worldview, to experiment, to rebel. The twentieth century's Mockingbird was a beginning. I only started with it because I had seen the trailer of the film based on it - and it looked very, very interesting. More than the Atticus himself, who of course interested me a great deal and is of course one of the real heroes for me, it interested me to get at how Lee did succeed in bringing a character such as Atticus out. It's so difficult!

The man does not have a tragic backdrop to his life! He's a man who has left off guns, without any style, cannot play football, is a regular office-goer kinda fellow, and he just sticks to his guns, and that's in fact all the story in the book. How does a man keep on sticking to his guns, holding his head high or low with shame - depending on what era's reader you are (for, in today's politically correct world, most readers would root for the former, but it would have been a much changed scenario a hundred years back). And yet, in some way, the story turns magical.

I attribute it to the children, especially Scout. Atticus himself is strongly brought about, whenever so, only through his interactions with the children. Since Atticus is not at all the type of a man who would say much for himself, it is only through what he advises or admonishes Scout and Jem time to time, the distant hints given to his character whenever he talks to Miss Maudy or Calpurnia, or episodes like the mad dog or Miss Dubose one, where the children, and the readers, have a sudden spurt of information about Atticus through others (Heck Tate, Maudy, Cal) or through the sentiments that they feel their father is generating through his actions all throughout. Scout still does not understand why Mr. Cunningham backed out with the mob when she recognised him, but she will in future, and Jem half does now only. For Dill, it's just witness to a hallowed scene and company! Although it's Cal who admonishes Scout to let the boy eat even the tablecloth if he wants to since he's the guest, it feels that it's Atticus - you have his way of living right there, in front of you. It brings about his focus on his tolerance, very sharply. The man would not hurt anyone deliberately, but he won't let anyone be at the same time, when it comes under his purview - he persistently defends Tim Robinson. And the point is that he himself is under no illusions of winning the specific case - but he knows that fighting the case in itself is a building a case for the future Robinsons, for a world where strange things like a man's way of living or his color of living do not form the criteria, for an Arthur Radley to live as he wants to, for a world of respect to each other, and to oneself. You can't fight the teacher and the new order of things - it's not worth it - but you can secretly contravene the system; Scout can keep on reading 'the wrong way'. You don't care if the whole of the world thinks you as wrong, but when to hold up your head it's important to do something, you have got to do it. A life led one's own way is any day better than a living death.

I will not contine now with Atticus in the near future here. I said, I will talk about the film as well, but something says me to stop for a while, and better think about him more. But, otherwise, my diligence with blogging this month will continue.

Atticus - II

Spoken word, written word - why is it so powerful? The visual word - have the moviemakers not come yet, or is it that the shape becomes more definite, the playground of imagination becomes bounded, and instead of the simple story told beautifully, it becomes a story of cutting, layering, framing, pre- and post-production, the sound, the make-up, the tricks and the cheats, a science in short instead of a story. I still remember Johnny Belinda, as if I have seen it yesterday - and it's many years. A simple story, beautifully told, simply told - not much wit, not much action, just the silent sighing of the trees and vast American expanses.
But in the written/spoken word, does the honest effort always work, if it is not garnished anywhere? Judging from the success of Robinson Crusoe and Scarlet Letter, maybe yes. But, then, Monte Cristo, Les Miserables, The Brothers Karamazov, or Great Expectations are not less powerful for their rich tapestries - they bring different flavours, they have varied my day, my life, my afternoons.
From that hot, sultry afternoon when Dantes incites Caderousse's greed with the diamond, to the golden, soft one when Hans and Gretel are skating, to the ones when so many of Dickens' boys are trudging to London, all grimy, weary, innocent, and ready to be influenced. The afternoon, a bit cold in the cell, in the monastery, and yet warm with the tension simmering all underneath, when Zosima touches Mitya's feet, to the one where white men are scouring the countryside for a black man whom they can impose their collective guilt upon. And the afternoons become magical. In school, it used to be the kites flying outside, with their shrill cries, looking for peace. The rustling of trees outside in the strong air. The sense of leisure and power, magically combined, that I feel, and yet an energy to do anything in this world. The bonds, that we benchmates, share as children, as the ones who trust implicitly, who revel in things unheard of by those who became old all too soon, who dread the math tables and love a good story. In college, it was the sense of harnessing all that invisible power - magnetic flux lines making work something, all the things? Who would have thought of that you simply have to cut the flux lines, and viola! The vast labs, and high ceilings, suddenly from the outside heat to the dry coldness inside which only a well-ventilated, well-sunlighted, high-ceilinged vast hall can have; the joy of starting up the motors by the three-point starter and the bonding of working in a team - and a team for what? One for just holding up the tachometer to the motor, the other feeling the king with the stopwatch in his hand, the couple of girls getting all high and mighty and thinking they are getting the cream of the job by noting the ammeter and voltmeter readings, and some fringe player, roped in for biting off the insulation with his teeth, making sure of all the loose connections, and still getting the worst of teacher's attention even after such thankless jobs. By the way, I used to love sliding the rheostats, especially the four-barrelled ones, and also adjusting the variable load resistor, or the VLR. And then, the travels. The red soil and the palms shaming even the sunset sky on a very narrow shortcut from Tiruchendur to Kanyakumari (which most people don't know of), to the bleachingly hot afternoons at the Crocodile Bank near Chennai. The afternoons, which never looked so, and by the time they did, the sun had set behind the trees, and a couple of idli hawkers would have set up their fledgling business, with a red tomato chutney, in the center of the small market square of, yes you guessed it right, Munnar. The afternoons which somehow make the Ganga look more sublime at Haridwar - it somehow becomes a pedestal for the pacy, vast river, and even the floating oil lamps in leaves and flowers all over the Ganga at night are nothing against that quiet, breezy, serene, and ingraspable afternoon.
Will continue.

