Yatin Satish

Written as review of Gregory Alan Isakov’s ‘Stable Song’ for Article 19 in early 2022. I love this version of myself. I still love the song!

It’s a simple life.

Gregory Alan Isakov is a farmer, and he’s got a nice little patch of land — about three-quarters of an acre — in beautiful Boulder County, Colorado, where he sows his produce. The man is extremely satisfied with everything he grows — Turnips; Carrots; Beets. Mostly quick-turning crops. All arranged in nice, neat little rows. Now and again, some friendly companions of his amble by. Fuzzy little sheep — “Super cute lawn mowers”, Gregory calls them. They’re good friends of his — “very chill”. They seem happy in their little barn, and so does Gregory, in his for Gregory’s house is a much bigger, renovated barn — modified by himself, with the help of a couple of close friends. It’s a rather unique place to live. A sign on a guest room door reads: “If you like the smell of sheep poop, leave door open.”

The inside of the renovated barn is very, very nice. A part of it is a studio apartment, with windows that face south, west, and east — perfect for checking on the gardens and the sheep. There’s a communal shop space, a laundry area and a workshop, along with a guest room which he uses for drying and cleaning produce. In addition to all this (and somewhat importantly), Gregory’s also got a little recording studio — with modified interior walls for soundproofing. This little room is where he takes his breaks, and mingles with and romances his one great hobby — music. It’s a hobby that Gregory is rather good at.

He’s been writing Indie Folk music ever since 2003 and has been steadily gaining popularity and recognition since then. His most recent album, Evening Machines was nominated in 2019 for Best Folk Album. It’s been a climb that has been slow, steady, and deserved. In 2016 Gregory, along with his band, performed some of his older songs with the prestigious seventy-nine member Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Among the eleven songs which were eventually released in the resulting album (Gregory Alan Isakov with The Colorado Symphony Orchestra) is a gentle, acoustic number called The Stable Song — rife with themes of tender remembrance and pastoral bliss.

It happens to be a song I adore. It also happens to be a song I’d like to write about.

The Stable Song was initially released in Isakov’s first “proper” full-length album (That Sea, the Gambler) on the first day of 2007, and is one of his finest and most beloved compositions. Even though the original is an incredibly beautiful piece of music in its own right, and holds a special place in my heart (it being the first Gregory Alan Isakov song I ever listened to), I will here address the reimagined version of it, performed in 2016 with the added, expert backdrop of the brilliant Colorado Symphony Orchestra.

Orchestral recreations of songs can often be overdone, with needlessly embellished instrumentation and garish, bombastic accompaniments which all compete to be heard. Here, the orchestra is at its complementary finest — capable of bubbling along stealthily with delicate little chirps and burbles, and patient enough to wait in the wings until expressly invited by Isakov to join in on the merrymaking. The ensemble lets the song breathe — keeping a safe space from Isakov’s acoustic, yet never quite letting it walk alone on its journey through Isakov’s little snowglobe of a world.

And Oh what a simple, gorgeous, musical world! That little snowglobe is filled to the brim with mellow wonder, and I cannot help but look on as sensations and memories swirl impatiently around, waiting for me to jump in. Isakov’s world is lush with rich, beautiful musical foliage which rolls past the window as he leads you through it in his lightly-jangling musical caravan — that beautiful, gold-stringed acoustic of his. 

There is this continuous sense of motion in Gregory’s songs (most beautifully seen in his Suitcase Full of Sparks and Saint Valentine), which is facilitated by his brilliant lyrics, but completed by the mesmerisingly circular rhythms and chord progressions he generates on his acoustic guitar. The undulating back-and-forth found in the perfect counter-play between Isakov’s acoustic and Steve Varney’s heavenly banjo is an absolute musical phenomenon. As perfectly-placed hammer-ons are exchanged between guitar and banjo, Isakov’s butter-smooth voice gently cuts through, delivering carefully thought-out lyrics which invoke images of bliss. A bliss both long-gone, and yet to come. 

***************************************

Remember when our songs were just like prayers

Like gospel hymns that you caught in the air?

