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.