Atticus - I

Writing, blogging diligently - now diligence is something that I've found the most hard to practise in this life. An esteemed friend is going to do precisely this this month - and I still remember her advice to me, as an aspiring and struggling writer, to write everyday, no matter there is 'something' or not, no matter you write good or bad on a day.
I have still not been able to gauge the soundness of the advice, as applied to me, for I have a mercurial nature (of course, most people knowing me would be surprised on hearing this, and would most probably attribute this only to part self-conceit, part ill notions, and remaining a lack of worldly judgement). Anyway, I rarely discuss myself - so what do I write about then?
Clint Eastwood's westerns? Some of the best Indian ads (and they are, oh, so numerous, and so good)? The air, the ennui, the meter of the people in some of the Indian places and regions, diverse fantastically? No, rather not. They can wait. Let me talk about Atticus - how Lee has brought out him, how Peck has acted out him, and what does Atticus mean in real life, in the present world? Is he relevant still? Or is the relevance immortal?

In my childhood, if my school notebook seemed to get lost and I was in real danger of being rebuked by the teacher, I used to remember Abbe Faria or Edmond Dantes - I used to think, with all said and done, I will still be better off than them, and what a relief it always was! Then came the contrasting characters of Caroline and Shirley, both of with whom I was in love with terribly mad, and one day I used to brag that oh, you know what, I like girls of the Shirley type, and the other day I was back supporting Caroline. Even today, the dilemma between Shirley and Caroline continues. And then, the white whale! Sea had fascinated me early enough through Alan Breck Stewart and Xury, but the whole science of whaling, the hidden and yet overt fight of retribution versus guilt, of white that is blightingly, glaringly, white, the one that makes you blink with fear and disbelief, versus the white that goes by the name of white, that is painted on the walls, that becomes the bow-tie of a spotless man, a white man, the white that everyone keeps as an ideal, for it will be easy to sully it, or to make it look so. I was torn apart; why Jean Valjean is not even the latter white, when he should have been the former one? Why and how can there be a story like Valjean's? As if Dantes and Tess were not enough, I have to now torture myself through Valjean - the loaf, the child, the sewers, the lonely death? And yet, I hated when he was respectable somewhere in between - I wanted him to rise and rise up, higher and higher up, shame even the Christ for a living crucifixion, and yet be one of the blacks. No, no whiteness attached to him. The anger of this swept me through my adolescence to Marx, Zola, Tolstoi, and finally Dostoyevsky. The passion of Therese Raquin still beats in me; nobody calls it white, but I do, for the purity of passion and lust are there. So has Gervais, so has Levin. The finely pomaded air of the salons which Anna and Vronsky used to frequent, jarred me out of the world of white and black I was living in, and introduced me to shades, ephemeral, fleeting, phantasmagorical - and it ended in Ivan's simple question that where is God if an eight-year-old girl cries out in the middle of a night for help and forgiveness, shut up in a latrine by her mother for bedwetting. Where is it? The ruin of an ambitious life - Dantes? The waste of an active life - Crusoe? In succumbing to passion - Tess? In not succumbing to passion - Madame Arnoux?

I will continue.