Come down, come down sweet reverence

Unto my simple house and ring

And ring

***************************************

 “Remember.” Isakov sets the tone with his first word, in his recognition of the latent power that lies wrapped within it, especially when it comes to building a world. Pre-formed tastes, sounds, and sights spring to mind when the word “remember” is uttered in the right context, and the gently winding guitar-banjo combination, along with the exquisitely crafted first sentence, makes it rather hard for it to not be the right context. Slivers of imagery and remembrance surround this introduction, lying at the entrance like so many beautiful, welcoming flowers. Unearthing moments like these within his songs has led me to believe that the Gregory Alan Isakov Experience™ is brazenly incomplete without due attention being paid to his lyrics.

Isakov does not confine nostalgia to his first word, though. It is a central theme to the song, and pervades the utterance of every consequent word and the ring of every consequent instrument. Nostalgia becomes a potent tool in his forging of that oh-so-vital connection a song needs between its author and its intended recipient. Isakov is thus actively using elements of the listener’s world to build his own — in a beautiful, sensitive and delicate process. This makes the song a deeply personal experience to those who come to love it, for the interplay between the artist’s and the listener’s world is ever immediate. Isakov gently invites you to survey his world, as you find little trinkets and remembrances which you can call your own in its reassuring vastness. 

In Isakov’s own words: “A good song takes you some place, [and] leaves you somewhere different. It makes you feel different. It’s an emotional lens.”

To me, The Stable Song will forever be a song of tranquil statement, one that will always, without fail, calm me and my frayed nerves. It is a song which emanates quiet, comforting, tinkling laughter, which echoes across the borders of the unknown and tames it, ever so temporarily. Uncertainty, anxiety and fear — those ever-discourteous miscreants — slink away, hurriedly burying themselves once more in that little box of Pandora’s.

For within the knitting of this song is an understated description of a certain type of life which speaks assurance. Do not ask me exactly what kind of life it is, however, because I do not know. But vague whispers of it will remind you of days and times long past. Of childhood, and of simpler times.

The life that Isakov directs to tender fruition in The Stable Song may never reveal itself to me. Not again. But I taste of it in the six minutes of immersion I am granted within its silky, golden embrace. I see sounds, hear scents, and feel sights. That first guitar hammer-on sparks it all — fragrant scented candles, which, as the song progresses, light themselves, and waft their sweet, serene aroma through the reaches of my pliable mind. A redolent mist, that encircles me and mine, and draws ever closer and closer. It curls, wisp-like.

And I am enveloped. Within a cloud of stability. Within a shroud of calm, as light as lightness itself. Doubt vanishes under the wave-like, steady auspice of The Stable Song’s rhythmic, familiar charm.

And there is nothing left to do but watch.

And watch:

********************

Come to me, clear and cold

On some sea

Watch the world spin in waves

Mad machine

*******************

It’s a simple life.

In the aftermath of listening to a beautiful song.

I have been listening to Butchered Tongue by Hozier on loop.

For the past few days, I haven’t been able to stop myself from marvelling at just how drop-dead gorgeous his Irish accent is. In the song, there’s only a little twang here, a little lilt there, with none of the full rhotic landscape that Irish proper can offer, in all of its consonant-shifting, vowel-flattening, aspirating glory. But it is enough, at least for me, to lend effect to the subject matter of the song.

My favourite lines from Butchered Tongue are:

************************************

As a child, it was the place names

Singin’ at me as the first thing

How the mouth must be employed

in every corner of itself

To say, “Appalacicola” or, “Hushpuckena,” like, “Gweebarra”

A promise softly sung of somewhere else.

**********************************

There are little nods to the long history of Irish-Native American solidarity in there, with the specific choice of Appalacicola, Hushpuckena and Gweebarra. The way he says each of these words breaks my heart, especially Gweebarra.

I’ve grown up watching Irishness and the Irish English Accent be mercilessly mocked in the global cultural mainstream. Drunks, leprechauns, brawlers, redheads, great green slurring buffoons, Guinness, St. Paddy’s Day, Michael Flatley Lord of the Dance, the whole works. Irish accents have been done to the death in every possible offensive variation. 

I only noticed relatively recently that practically every Irish musician I’ve listened to from the global cultural mainstream had completely cleansed the Irish English accent from their music, whether it be U2, The Cranberries, Enya, Westlife, The Frey, or The Script. I’ve noticed the same with Northern English music, where there’s a little more variation in accent, but it is still relatively neutered. The Rolling Stones, Oasis, Def Leppard, and even The Beatles, they all tend to swim with the current. (I personally think the Northerners sound far more Historically English than the notoriously clean, “polished” RP/Cambridge Accent, which sounds quite artificial to me after a degree in English.)

