The Third Mind

I don’t feel like making this one too heavy. You can only have so many blue days in a month. But I would like to post an update on what I’ve been thinking about. The single most frequent comment I get from anyone that I’ve burdened with this absurdist pursuit of some kind of desire-less existence is “Why do you even want to live without it?” To many, it may seem like I am trying to kill a part of me that is essentially human, something foundational to every single human impulse and ability that I possess. Indeed, why would I want to do that?

Let’s see how I have practiced the idea so far. In trying to achieve a love for others without desiring any love back, the basic tendency is to deal with money. Why not spread this little money I have and surprise people? I remember back in my UG days in Bangalore, my friend and I would go to Church Street to buy Christmas gifts for everyone. Not only did it make the month of December our collective favourite month, I have to admit there was a secret joy in knowing that my gifts were going to, in some way, make me more beloved with the people I loved most. In a similar vein, while not intentional per se, I would always try to help people around if they asked for help in some project or research, and I would at some level feel like that help would make them love me more. Strangely, the one habit I have been able to single out as one that I truly practice out of no desire to be loved back is buying my friends flowers every time I meet them. It makes me feel one with them. It makes me feel good that I can associate them with flowers. It is the one act of true love that I have been practicing so far, and I didn’t even know it.

What difference does that even make? I realised that this giving of flowers was truly the most unattached I felt. Unattached only to the fear or anxiety of not having done something better. The flower represented no superior quality, no display of imagined purity, nor a breaking of societal norms. It represented purely my love for my friend, a physical manifestation of what I think they feel like to me.

I have been reading psychological journals that talk about what desire could be to the human mind. Some say it might be an indelible part of the human psyche, a key motivator and completely inseparable from the pathology of the human mind. Indeed, one even comments on whether this “death of desire” might represent in itself a repressed desire. As a scholar of a humanities, as I assume many of you reading this are, if you are a structuralist, you are inevitably attracted to the idea of having been moulded, knowingly or unknowingly, by the frameworks of society that surround you. But as a post-structuralist, would you not agree that desire itself is a primary driver of the repressive societal structures that bind us? And indeed, they are repressive, otherwise we would not celebrate a free market that has been ravaging our finite world like an insatiable monster unless our own desires were being satisfied (this is something I’ve been reading about in ‘On the Calculation of Volume’ by Solvej Balle).

To be free of these, not necessarily in a material sense, is to allow yourself to consider a possibility where you proceed through life unbound by these structures. However, a criticism that was rightly pointed out to me by a friend was how shallow these things might seem when there are so many bigger problems in the world. Indeed, proponents of historical materialism might not even take anything I say seriously at all, saying my idealism is the reason we are in the shit that we are. I will not presume to act as if I will suddenly be able to reconcile materialism and idealism, but there is a lot of truth in this. Do you accept the rigidity of structuralism, and by extension also the ability that it gives you to truly engage with the world? Or do you try to find meaning in a post-structuralist world, where true meaning is up in the air for everyone?

What I find most clear to me now is that in this quest for some kind of freedom from desire, I feel calm and peace unlike I have ever before. Some have argued with me, saying I am becoming cynical but I want to tell them on the contrary; I have become more hopeful than ever. There is a joy in trying to imagine what I can with this unburdening of the self from the desire of the self.

Let us again go back to the exciting and fun world of policy. Can I not look at collective struggles from a materialist lens? Can I then not look at the individuals within that struggle from an idealist sense? I wonder if that would make for a more complete way to look at what the problems that people face are really? Imagine a case of sanitation. The materialist eye would realise that the casteist histories of our society have an outsized effect on how people look at the responsibilities of cleaning. The idealist eye would perhaps consider what it would mean for the creative abilities of people once they are freed of the aesthetic limitations of a dirty environment.

Fundamentally, is my search for the notion of a love untethered by desire for it in return making me turn it into a puritanical argument?

