This would be a long post. Before starting, I would like to share or explain that I am not a native English speaker. I say this as what I’m going to write, may or may not be the same terms or meaning that others understand as I’m an Indian who uses American English + British English.
So it’s very much possible that I have picked up all the bad habits of learning and understanding and not any of the good ones in writing English as bad habits as elsewhere in life are the easier ones to pick up. Also I’m not a trained writer or have taken any writing lessons ever apart from when I was learning English in school as a language meant to communicate.
Few days back, I was reading an opinion piece (I tried to find the opinion piece again but have failed to do since) if anybody finds it, please share in the comments so will link here. A feminist author proclaimed how some poets preached or shared violence against women in their writings, poems including some of the most famous poets we admire today. The author of the article was talking about poets and artists like William Wordsworth and others. She picked out particular poems from their body of work which seemed to convey that message. Going further than that, she chose to de-hypnate between the poet and their large body of work. I wished she had cared enough to also look a bit more deeply in the poet’s life than just labeling him from one poem among perhaps tens or hundreds he may have written. I confess I haven’t read much of Wordsworth than what was in school and from those he seemed to be a nature lover rather than a sexual predator he was/is being made out to be. It is possible that I might have been mis-informed.
– Courtesy bluediamondgallery.com – CC-by-SA
The reason I say this is because I’m a hack. A hack in the writing department or ‘business’ is somebody who is not supposed to tell any back story and just go away. Writers though, even those who write short stories need to have a backstory at least in the back of their mind about each character that s/he introduces into the story. Because it’s a short story s/he cannot reveal where they come from but only point at the actions they are doing. I had started the process two times and two small stories got somewhat written through me but I stopped both the times midway.
while I was hammering through the keyboard for the stories, it was as if the characters themselves who were taking me on a journey which was dark and I didn’t want to venture more. I had heard this from quite a few authors, few of them published as well and I had dismissed it as a kind of sales pitch or something.
When I did write those stories for the sake of argument, I realized the only thing that the author has is an idea and the overall arc of the story. You have to have complete faith in your characters even if they led you astray or in unexpected places. The characters speak to you and through you rather than the other way around. It is the most maddest and the most mysterious of journeys and it seemed the characters liked the darker tones more than the lighter ones. I do not know whether it the same for all the writers/hacks (at least in the beginning) or just me ? Or Maybe its a cathartic expression. I do hope to still do more stories and even complete them even if they have dark overtones just to understand the process. By dark I mean violence here.
That is why I asked that maybe if the author of the opinion piece had taken the pain and shared more of the context surrounding the poem themselves as to when did Mr. Wordsworth wrote that poem or other poets did, perhaps I could identify with that as well as many writers/authors themselves.
I was disappointed with the article in two ways, in one way they were dismissing the poet/the artist and yet they seemed or did not want to critique/ban all the other works because
a. either they liked the major part of the work or
b. they knew the audience to whom they were serving the article to probably likes the other works and chose not to provoke them.
Another point was I felt when you are pushing and punishing poets are you doing so because they are the soft targets now more than ever? Almost all the poets she had talked about are unfortunately not in this mortal realm anymore. On the business side of things, the publishing industry is in for grim times . The poets and the poems being perhaps the easiest targets atm as they are not the center of the world anymore as they used to do. Both in United States as well as here in India, literature or even fiction for that matter has been booted out of the educational system. The point I’m trying to make here that publishers would and are not in a position to protect authors or even themselves when such articles are written and opinions are being formed. Also see https://scroll.in/article/834652/debut-authors-heres-why-publishers-are-finding-it-difficult-to-market-your-books for an Indian viewpoint of the same.
I also did not understand what the author wanted when she named and shamed the poets. If you really want to name and shame people who have and are committing acts of violence against women, then the horror film genre apart from action genre should be easily targeted. In many of the horror movies, both in hollywood, Bollywood and perhaps in other countries as well, the female protagonist/lead is often molested,sexually assaulted, maimed, killed, cannibalized so and so forth. Should we ban such movies forthwith ?