I find the masking the Irish undertake extremely tragic. The fact that it needs to be done at all, that these little dynamics have shaped what I have even been able to access, make me quite sad. As an Indian, I know the same shame of accent masking, neutrality and self-hatred. We do it to ourselves. If you’re not thinking about it, a fellow countryman will dutifully remind you. Both the Irish and the Indians have the scars of centuries-long language trauma on their tongues.

And this, the Irish relationship with English, simultaneously horrific and beautiful, got me thinking of Indo-Irish Solidarity. There is so, so much throbbing history shared between India and Ireland. So much shared struggle and historical collaboration. And of course, experience. Artificial Famines, Language, Dress, Genocide, Partition, Internal Division. But it seems to me as I write this that we Indians seem to have strayed very, very far from the memory of our anti-colonial struggle. Much further than Ireland, at least. Of course, it goes without saying that the Emerald Isle has its own notorious struggles with memory.

There is so much opportunity for solidarity between us in this shared struggle, in these shared contradictions! From the vast pool of admiration I have for the Irish, let me pick out a little droplet, and dedicate it to the Irish contribution to the English language.

Where would English be without the blood transfusions of creativity that Swift, Stoker, Wilde, Joyce, Shaw, Yeats, and Beckett donated to it? Where would English Literature be without them? I’ve always hated counterfactual history questions (would science have ceased forever and run backwards with its tail between its legs if the apple had killed Newton? NO!), but for the first time, as I consider this vacuum, I am genuinely at a loss for words. To think of English literature without even one of them is to have my heart break in two.

It is not just the Irish intelligentsia I find inspiring. On the tongues of any Irish person, the English language is given wings, and sounds to me like it was always meant to be spoken that way. Its rhythm, and its beauty, simply defies unitarism. I have felt this way about the Nigerian accent too, another gorgeous English accent I have come across. I hope one day that more of my people will understand this feeling of appreciation, and I hope also that the gross fetishisation of the GenAm and Cambridge/RP Accent will cease. I wish for India to come into its own on this matter someday. I do think Ireland might be a sibling, and yes, with its role as the petri dish of British Empire, an elder sibling, in this common cause.

For it is in the Irish that I see the naturalness, and the regality with which I see my own people speak English, whether it be the Tuluva, the Tamilian, the Malayalee, the Kannadiga, the Haryanvi, the Punjabi, the Mizo or the Bihari!

I wrote this sometime in 2022 for a competition. I think the prompt was “childhood nostalgia” or something similar. I look back very fondly on this piece.

Nostalgia lies in the soft buttocks of an animated Panda smothering the angled face of a ruggedly handsome Snow Leopard. It dwells in the bulging eyes of that very same Leopard getting the wind knocked out of him by those very same buttocks. It lives in the soft pop that echoes as the buttocks release their clamp-like hold on the unfortunate target. It exists in the slow, agonising moan of dismay that escapes the Leopard’s mouth as he realises what is happening. It revels in the small tuft of tail on the Panda’s backside that wiggles in slow motion as all of the above happens.

…

No, it does, I swear!

As Po the Panda and Tai Lung the Snow Leopard tumble down an endless flight of ancient Chinese stairs together, exchanging fancily animated Kung-Fu moves, they participate in the climax of a 2008 DreamWorks classic — Kung Fu Panda. A particularly hilarious moment in this climax that stands out to me even now, seared into my brain, is a five-second slow-motion clip of Po accidentally sitting on Tai Lung’s face during their epic final showdown.

To me, this stupid, glorious fraction of time is a symbol of simpler times long past, and of childhood and memory. One of the most memorable parts of the movie, those simple five seconds scream nostalgia and child-like glee to me, with the movie itself proving to be an unending, brilliant source of joy to me as a child.

Watching it in the darkest brightly-lit room I had ever been in; first-hand with my mother and sister in the first AC Theatre to open in my city, their half-lit faces turned up to the flickering screen while I sat in between, sneaking away tiny fistfuls of popcorn from under their noses.

