Yann Martel on Fear from Life of Pi

I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.

Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.

Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.

The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

By Thao Nguyen

My Spring
is not filled with fragrant petals,
with newly budding saplings,
but with the salty candies that my eyes gift you.
Because mine is not one characterized by a renewal of happiness,
but by the understanding of your suffering.
You who treads alone,
care not to look to the side
where with my lantern I walk.
But it is of no matter,
because you are my Spring,
you are my lachrymose joy,
the aching of my heart,
the stretching of brittle soul.
My Spring
is not filled with laughter,
with the dancing butterflies,
but with a sweet loneliness.

I am a monster.

I am a monster and I am aware of it. It’s in my nature to be what I am. I wear a red cloak as I tread down a narrow thorny path, waiting for my next victim. I make no solecism in doing so. And then I attack without an apprising. Don’t worry, I don’t kill. I do much worse though. What can be worse than dying? Oh, only if you had lived long enough to see what is worse than dying. And I caused that to happen. In fact, I consider it among my greatest achievements.

You are wondering, I am some monster mentioned in a lachrymose fable from medieval times from which you can hide under the aegis of time. I am no such thing. I am present inside you. Without me, you are incomplete. Yes, a part of you that has lived long enough to witness history, a part that still resides in you and a part that will live longer than you-be it in a very miniscule form. You are but a microcosm of my existence. I am eternal. As long as someone breathes, I live. I have no home. I am not indigenous. I am inside everyone. I am not trying to obfuscate you; just trying to show you your verisimilitude.

Still no idea about who I am? Let me introduce you a bit more to myself. I wear a mask of injustice. I live within those of you, who are victims. I also live within the culprits. I have caused the bloodiest battles in the past. I can turn the most eleemosynary men into animals. I have left the most fair and determined minds in a melee. I have turned husbands against wives, sons against mothers, brothers against sisters. I can destroy that which worth’s the most to you. I can make you loathe yourself. I can devastate you as easily as you can crush an ant. I can make you suffer without shedding a single drop of blood from your body. I can turn you into a bibulous coward. I can snatch away your claque from you in a blink of an eye. I can polarize your love for those near to you. I need no lexicon to sway you; my false paternalism serves the purpose.

But you know what’s magnificent? I sin and I get to live. You are the one who pays for my deeds. It’s ironic that you have walked on the surface of the moon. You have acquainted creatures that live deep below the sea. You have successfully turned thousands of miles into nothing, making it seem that nothing is beyond your purview of intelligence. And yet, yet you are unable to defeat me. Oh yes, I am not oblivious to your feats. But what you lack is what I have. Despite your sanguine seeming achievements, you have not succeeded in deracinating me. For I am “Anger” and I am invincible. I laugh at you, mankind as you are no more than my vassal. You are weak and destructible and I am not.

Solitude, Coffee and Late Night Wanderings of My Mind...

This is kind of frequent for me, usually I blog once or twice a month at most. But I need to untangle my mind a bit and no way better to do it than writing (at least for me, anyways).

These past two weeks have been eventful, to say the least. My family came over from Pakistan and I saw them after 3 years. It was so emotional. You know how people say that our biggest weakness, as human beings in general, is love? I say, that is our biggest strength. The love for family, friends, humanity, kindness, rightness, animals, plants etc. I mean it's just so beautiful how much a human being can love. True, our biggest strengths can make us weak but it works the other way round too. Why do we still long for acceptance and love? It's possible to survive without it, but is it possible to live without it? I don't think so. People turn bitter because of lack of love. If you had all the love in the world, you wouldn't want others to not feel love. Because you'd know how beautiful the feeling is when someone brings you hot chocolate after a long tiring day and you'd want others to experience it. How can you not? If you see a really good movie, you recommend it to your friends-do you not? If you visit a beautiful place, you want your loved ones to see it too. Why? Because we promote things that appeal to us. I think, to an extent, it's the same with love.

Anyways, i'm getting away from the topic, but there really isn't a topic so that doesn't make sense. But neither do my emotions. Maybe it's like a volcano of too many feelings clogged up together and is waiting to explode or maybe it's one thing that has influenced me so much but I can't put a finger on it. I used this analogy earlier with a friend, but it defines my emotions perfectly as well. My emotions are on crack. I have been feeling so nostalgic lately, for obvious reasons. I met my family after three years. It brought back so many memories and we created so many new memories. It made me reconsider somethings and my life. Like when I moved here, I had this depressed emo phase where I missed Pakistan so terribly that I used to cry myself to sleep. Then I learned to see the beauty in reality and came to terms with the fact that my life was here now and not in Pakistan. And that if I didn't start making memories here, I would regret it later. Then I started loving it here, and to the extent where everything about the Desi world/people started to piss me off. I was trying to detach myself from my heritage because I saw the perks of other ethnicities/religions etc. And now? I am proud of my heritage, culture, country etc. and I love it here too. I have realized that I can't have everything both ways but this is one thing I can. And I'm happy about that.