The question has merit. I am not yet able to find a way to articulate a sense of what I consider this “love”. In the beginning, it was to me the word which came closest to what I wanted to describe. Of course, it does not mean just romantic love. It is a love which is all-encompassing, holistic, plural. It permeates through every action, every thought and every feeling. If it was just action, it would be called altruism. If it was just romantic, it would have many strings attached to it.

But desire to be loved back? The argument being that love without this desire is more pure and less intentional, less burdened by an expectation – and therefore more aligned with the basest nature of humanity. Even the idea of changing this base nature within us?

There is no doubt about your prescience in saying that there are a myriad ways to look at love – with each of them being correct. But at a very individual level, my fundamental question remains – could we perhaps be better, more unintentionally positive in our thoughts and actions, if we are able to give up this desire?

I propose; there is no moral basis to my argument. Despite the present articulation, giving up desire makes not a better person (a la Camus) and neither does retaining the desire to be loved back as a force for willing yourself to love more.

Ah but yes, there is a significant failing in my own exploration until now, and it is one that I need to look for within myself and without. It is that in my postulations I have assumed the goodness in humanity, in society. I fail to assume the negative motivations in society. What if one is abused? What about the various societal conditionings that make a person some way? Can you continue to love while being under the boot of an oppressor? How will the different perceptions and expectations of women and men affect this erosion of desire? Can it even be practiced in an unjust world?

On top of these, there are still fundamental questions I have regarding my own ideas till now. How do you reconcile this erosion of desire with acceptance? Is altruism the same thing (am I on a wild goose chase)? What role does performance play in it? Am I unable to truly reconcile the idea with my notions of purity?

Over the past few weeks, a singular question has been taking laps around my brain like a race car that isn’t being called into the pits despite the rain coming in. In a bid for more clarity, I framed this question to my friends as well.

Will life truly be better if we give up the desire to be loved?

What I mean by this is not the absence of love. I do not even mean “love” in the traditional sense. The love I mean is all-encompassing, a deeply natural and human feeling. It is something that affects everything we do. Can the absence of the desire to be loved, however, make a difference in how we view ourselves?

What happens in this scenario when there is no desire to be loved back? Suppose you get a big LEGO set. It comes in 6 packets, each of which you have to make separately and join at the end for a complete thing. Now, imagine you are in charge of a city, as I will force you to do as long as I am alive and as long as urban policy remains in decline in this country. You look at the problems that need to be solved with this staged mindset. You look at roads that need to be fixed and fix them. You look at trees that need to be planted and plant them.

But you don’t do these things because you desire the love of the people who use that road, or the love of the trees you are planting, or the love of the people who are going to sit beneath the shade of these trees. You love the people. You love the tree. But you do these things for them regardless, because it is not necessary for you to be loved back.

In the Gita, it is not love, but duty. For Kant, it is not love, but morality. For Schopenhauer, it sure is something I’ll get back to you when I figure out what the man keeps rambling about. But for Camus, the absence of the desire to be loved, unlike for me, takes the form of a disaffection which permeates every action. Instead of the absence of desire with the presence of love, Camus’ Stranger walks about with an incredible absence of both desire and the possibility of love, both from myself and from the other. This is why I believe it is necessary to retain the love that is inherently human to us, in spite of this exorcising of desire to be loved back.

A conversation about this later made me change the question to something that might be more practicable.

Will life truly be better if we give up the desire to be attached?

Attachment is like one of those tapes that get stuck to your shoe and which becomes inexplicably linked to your soul until you notice it. The Buddhist philosophers are champions of this stuff, as are Hindu philosophers and other Biharis. Why it becomes easier to digest the absence of the desire to be attached, rather than to be loved, is because to be attached is to be a tangible thing. To be loved is intangible, undefinable, indecipherable. There is a reality to attachment that can be expressed in material terms. You are free from attachment when you do for your city without expecting it to build you statues in your name. But for me, that is skirting around the real issue.