Watching it with my father back at home on our little computer screen, his big arm resting heavily but comfortingly around my small shoulders, with me looking up to him every now and then in expectant glee and satisfaction as he threw his head back in laughter at all the right times.

Watching it on my own, on the cute little Windows XP-fired PC that we had, the epic fight scene more than satiating my boyish wonder as I opened it now and again during my ‘computer time’, as children who are granted this facility often do with things that they enjoy.

Was every single time that I eagerly watched that scene back then not an exercise in nostalgia as well? I strove to recreate the joy that I had felt the first time I was availed that experience, through whatever means available within my grasp as a child. Yet now, there lies potent nostalgia in those very attempts themselves.

For nostalgia is capable of inhabiting itself in layers, like a snug sheaf of letters filling out a desk drawer; in ways that roam in lands beyond the strict, watchful eye of that withered and ineffectual simile — proud King of her domain, and of nothing else. Language is shadow here.

This reliving of the reliving of nostalgia is an extremely complex process to describe, for it is one that is both beautiful and dangerous.

Beautiful, as a repeated examination of any entity under new conditions can yield gorgeous, novel perspectives that only improve the underlying experience: The angle that a familiar guitar chorus is oriented at as it crashes into me, suddenly recalibrated and noticed. The chunky consistency of a brushstroke in oils as it lumbers into my eyes, greeted with a radically different optical handshake. The soft caress of a muslin-thin wind, undressed by my skin in more tender a way than I could have ever imagined. The forgotten taste of a spice, hugged effusively by my tongue, and recognised afresh by some long-replaced nerve ending.

But dangerous too, as nostalgia sits all too close on the bus to that cranky old neighbour — pain.

Let us not address that shade. It stands alone at parties, and we shall not buy it a drink. Avoiding that spiritless spirit is difficult. It requires a certain disciplining of the self, and a compass that points towards brighter poles. One that doesn’t lead you to flail and drown in those icy, loving, seductive tundras of pain.

But then again, that flip side of nostalgia is a matter of preference, really. I personally wouldn’t want to drown in an animated Panda’s buttocks. Least of all those of a Panda from 2008. (And not just because animation has gotten much better since then, smartass).

I wouldn’t want to do that because it’d be fucking weird, my guy.

And so is nostalgia, to be perfectly honest.

Let escapism do as escapism does.

So there!

Thoughts on learning.

It’s been a year now since I graduated. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have gotten to take this time to myself after college.

Instead of throwing myself headfirst from one organised hierarchy into another, by formally continuing my education, or working a 9 to 5, I’ve been able to exist in the cracks of Indian society for a while, taking my own sweet time, and self-directing my learning. It has been extremely rewarding. The skills I cultivated since graduating last year were not skills that I was whipped into learning in any structured curriculum, or forced to develop for the purposes of corporate productivity. These skills were mine, are mine, and mine alone.

With the luxury of time, I am able to reflect on the teaching I received in college. I have been able to go back to my notes, sift through them, and re-examine the little gems I found interesting. Most importantly, I have been able to conduct this re-examination away from the controlled shadow of hierarchy, and in the light of this new, terrifying tropical paradise where the sun shines free. A.K. Ramanujan, O.V. Vijayan, Gautier, Huysmans and Petronius, the literary friendships I hold closest now, have all crystallised from me going back and re-examining the paths I nervously hurried down so long ago. They are my gemstones who came alive in the sun.

The endless ideas that were machine-gunned at point-blank range into my head in college have had the time to calm themselves, settle down and make friends with each other. This maturing could not have taken place in any other scenario. Or, I think, at the very least, it would have taken much, much longer.

Slowing down my learning has paradoxically led to it speeding up. Sure, I was fast in college. I was so fast. But I also remember all the terrible, performed anxiety of corporate ‘fast’ — of running through masses of material mindlessly because everyone else is, of knowing you could be doing so much more because someone else is, and of agonising constantly about just how much you’re doing to everyone you meet. You only have so much stamina for this performance that the hierarchy demands of you before your learning suffers, no? 

To be slow, and consistent, to take breaks when affected, to ponder, is to slowly fall in love with every little flower by the road, and to wonder where every leafy path leads. A certain libido of discovery is set aflame, which thrives in the depths of slow, considered affection. With knowledge of this deeper satisfaction, and with this libido straining at the reigns, I ‘accomplished’ far more with a far greater stamina.