I've also been feeling content lately. Like, I have figured a lot of things out this summer. My future, my present and my past. I understand now, that I am who I am because of my past experiences. Yes, I was ignorant and stupid before. But so what? With time comes experience and with experience comes knowledge and wisdom. I can either fret about what I didn't do or didn't get done, or I could live in the present doing what's in my power and looking forward to the challenges life throws at me.

But I have also been feeling a little sad. About what? How short life is, how few moments we get to spend with our loved ones and how everything will change one day. But I keep those feelings shut up in a very tiny box buried deep inside my heart. I guess, melancholy is a part of who we are as human beings. Without sadness, we wouldn't know happiness. Tears make you realize the importance of smiles and laughter. And turmoil makes you realize the value of peace in life. So I guess in some chimerical way, I am the closest to being myself right now. I don't want it to change, but it will and I know it. C'est la vie, right?

Desi Parents (:

Yesterday, after a long tiresome day of school, I dared to mention my effete situation to my dad. What followed was not sympathetic looks or comforting words but a vignette of how my dad used to walk miles, barefooted, in scorching heat while carrying ten textbooks, to school. It was inspiring the first time I ever heard it and the second and maybe the third, and was an adjunct reminder of how blessed I was, but hearing the same story a million times kind of loses its appeal. This, however, did make me think about how interesting the Desi families are. But let me define who Desi’s are first for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term. Desi’s are basically people from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Anyways, the Desi communities have this hierarchy where if you’re a doctor, engineer or a lawyer, you are the cream of the crowd. But any other profession and you are added to the list of poltroons who are never mentioned at family gatherings. Obviously there are those not-so hidebound parents who allow their children to pursue a degree in Liberal Arts with a second degree in Medicine, Law or Engineering but even then they would only consider latter one to be a fait accompli. Speaking of which, most of the conversations between Desi parents involve two things: bragging about whose child is better than whose or arguments concerning politics of motherland. Let me tell you a little something about the Desi definition of good grades. If you ever get a 99 on a Math or a Science test, do not expect to be applauded. In fact, you would be asked about where you lost that one point and why you didn’t get the bonus question right. Soon you would also find yourself in a morass of another ribald story about how your parents took Calculus in 6^th grade and got better grades than you and how you’re doomed for the rest of your life. Not getting perfect grades in English is acceptable though because for most of us it’s not our first language, making it a very reasonable excuse for not scoring well. In fact, you would constantly hear your parents complain about why our native language isn’t counted towards the required Foreign Language credit.

Now let’s get to their other favorite topic-politics. They would sit down for hours in a supine position, sipping five cups of tea in one go (which by the way is definitely not an addiction and is completely normal in a Desi household), to caterwaul about which political party is the least corrupt of them all. They talk about it as if they might secretly be bellwethers of that party working to gather some proselytes, but that’s all they’ll ever do. If you suggest doing something to better the political system of motherland, well they’d either look at you as if you’re deceived by a mirage or would be merciful enough to say that you’re oblivious about how the world works and would label you as a silly novice.

I forgot to mention one other topic Desi people can’t resist talking about. Cricket. If there’s ever a Cricket match on, it’s a liturgy to throw a party and watch it with every other Desi person in the ten mile radius. It’s definitely more anticipated than the Super bowl or the NBA finals and to skip it for work or school is considered sacrilege. This just might be the only thing that quasi religious holiday, where skipping school is okay.

What’s also interesting is that Desi people would never buy something that’s not on sale. But if it’s on sale, we would probably buy a hundred of those items, even if we have no need for it. In some chimerical way, it’s all a part of saving some money. In fact, I think the only time Desi people ever truly spend money is on weddings or education. Even when it comes down to going to the doctor’s, they would do their best to procrastinate it as much as they can. They firmly believe that Advil or Grandma’s old remedies are the solution to every illness out there. And if those fail, well then, what’s the internet for?

In the end, I just want to say that this was nothing more than an attempt at a raillery and was not intended to be noisome. I am a Desi person after all and am kind of proud of my heritage.