Charvaka and Dionysians and the hedonists would tell you they thought about this, and the answer they came up with was you do what you want, man. But there, there is a selfish undertaking, not the selfless giving into love that I require. However, it makes me wonder: Isn’t this compulsion to be free of the desire to be loved also a desire in itself? But I am not against desire in itself, only the reciprocity of it. In any case, it is something to be considered. In what Tanmay Bhat considers a pretentious movie, the Jain monk in Ship of Theseus, when asked by his lawyer, who is named Carvaka, about why he refuses to take medicines and if that also reflects a desire within him that he has not been able to excise from himself, replies that There is always a duality in man. To live is to desire. Even the monk who renounces the world desires the peace of renunciation. But one must choose the desire that leads to the least suffering for others. Huh. Make of that what you will.

What I want now is to put this into practice. I’ll take one month diligently. Can I love without the desire to be loved back? What will it do to me? Will it be a sort of ego death? Will I experience more closeness with the universe or will I experience a sense of deep displacement, realising that my love was never appreciated in the first place? Ultimately, positing myself the anti-Camus, I must imagine a world which does not put me in a state of delirious disaffection from society, but a deeper sense of doing what I want to, regardless.

There was a time as a naive schoolchild I used to try and make loneliness a friend. I was attracted to the esoteric beauty of the feeling of being lonely...the ironic attention it got me from myself. I used to think that if i became comfortable with being lonely (which started with the pretentious belief that I was indeed comfortable and in fact preferred being a loner), then I would be able to devote more of my soul to endeavours of personal enrichment and pursuit of knowledge. It would detract me from foolish nonsense that others make their whole personalities. Of course, in such naiveness I was unable to notice that it was the most fulfilling period of my life, I was surrounded by people at all times, people who loved me, cherished me, respected me and genuinely wanted nothing more than my time and company. 

Later in life when i started to get used to the taste of company and a room full of laughter and mundanity, it was -

a) cruelly taken away from me by that bastard pandemic

b) at a time in my life when i wanted nothing more than that room warmed by the simple breath of more than a few bodies exulting within their own happiness of connection, I was rewarded with true loneliness. 

Such are the cruel tricks played by what we would like to call some form of fate or universal karma, but which I would call the natural progressions on a journey of making sense of where we understand ourselves. Life/the universe does nothing but teach us the fact that in abundance, we are by design a freak entity that will undoubtedly find the one missing piece that will completely blind us to the possibilities of abundance. There are those who profess this to not be the case with them, who think and say that their path to enlightenment does not merit them an ounce of such reductive thinking, and yet I would argue the first tile that their foot rests on in their path to enlightenment has the scarcity of enlightenment itself as an affront to the abundance they are unable to perceive all around them. 

I attend one of the most prestigious institutions of the country and yet every day I feel the utmost regret and sense of privilege that I carry. I do not mean this to sound as if I mean that the privilege I carry is some burden that I am making a big effort for the lower classes to carry, but the fact that I am in my state helpless to provide them with help. As a student one of my biggest weapons has become the "student discount" but that is such an insidious thing to ask for when you are someone who pays more than a lakh per semester to attend a few lectures that give you a degree you can show to the world saying you attended some classes where an older person told you to read something you had not read before.

I am sorry if this comes across as cynical. I have been reading the book "Hatred in the Belly", a criticism of the likes of Arundhati Roy and Navayana Publishing, which are primarily Brahmin led, to explain and/or take up space in the dalit literature canon that should actually and logically be taken up be dalit voices. In history I am one that does not have the right to access this space, and I am happy to do so. But recently I have come across a group, especially on Twitter, who although not insidious, are more than likely to fall in this "arundhati roy" band of activism that means rapid criticism and taking spaces of those who need their voices heard, rather than careful and considerate exercise of voice and privilege. I wish not to follow their example.