And so, now, I can say this to myself with some confidence — that I have learnt the skill of making my way through reading, writing and scholarship without being whipped, blindfolded, through the forest. Don’t get me wrong, hierarchy has benefited me as well. All the signposts I collected from those busy undergraduate intersections in my five years have given me a sense of safety, as, map in hand, landmarks sketched out, I get to make my own decisions on where I want to go without precedent or propriety.

And oh God, is it freeing! 

I hope it lasts.

In a nutshell, I think learning needs time away from hierarchy to truly settle. Is this what they call unlearning?

Semi-rant on annoying online cultures.

I struggle with choosing between simple prose and the more decorated kind.

While I know, as almost everyone does, that there is a sweet spot between the two, I hate, with a burning passion, the insufferable binary that is constructed in the popular culture.

This binary comprises of two categories of person. The first is that distinguished ‘scholar’ who is so obsessed with ornate prose that she thinks simple prose is hot garbage for the literate illiterate. Simple prose, to her, performs the same function as those colourfully illustrated alphabet charts that children learn from, where ‘banana’ is next to a banana, and ‘monkey’ is next to a monkey, and so on. 

The second category of person, to me, is just as obnoxious as the first. So insistent is she on simple prose that communicates ‘efficiently’ to ‘the average reader’, that she will label anyone who so much as attempts a semi-colon a try-hard old fart. To her, writers who employ ‘purple’ prose are only trying to dominate their readers with unearned flashiness, or are compensating for their sad, failing sex lives. Combined with very shallow understandings of social justice, these styles can easily be derided as elitist, male, white, fascist, or whatever other adjective this type of person requires to keep up the excuse of never ever opening a book.

Each member on either side of this binary is required by the universal law of stupidity to come to a strict, manifesto-like conclusion for their preferences, operating with carefully cultivated, surgically precise exclusion. Brick-by-brick, they each construct and strengthen their identities while locked in their respective echo-chambers, derisively mocking poor, clichéd writing that is supposedly representative of the ugly other.

And where am I on this battlefield of morons? I both agree and disagree with both sides, and so find this binary utterly useless. Complicated, meaningless, borderline AI-generated, “postcolonial” prose is the norm in most writing competitions I apply for, and I’m sick of it. But I’m also sick of barebones, unimaginative prose that operates in tiny dramatic sentences. I’m. So. So. So. Sick. Of. It.

Obviously, I also love both styles, provided they are executed well. I love forbiddingly simple, clear prose that cuts through an idea like a knife, and I absolutely adore creamy, decadent prose that dances around a cluster of ideas like an annoyingly immaterial, beautiful mist.

And here’s the kicker. Being online, I almost forgot about my love for both, and for reading altogether — so obsessed was I with binary trains of social media hate! I’m very grateful to be off of social media, where the loudest morons reign.

As a writer, I now get to sanely self-reflect, and see where my priorities lie. Finding fault is easy. It’s as easy as breathing. But I don’t want to cultivate my style only through resentment — although resentment has definitely helped me identify paths I do NOT want to take. The next step after inevitable resentment, that everyone seems to skip, involves love, and respect for myself and my craft. How am I going to get the very best out of my style? How do I communicate my ideas, while also retaining my personality, and the dreamy whimsy that my young brain deems necessary to it? 

Now off of social media, I get the peace and calm required to think these things through! So here is what I think now.

While I think writing simple prose can be quite hard, it takes much, much more practice to be able to go complex. The sheer lack of practice in everyday life that contributes towards being able to execute complex prose is a lack I feel sorely. Every conversation, and every other piece of media does not operate at this level. Dips in literacy across the world do not help either, as language is being dumbed down to previously unseen levels. 

Keeping this in mind, I’d like to live simple, but I’d like to shoot for complex. I want to be readable. But I am also suspicious of simple language, and its ability to be commandeered and appropriated for horrific purposes. I don’t want every reader to have a single experience of my writing. I want it to be able to spark ideas along different chains. Room for interpretation is of utmost importance to me. This is a literary quality that I adore.