Also does ‘banning’ a work of art really work ? The movie ‘Padmavaat‘ has been mired in controversies due to a cultural history where as the story/myth goes ‘Rani Padmavati’ (whether she is real or an imaginary figure is probably fodder for another blog post) when confronted with Khilji committed ‘Jauhar’ or self-immolation so that she remains ‘pure’. The fanatics rally around her as she is supposed to have paid the ultimate price, sacrificing herself. But if she were really a queen, shouldn’t she have thought of her people and lived to lead the fight, run away and fight for another day or if she was cunning enough to worm her way into Khilji’s heart and topple him from within. The history and politics of those days had all those options in front of her if she were a real character, why commit suicide ?
Because of the violence being perpetuated around Rani Padmavati there hasn’t been either a decent critique either about the movie or the historical times in which she lived. It perhaps makes the men of the land secure in the knowledge that the women then and even now should kill themselves than either falling in love with the ‘other’ (a Muslim) romantically thought of as the ‘invader’ a thought which has and was perpetuated by the English ever since the East India company came for their own political gains. Another idea being women being pure, oblivious and not ‘devious’ could also be debated.
(sarcasm) Of course, the idea that Khilji and Rani Padmavati living in the same century is not possible by actual historians is too crackpot to believe as the cultural history wins over real history. (/sarcasm)
The reason this whole thing got triggered was the ‘snowflake’ comments on https://lwn.net/Articles/745817/ . The article itself is a pretty good read as even though I’m an outsider to how the kernel comes together and although I have the theoretical knowledge about how the various subsystem maintainers pull and push patches up the train and how Linus manages to eke out a kernel release every 3-4 months, I did have an opportunity to observe how fly-by-contributors are ignored by subsystem-maintainers.
About a decade or less ago, my 2-button wheel Logitech mouse at the time was going down and I had no idea why sometimes the mouse used to function and why sometimes it didn’t. A hacker named ‘John Hill’ put up a patch. What the patch did essentially was trigger warnings on the console when the system was unable to get signal from my 2-button wheel mouse. I did comment and try to get it pushed into the trunk but it didn’t and there was also no explanation by anyone why the patch was discarded. I did come to know while building the mouse module as to how many types and models of mouse there were which was a revelation to me at that point in time. By pushing I had commented on where the patch was posted and the mailing list where threads for patches are posted and posted couple of times that the patch by John Hill should be considered but nobody either got back to me or him.
It’s been a decade since then and still we do not have any proper error reporting process AFAIK if the mouse/keyboard fails to transmit messages/signals to the system.
That apart the real long thread was about the term ‘snowflake’. I had been called that in the past but had sort of tuned it out as I didn’t know what the term means/meant.
When I went to wikipedia and came up with the ‘snowflake’ and it came with 3 meanings to the same word.
a. A unique crystalline shape of white
b. A person who believes that s/he is unique and hence entitled
c. A person who is weak or thin-skinned (overly sensitive)
I believe we all are of the above, the only difference is perhaps a factor. If we weren’t meant to be unique we wouldn’t have been given a personality, a body type, a sense of reasoning and logic and perhaps most important a sense of what is right or wrong. To be thick-skinned also comes the inability to love and have empathy with others.
To round off on a somewhat hopeful note, I was re-reading maybe for the umpteenth time ‘Sacred Stone‘ an action thriller in which four hindus along with a corrupt, wealthy and hurt billionaire try to blow the most sacred site of the Muslims, the Mecca and Medina. While I don’t know whether it would be possible or not, I would for sure like to see people using the pious days for reflection . I don’t have to do anything, just be.
Similarly, the spanish pilgrimage as shown in the Way . I don’t think any of my issues will be resolved in being either of the two places but it may trigger paths within which I have not yet explored or forgotten longtime ago.
At the end I would like to share two interesting articles that I saw/read over the week, the first one is about the ‘Alphonso‘ and the other Samarkhand . I hope you enjoy both the articles.
Experiences in the community 