I realise it has been a long time since I last wrote here, and so much has happened since then. When I was a child, my first dream job was to be a car designer. I used to doodle and scribble and thought it would be a cakewalk, but soon enough as with other things, mathematics turned out to be my bane once again. Having little patience to deal with that nonsense, I shifted my focus to becoming a journalist, believing myself to be so good of a writer that I couldn’t see past my own vainglories. And when I learnt that there was an option to be a journalist who only writes about cars, an automobile journalist, I was hooked. Although later on my priorities changed, as I soon wanted to be a columnist and then a civil servant, that dream still remained.

The last five months, I have lived that dream. Out of nowhere, I got an opportunity to intern at one of my favourite Indian automobile magazines, and oh joy, it was better than I had ever expected. I got to write more than I thought I could, drive more than I thought I could, drive more expensive and beautiful cars than I thought I could see, and be a complete pain in the ass for my editors. They even put pictures of me in the magazine, for who knows what joy. But damn, what a life. But enough. With no malice intended, I could not see this being the finality of my story. That bug of wanting to change things cannot be done from behind the steering wheel, and I want to be the change.

Pune started off as a depressing hellhole, but soon turned into a wonderful safe space, everything considered. I came to enjoy the life in a PG, commuting to “office” everyday (where everyday someone would invariably start singing a potty song that would soon spread through the office and by the end of the day 15 grown ass men are singing bedardi raja in unison, and then playing with electric scooters). It was soon time to move though, as I was also still going through the motions of giving those asshole entrance exams. Shifting to my best friend A’s place, and giving my notice, was a breath of fresh air.

A dropped me to my next entrance exam, and I topped it. After that, the month went by like an electric car, so fast but unnoticed (that’s a car reference from my professional experience). It was such a good change of pace, with leisurely strolls and conversations. A saved me from a lot of misery that I would have otherwise inflicted on twitter had I still been in the PG. What a time.

I was wondering recently as I started a book again after a long time, how my pattern of thought has changed as I have grown older. Most of you who will read this have probably gone through the same metamorphosis in how we consume media, interact with technology in our lives. We have seen the shift from cassettes to discs to streaming, and some of us might also remember typewriters. Granted, a lot of this exposure to vintage tech is because India got exposed to the cutting edge much later (and one might argue now there is too much cutting edge), but it brought a change in my way of looking at things into sharp focus. Reading a book is a vertical exercise, wherein you go through it one by one, level by level, taking a moment, every page followed by another. You cannot start from somewhere randomly unless you have already read it, and even then, the act of re-reading the whole is a joy in itself. In the shift to digital, we have now become so accustomed to open access (in the way of perusal), the availability of all material unbound by a vertical structure of chapters, titles or subtitles, that our way of thinking itself has turned from lateral to a giant mess of multi-point attention. Although there are studies, it is a little hard for me to believe that this entire generation has lost its attention span. I think we suffer more from our ability (and indeed, being forced to) spread our attention at all times to a hundred different things.

Video games are similar in how they have changed. I started gaming when the norm was to have level progression and specific areas to enter, finish all objectives in and exit. You could not randomly jump in to any point in the story and continue playing. You had to follow the structure, and it gave you a sense of direction. To a gamer of today’s generation, who is oversaturated with the Ubisoft and Rockstar standard of open-world map unlocking games like Assassin’s Creed and Grand Theft Auto, it would seem ridiculously limiting to have to go through such a structure. But look at the reception and criticism recent open-world games like Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us 2 have got. Having an open-world for the sake of it does not make the game thematically any greater than a linear game. Ghost of Tsushima is a breathtakingly beautiful world built around an idealised version of Japan’s Samurai era, even harking back to Kurosawa tropes. But the storyline is limited so much by the open-world structure, which constantly distracts you and bombards you with things you waste you attention and energy on. The story deserved a much more focused, linear structure, because the story was beautiful. In the excessiveness of the structure, we lost the minimal beauty that was in the relationships of the game.