So this is how I will plan my journey. I will plod through the valley on my simple, reliable mule wherever I can, for the most part. But wherever I encounter an exciting ravine, instead of taking the simpler path down, I’d like to try to fly across it on a zany 1900s-type aerial machine, cellotaped together with pretentious imagery and grotesque sentences. I’d like to count this engineering as practice towards learning how to fly. Sure, most times, I will probably crash and burn in a massive, embarrassing inferno fuelled by my own farts, but it will be practice nonetheless.

I’m quite happy with this setup.

A childhood memory, involving lying and the irresistible rain.

When I was six, I remember getting a 10/10 in some inconsequential English test. It wasn’t Science or Maths. Of course it was inconsequential.

It was raining very, very heavily as the teacher handed out our little one-page answer sheets. A 10/10 was always nice, but all I could think about was the rain, and what it would feel like to stand out in the open corridor. My brain simply refused to think about anything else — I loved the Mangalore rains with everything I had. I was always the last one in when we were called to class after it began to rain. My favourite song was Rhythm of the Rain, by The Cascades.

No wonder I was love-struck. It had never rained like that before at school, and in the ten years that I attended, it never did again.

I wanted to be out in the corridor so, so bad. Through the window, I could see thick, grey blankets of rain shivering animatedly across the low light. The teacher, done with distributing the sheets, strictly instructed the class monitor not to let anyone out, and left.

I could have screamed. I was so excited. I got up from my bench, and shot my hand into the air. Thaiseer, the class monitor, came over. I grabbed my crotch and jumped around, half-crazy. I pretended to be so excited about my test results, that I could not hold in my pee. Thaiseer laughed a kind laugh and let me leave. Look at the muggu go.

It was the most beautiful experience the muggu had ever had.

I took my own sweet time.

I walked as slow as I could, up and down the corridor, my face turned deliberately into the spray of the rain. The wind was howling its guts out. Every tree around looked like it was disintegrating into itself. The rain was coming through the rectangular gaps in the corridor in cold, nearly-horizontal gusts. The wind was so strong that it came very close to picking me up and flinging me against the wall. Almost. When this plan failed, it cut through me with little tickling kisses that my skin remembers even now. It was heaven, pure heaven. I came back completely drenched, grinning like an idiot. I felt no shame whatsoever.

It was the happiest I ever got to be as a child. It was also the first time I realised that lying could have its benefits.

Figuring out what I think about superstition, from 16th-Century England to the Ambanis.

I’d like to move beyond the neat, fixed categories of what my convent school upbringing led me to believe about superstition — that it is the practice of the ignorant, the stupid, the primitive, and the unenlightened. This doesn’t satisfy me. I’d like to build up my own views on the subject.

I’ve encountered two categories of extremely superstitious people in my life. Those who live in a perpetual lack of safety, and those who live in a perpetual surplus of it. The binaries of urban/rural, educated/uneducated, western/eastern, or enlightened/ignorant don’t really do much for me. My categories are not universal, they’re just two categories that interest me, one set in industrialising England, the other in modern India.

Let me start with the first. In rabidly religious, swiftly-urbanising England, the most superstitious group of all were sailors, whose washed-up, sun-burnt corpses could be calculated by the ton. They had superstitions about everything — from ship naming, to unlucky numbers, to bananas, to cats, to tattoos, to whistling, and, of course, albatrosses. The most interesting superstition of them all, to me, is that clergymen were actively considered the worst kind of luck on the sea. They were considered the ilk of Jonah, the ultimate sign of doom.

The sailor, after all, was that category of person who lived in a limitless state of unsafety that boggled the mind. Where could a benevolent God be in the face of a hundred-foot wave that blocked out the sun? And so, while being ripped up by randomness, the sailor found superstition, and looked everywhere for a semblance of constancy, for universal signs and a kind of primordial external logic that operated beyond this grim, material world. This logic required such strength, that it went beyond even Christianity. Isn’t a loving, predictable God impossible in those horrifyingly deep waters that swallow the soul? Even now, the tendency amongst modern European sailors in various rituals like the line-crossing ceremony, is to acknowledge, with humility, that most demonstrably pagan of the Gods — angry, moody, irascible Neptune, whose endless whims must be appeased through the upkeep of ritual superstition.

Now, let us move to the other category. Surplus safety. Here, I’d like to come back to India, where some of the richest families the world has ever seen are superstitious to a fault. The National Media constantly televises the rituals they undertake. Every Indian, I bet, can conjure up a mental image of these families, bowing and prostrating and looking very shuddh and humble. In my opinion, these people, who live in an absolute surplus of safety, perform superstition out of a need to self-preserve in the context of the larger social fabric.

Especially in India, where income inequality is of such an incomprehensible magnitude, the wealthy, and even the middle-class, are forced to adopt various cultural attitudes to dispel guilt, and distract from the awful material reality of it all. One of many brilliant outlets for this is superstition, and religiosity. Assiduously following the orders of an astrologer with humility provides a neat logic for why these families excel on the social pyramid. As with the sailors, giving in to the rule of random assignation is horrifying. There can be no luck in merit.

Performing superstition thus provides a crucial outlet, in the guise of performed humility. It is both a private and a public purging. The private performance of superstition rids the individual of guilt (resulting in nauseating levels of narcissism), but as we move up the ladder of power and influence, it is absolutely necessary that the poor man is an audience to the rich man’s public performance of superstition. Don’t you see? The universal logic of power is set in the stars itself. My humility is only being rewarded as ordained by the powers that be.

This public performance of superstition thus helps justify the Indian economic hierarchy in those corners of the Indian mind where cold, hard Neoliberal Logic has not yet arrived. And caste interlocks so beautifully with both of these, does it not?

Finalism is the most potent drug a human being can ingest.

My thoughts on creative struggle.

Nietzsche came up in at least four different contexts and conversations over the last weekend.

I started off this year with the realisation that I am a very boring person, and I only seem to be collecting more and more evidence as the months go by. Or wait, it can’t be them, right? No, the only common factor here is me.

One of the Nietzsche conversations was with my friend Aman, who, very awesomely, helped set up this blog for me. He is also not boring, which is another nail in the coffin for me.

I also came across a Nietzsche meme a few days before meeting him. Here’s the thread where I found it, with all of the context about Alysa Liu, who’s the person in the second frame. In short, she displays the sense of whimsy and complete disregard for hierarchy that I, along with many others, think that Nietzsche advocates for in his conception of the Übermensch.

First, I will get this out of the way. Nietzsche is controversial. Great. That’s settled. Very nice. A lot of people think that. But I, I am cool and different. Or extremely boring and annoying, whichever works for you.

Inside Nietzsche, I see a very beautiful philosophy. It is an agonising, step-by-step, painful, giving-birth-to-yourself-in-a-shower-of-blood-and-placenta affirmation of joy, creativity and boundlessness. So there.

The guy was ridiculously well-read, even by the academic standards of his time, which were INSANE. And he still found, AFTER all this rattafication, the space in himself for instinctive kindness and a complex, nuanced appreciation of the arts. That’s crazy. Most nerds today are psychopaths. I think, springing from the appreciation for complexity, he also has some very beautiful advice for artists. He saw creativity as the fundamental drive to life, above all else. Life itself, to him, was an artistic endeavour. So yes, quite a dramatic guy. I like that. Many, many people do, actually. His ‘Birth of Tragedy’ was basically required reading for many of the coolest artists of the 20th Century. Not to mention philosophers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and many many others.

But, of course, there are also killjoys, who do not leave him any capacity for kindness, and who use his arguments to justify, of all things, slavery and genocide. To them, Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘Übermensch’ is used to refer to a fundamentally superior breed of man (and always man), a sort of noble master, who will whip the stupid, brainless slaves into submission. These people use a very muddled, very literal understanding of Nietzsche’s unfortunately-named concept of ’Herren- und Sklavenmoral’  (Master and Slave Morality) to justify their edginess.

This is a very lazy reading of Nietzsche. The only equivalent I can think of is if someone saw Alpenliebe and assumed that it was the ejaculate of a Swiss dude.

It is very clear to anyone that engages with him honestly, that he wants the Übermensch to transcend BOTH the Master and Slave Morality that he outlines. This is, literally, the ‘Overman’. Most people, beginning in English, think of Über, as “special”, or “premium”, or “super”, and take “Mensch” to be man, leading to ‘Superman’ as the immediate understanding, which is pretty much a huge turn off to most. This leaves us in a very boring place, honestly.