I think this is why we are addicted to binge-watching so much. Something about a linear structure of episodes and chapters brings us back to that safety and peace that we (at least I) remember from a time when we did not have to live up to the vapid fascination fuelled by the social media age. This is not a criticism of social media, which I always have believed can be a truly great resource. It is however a criticism of how we are made to use social media. We interact more with brands online than we do with real people. There is a point at which we ask ourselves, I wish I was talking to the person who was behind this account rather than a fucking brand. Binge-watching lets us go back to structure, and that is again broken with the desire to feel included in the “conversation” and interact with every single piece of online material about it, down to what the actors wear daily.

Even through the course of writing this, my attention has been spread between four devices, and I have gone and come back more times than I wanted to, resulting in this disjointed mess. I do think the revival of dedicated devices is a good thing. E-readers are a boon to have as a reader, you can have a portable gaming console now and even keyboards with tiny screens that only let you type in peace. The era of the multi-purpose has for sure developed a new type of person. I’m not exactly sure I want to be one.

A lovely piece of writing by Marshini, who I am proud to call my friend.

When Tre randomly sprung the question and asked me to write for his blog, I was honestly lost. For a person who constantly complains about the (mis)representation of women or the lack thereof, I could not for the life of me come up with something that had not already been written about. And then as I mulled over the course of our conversation earlier that night, I realised how this even came about. We were discussing men studying humanities at our University and their dating pool. Yes, we were complaining about insufferably well-read men. And let me be very clear, this complaining does not stem from jealousy despite their ability to quote the UN Charter like the back of their hand.

Before divulging further, I just want to place on record the small prayer and a heavy sigh that leaves my lips when I hear stories of women having to settle. More often than not, we settle because as we all know, having low standards is worse than having none at all.

To begin with, the male population in my school were boys of whom I thought, so emotionally immature. So something about meeting boys in fests seemed more tolerable; at the top of the culmination of this social rung were the MUN/festing boys, formidable with their heightened awareness and their knack for words. I was even naïve enough to look forward to meeting such well-read men in college, elated at the prospect of getting to know ‘my’ people. Any woman reading this would very likely relate to how unsuspecting and just how foolishly we thought better of them. They have read political theory. They know there’s five waves of feminism. They are quite cerebral about the movies they watch and the art they consume. What more could you want? So you get to know them better. They tell you that they like you because you are smart and they want you because you are smart.

But it only takes a matter of days to see the cracks on the façade. More often than not, it all begins with a snide remark enveloped as a product of their enviable wit and impeccable comedic timing. Before you can process it, you are asked to graciously take a joke. And you do what you are told to because you think it will get better. I mean, what's the harm with a little uncomfortable smile even if you don't agree with what's being said, right? They are rational and they share the same values as you.

In spite of your rapt attention to his actions, it's all bokeh. It snowballs to bigger things- supporting problematic artists, a warped grasp of dark humour which gradually morphs into an assertion of their self-assuredness. They reassure you that you are loved because you are smart. You soon realise that you should only be smart enough to impress his den of pompous friends but not too smart that you intimidate them. Somehow your smartness is a quality they want to flaunt like a trophy, but whose accolades you cannot celebrate - and it definitely shouldn't be one too many.

You try to hold yourself together and give them the benefit of the doubt. You tell yourself it’s the years of indoctrination of toxic masculinity and the weight of gender roles. Familial expectations. Mental illness. You claim to yourself loudly, ‘They are not like the right-wing men I detest.’ They are not shallow and they like you because you are a good, smart person.

Before you know it, you are in too deep. Now we are at that stage where your laugh is too loud or your lipstick is too bright. Or the books you read and the artists you hate are too political to be declared openly in social settings. It is not very objective Marsh, they tell you. Be rational.

Finally, you get it together and uptalk yourself in the mirror, thinking of various scenarios to manoeuvre the conversation for when things go downhill and you know, it most certainly will because according to them, being nice is a low-end virtue; somehow even the slightest display of consideration will break their fragile ego. You hate him but you hate yourself more because you still expect better of him.

The fine day arrives. You decide you have had enough and you confront them about it. On the rarest of occasions, an apology is mumbled, unsurprisingly devoid of any meaning or remorse so you take what you get because just the general guilt of the confrontation consumes you. But other times, it is exactly how you wished it would not be. Whether it is winning MUNs or arguments with their partners, their only key to emerge victorious is being loud. I don’t even need to elaborate on the end result of this yelling fest. Ultimately, it is an excruciating blow to your understanding of rights and wrongs. It sows a seed of doubt which still haunts you as the entire premise of the relationship was built on a shared intellectuality and their supposed decency.

Then it all comes crashing down at once to you- just because they spent hours researching female genital mutilation in Libya for UNHRC does not mean it translates to an iota of empathy for fellow beings beyond the scope of jargon. It only made them remember facts. Maybe earned themselves the title of a stellar debater.

Women, these men tell you they like you because you are smart. But are they?

The idea that this pandemic has in any way been positive to the populace other than showing up as such in their worst nightmares has been a myth since the first lockdown ended (remember that?). This pandemic has only been a negative thing, taking away from what we had, and being rare in the way that it has in any way been a situation conducive to goodness.

I feel like I have not been true to myself, not only because of the pandemic but because it is only now that I make an effort into understanding who I truly am. I have been told that I will do well, things will be good for and in turn I will make things good for others. I relegated myself to this notion of what I was supposed to be, and the fear now is that maybe I believed in it being the truth too much.

I only recently realised that the political ideology I identify with most is that I'm a social democrat, because to me being a total leftist in today's age is an impossibility. However, by consigning myself to social democracy I'm consigning myself to compromise, and this appears to be the continuation of a theme in my life. In interpersonal relationships, I've realised I rarely hear the word "sorry" from anyone directed towards me, and till now I had convinced myself that that was a good thing maybe. But I end up saying sorry for the heck of it, maybe because I want to balance the lack of sorries in my relationships. It sounds like a weird metaphor for how the spirit of compromise has compromised my whole spirit.

Because of the pandemic, simple communications skills are being lost from my grasp. I am on the verge of losing friends with whom in normal circumstances I would have been inseparable. Forget making new friends, sometimes I forget how to talk to the ones I do have, at one time being overly edgy and at others becoming more emotional than the situation requires. While no one would call me a true emotional, it would be fair to say that the display of emotion is something I have so far failed to comply with, save for a relative few occasions.

This, along with the large period of fallow joblessness that I have experienced over the months since my (virtual) graduation have intensified the feeling that perhaps I am being "found out". I have no answer to this, perhaps this is not a question to be asked, perhaps it was always known, except to me. Boredom has overtaken my life to the point where I am studying for my own sake, often not knowing the day or date. Boredom only makes you eager to get to the next thing, and my days have been filled with these long periods of waiting followed by instant gratification from what I decided to wait for, a new episode, or a new article or a new game. It really doesn't matter as long as there is something to look forward to. Ever since the season ended, my weekends have also been deprived of any and all kinds of motorsport racing, and so this period has become even more maddening.

One constant "ick" (as the children say now) in the back of my head lately has been the constant knowledge of living in a deeply backward and rural region of the country, and yet having not taken a step into it, for myriad reasons. Most times it is my own inaction, and other times it is the scare of the pandemic. The fact remains, that I am in a location where I should be out learning what things are like, considering the deep feeling for the injustice that I've made myself feel is present in society, but it is inaccessible to me, of my own volition. It comes back to the question of compromise that I raised earlier, perhaps I am compromising on any real agency in terms of my own political action because the comfort of living in the house my family lives in is too attractive.

As I listen to George Harrison's Isn't it a pity for the 10th time tonight and drown myself in the blues that accompany me on my nights, maybe it would be prudent to just "get on with it". I'll make the best effort, put my all into a few hours to come up with another statement of purpose, another writing sample, another exam to give to be considered for admission into something that gives me a respite from my own self, a struggle that all humans have dealt with for millennia, that I have read about from many great figures in history and felt pity for them, but which this time seems to me to be of the worst degree of hopelessness.