Let’s get into a little bit of the nitty-gritty here, because I think its worth it. Here are a few things about this ‘Overman’, very well stated, that thisarticle outlines. Note the difference in translation, across both spatiality and gender:

“Übermensch is usu­ally translated as “superman”, but this translation is somewhat misleading. There is a distinction in the German language bet­ween different uses of the word über — it can mean “over” or “above”, but it can also mean “through” or “across”.

A better translation may thus be “the trans-human”, a category that reaches through and goes beyond what we normally think of as human existence. In this interpretation, the Übermensch is not a superhuman comic hero, but rather a person who lives relatively unrest­rained by the normal dynamics of everyday life as we commonly experience them.”

In our new modern world, where, as Nietzsche says, “God is Dead”, and religion plays a declining role in our day-to-day decision making, it is the self-creation of values that  is of utmost importance. Even religious people, operating in a modern world where Nationalism is fusing more and more with religion, think like Atheists.

And this self-creation of values, to Nietzsche, does NOT prevent values like kindness, patience, love, non-violence or empathy from presenting itself in the Übermensch. As long as we arrive at these values through a truly interior process, and they are not lazily and superficially harvested from the fields of what he calls ‘herd morality.’ This also DOES NOT mean working in endless cycles of flipping around narrow hierarchies and working in shallow interpretations of thesis and anti-thesis. (The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house!)

Creativity lies beyond (and through!) this ugly marsh.

Yeah, so basically you don’t have to be a fascist. That’s nice, isn’t it?

But we do have to struggle against tendencies, like what Nietzsche calls ‘Ressentiment’ that come naturally to us in this process of transcending hierarchies. It is not simple, it is a continuous process that is actively painful. And that is why the Übermensch is more of a parable than some kind of a final state. My friend Aman wrote about our binary, hierarchy-flipping tendencies in I Want to Stop Defining by the Negative. In it, he says, “Wherever you find passionate people with strong opinions on ‘the better way’ to do things, the quickest way to carve out a niche is to define it in opposition to a vague status quo.”

He goes on:

“If your entire definition is “I am not X,” you are still controlled by X. You depend on the existence of the “boring dashboard” to validate your existence as the “exciting storyteller.” You haven’t actually said what you stand for, what you’re trying to build, what drives this specific work/activity/process. You’ve just pointed at something else and said “not that.” It is much harder to do the work of articulating what you actually are and explain it on its own merits.”

When I read this, I loved what a beautiful, instinctual, and honest articulation it was of a struggle that we all face, of overcoming ressentiment, of articulating ourselves without just oppositional binaries, and of truly embracing our creative spirits. All of these struggles are intrinsic to this crazy fellow Nietzsche’s manic obsessions, which is why I like him, and which is why you should read up on him when you get the time.

It’s always been the people in my life who affirm, in flashes, the small, everyday pitched battles that they fight against narrow, unnecessary hierarchies that seek to limit their imaginations, that I most admire. They fight these battles both within themselves, and also (whenever they have the energy) with the people who rest on the laurels of a lazy, unearned, undefended hierarchy. Even having that interior struggle exist is admirable in the face of such demanding, aggressive conformity in the societies we live in today.

This is why I love conversations with friends like this, with Aman, or Anu, or Anirudh, or Sanjana. This is why, when in conversations with such friends, their creativity, their intelligence (a kinder, grounded variant than that of the sneering dullard) and their commitment to bulldozing entirely unnecessary pedagogical hierarchies suddenly shines through, whacking me in the noggin, I feel so proud and happy to know people like that.

They are SO inspiring.

Let me finish up with this. One thing that I like about Nietzsche is that he has the capacity to be a giant troll, operating in some extremely stupid parodic spaces, where he intertwines myth, parable, and the genuine expression of deeply-felt emotion. So, let me try to do the same thing.

Here is an example of what it’s like in my head when I see a cool friend stick to their creative, pedagogical guns.

Aman shows me a cool project he’s working on.

Aman immediately gains 200 Kilograms of pure muscle. And then I turn on the TV, and see news of a caped Bangalorean Vigilante (who travels everywhere by bus) heroically fighting off waves of angry, hierarchical, and determinedly unimaginative Bellandur Tech Bros, as he defends the takeoff - in epic, creeping, slow-motion - of a helicopter struggling into the sky. This helicopter representing, of course, his drive to creativity, and his commitment to his own, self-fashioned values.

GET TO DA CHOPPA!