Come, join me in the little Nighthawks cafe. Here's a drink. Settle down. It has been a long time since I wrote here, and for all that time maybe no one noticed the absence of the blog as well, which is fine by me. I have spent this time figuring things out. It has meant partaking in the devastating act of looking at myself from what John Rawls would call his veil of ignorance (which hopefully is also my last attempt to convince you that yes, I am an academic), and the picture I saw painted in front of me has made me realise something. If this is what you have all been facing all these years, I guess I owe you all an apology, because by God spending 20 minutes here must be a holistic nightmare.

However, what it has also led to is a reckoning with who I want to be. It would be disingenuous of me to assume that all of us feel the same way, but honestly (and you all better get with this program), I am rarely wrong about things. I think all of us have a vision of the person we see ourselves being in our future. A mirror, nay, a portal into a future where you are the person you want to become, or the person you fear you might become. What qualities do you have? What does it mean to you to know this person? Would you try harder to be them, or would you try to change things up and keep your future on their toes, as if to become the living embodiment of a land mine to your own self? As Calvin’s dad would say, even that builds character. Think about that while I tell you this boring story.

I recently read about a District Magistrate posted in Keonjhar, Orissa, a small mining district. The town was riddled with disease and illness, especially for children, and the local administration was at their wit’s end as to why it was so. Although the obvious answer was literally the mining, they wondered how to solve the problems. The DM came in, simply looked at a fund created especially for mining districts that used a part of the profits and realised they were left unused. He used these funds to dramatically improve the healthcare of the region, increased investment in all possible social barometers, and even enforced the minimum wage already put in place, which meant that all the daily wage labourers who had returned to their homes because of the pandemic never left. The person came in, saw things being unused, used them and improved the significance of an entire district. This was a person of consequence.

What I know is that I want to be a person of consequence. I do not want to be famous, no, because you can be known all over the universe and yet amount to nothing in the grand scheme of things. We all know these people. Maybe we even admire them, but do we want to be them? I think not even they want to be them, because how else would you explain the myriad celebrities out there trying to make a legacy and prove themselves as being greater than what they are. It is a life trying to become important instead of being famous when you realise your fame is fleeting. There is no shame in being famous, but it is not who I want to be.

I want to be of consequence, not of notoriety because being notorious means you will not be remembered, you will be feared. There is no feeling worse than entering a room where you are not wanted, and if you are notorious that is the person you become. There is no honour in being feared, the same as there is no honour in being facetious.

You can be negatively consequential too. George W. Bush may not have been a good president, but he was hugely consequential for reasons that we are all aware of. It might not be wrong to say that Bush was responsible for how at least a quarter of this century is playing out. On the other hand, Barack Obama was a great president, but he was arguably an inconsequential one, either having to deal with what Bush did, or putting up with the status quo in a divided world. History is riddled with good people who are inconsequential and other men who are consequential. There are, of course, mighty legacies built of inherently good people (no one would deny George Harrison), and you might even notice my reluctance to use the word evil to refer to consequential people. Evil men exist, and good men rise to fight them. This is true in stories, myths, legends and history. I want good people to stop rising for the sole reason of stopping evil. It seems a remarkably small ambition to be alive solely to stop someone else, which although honourable, has a net result of zero (a zero-sum game, if you will allow me).

I do not want to be a zero-sum game guy. The purpose is to become full of consequence, and not just for the sake of it. If I can inflict change that has a positive consequence on people, how wonderful that would be. It does not mean I would become famous, remembered or even loved. But it would mean that someone became good simply because they wanted to be good, not simply because there was evil in the world to vanquish.

The King’s Speech, released in 2010, is a universally acclaimed film winning 4 Oscars, including best picture. The film not only delights one with its crisp and clear storytelling, but is also gratifying to watch. With phenomenal performances from its lead actors Colin Firth (who won a best actor award), Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter, the film keeps the viewer gripped and involved in the story for the entirety of its running time. A real story about the stuttering king of England, King George VI, and his journey to overcome his struggles with the help of his wife, the queen, and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, in time to give a message of inspiration and hope to his subjects during the initial stages of World War 2.

One of the most important parts of the film is when the King, called “Bertie” by his family, meets his therapist, Lionel Logue for the first time. In the scene, both men are uncomfortable in the situation they are put in (The King is sent to the therapist by his wife). This is made even more clear to the viewer by way of the clever cinematographic techniques used. Bertie remains uncomfortable throughout the whole meeting. This is characterised by an ‘unbalanced’ frame that the camera puts him in, which means that his face and body are always at a horizontal or vertical extreme end of the frame. This discomfort with his situation is also evident by the fact that the wall to which Bertie is sitting with his back to, is painted in a splatter of colours and disjointed associations, showing the mental distraction. 

Although Lionel’s face in the earlier parts of the scene is showcased in the same manner, he soon takes charge of the situation and assumes a more commanding position, even though he is talking to the King himself. The way he adapts to the situation is shown by having his face in the middle of the frame from then onwards. Lionel also has fewer camera cuts as compared to Bertie, thus making us believe that the two men, even though in the same situation, have not reacted in the same way to each other. 

This scene shows that Bertie thinks he is wasting time with the therapist and that nothing can hep him cure himself of his stuttering dilemma. He also thinks that Lionel is inferior to him and reacts to him in a rather off-putting manner. However, Lionel takes it in his stride, and resolves to make the King understand that he can indeed help him and that the King has no reason to doubt his abilities or mistrust him.

Afterwards in the scene, Lionel tells the King to read a portion from Shakespeare’s great drama, Hamlet, particularly the soliloquy “To be or not to be”. When he first reads it, Bertie stutters a lot and gets incensed by Lionel for wasting his time. However, Lionel then makes him read the same portion while playing Mozart’s opera, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, on a headphone. He convinces Bertie to do this by offering him a bet. The King doesn’t have any money, and Lionel offers him his own change, again showing how Lionel attempts to make the King believe that he is indeed a friend. With the music on, we learn that Bertie can indeed read out perfectly from the text, indicating that the real problem with him is not his speech, but his mental confidence. 

Here, the inspired decision of choosing “To be or not to be” as the one text used by Lionel to implore the King to speak it is significant because of the role it essayed in the original play. Hamlet’s speech is called a soliloquy even though he is not actually alone on the stage. There are three other people on the stage that Hamlet doesn’t notice, and who actually hear him speak. It is possible that if Hamlet were to know that these three characters, Ophelia, Claudius and Polonius, are listening to him, we might not have got one of the greatest pieces of writing ever written in the English language. In fact, Claudius and Polonius cannot even understand whether Hamlet is really sane or only pretending. 

Thus, Hamlet’s position in the play is extremely similar to Bertie’s, in that they both have important things to say, but they are limited by their confidence. They are both aware and afraid of the ridicule that they might receive if they speak what they have to speak and how they speak it. A big part of Bertie’s life is the ridicule he received from his brother, and the shame that his father, King George V felt and made clear to him. In Hamlet’s case, he is more confident because he knows no one else is listening to him, but in Bertie’s case, he is more confident because he cannot listen to himself. This parallel is interesting because their motivations and conditions are different. As in Shakespeare’s oft-quoted phrase, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them”. The Kingship of England is thrust upon Bertie when his father dies and his brother abdicates the throne. 

Even the text of “To be or not to be” is interesting in this respect because it deals with a choice that the protagonist has to make, and that choice has been thrust upon them and that choice may well impact the lives of many others. Such a parallel between two pieces of text from two wildly varying times in history show that literature transcends all space and time and is clear and relevant to all who read it.