The Hurt Locker

What can make a man unafraid of death? If his life is not worth living—irredeemable—and the end of it is a decidedly better alternative to its continuation. What then if it is the irreverence that injects the sublime into living? The utter disregard for the most primal fear frees him in a way nothing else can. Because his mind is unfettered, his actions are not crippled by the (potential) fatality of consequences. They are compulsively reckless; they release the being from the cage of fear and foreboding. Two sides of the same coin?

This is my single most important takeaway from “The Hurt Locker.” I will skip the chance to analyze and rate it (though I think I have said more here than I could have through a review). It is a movie unlike most others on war. It simply tells you, War is a drug. And let me add, for people like Staff Sergeant William James.

Toward the end of the movie, you realize that the choice for James is between love and fear. And he chooses both, in a way. His fear of ordinary, grounded existence pushes him as much as his pure love for what he does best drives him. To him, the life most others lead is probably even more terrifying than death. Surely, he is an escapist then. Yet, you see he’s anything but one. Both judgments are deserved, for both crimes are committed.

Everything I say about James seems insipidly worded, pablum. For he is that kind of a mystery. You can only watch the movie and then maybe you’ll get what I’m trying to say. Long after you’ve seen it, as you’re sitting by the window, wondering, things will fall into place.

excerpt

Her body fights and extricates her mind from those bubbleheaded years. Memory is a living thing, she thinks. Where it is amputated, severed, it swiftly grows itself into a whole again. The completeness in her memory makes up for the void in her present. The laws of compensation. It is a game, she believes, where the conscious and subconscious are at play. The objective of the game is to salvage the self, to not let it lose respect for itself. Now she understands self-respect. That’s what her life has become: a pursuit to earn her self back. She is returned to her world now. To enterprises undertaken in another bubble. A space of reason and practicality that she has to furnish with the living furniture of honest toil and reparation. She feels ready.

PS: It's an excerpt from what I'm working on. Just wrote this bit and felt like putting it up.

i’m so sorry!

I don’t know—maybe I know but don’t quite get it—why Tiger Woods has to apologize to everyone and anyone. What possible crimes could he have committed? His public apology would have been fitting in magnitude had he mortgaged the world’s oil fields to Martians for a romp with nubile, supple aliens.

International sportsmen seem to have made Faustian bargains with their sponsors, their media managers, and the general public. The “with great power comes great responsibility” dictum has been twisted beyond context. How can it be that people are stupid enough to look up to public figures as perfectly moral archetypes?

What a pity Tiger Woods is such a wimp! If his only “problem” is that he likes sex with multiple women, he should just never have married and spared himself the effort of doing it on the sly—given his list, it must’ve been like hiding an elephant in a cupboard.

How wonderful it would’ve been had Tiger Woods just carried on with his business, unapologetic and unperturbed. He would’ve lost the sponsors, half his wealth in divorce settlements, his media-created public image—basically everything extraneous to his actual talent. With a media wave of derision behind him, he would have returned and won a major just like old times. But that was not to be. This world is warped. Here we have to issue apologies and publicly atone to be deemed cured.

to cut a long story short

I was ready to resign
To the fury of indifference, convinced
That inaction will (at least)
Shelter me from the heart of feral hatred

The immediate aftermath—
I wanted to grow my usual carapace that
Saner days and weeks had worn down
Like water sheets ploughing soft earth
Leave me alone!

But you stood. Rooted.
In the corner of my eye
Refusing to budge: “I’ll be here”

I shrank and withdrew
Indignant and stubborn
Hurt and accusing,
Burning bridges to the island

Oh what hubris, how selfish!
Reading of the balance statement
Actually, it’s quite clear
He’s wrong and you’re wronged. Pronounced.
Advice to you: Don’t you bother looking out.
Tch tch…not worth you

But you stood. Rooted.
In the corner of my eye
Refusing to budge: “I’ll be here”
Even when

Shadows grew long
Night after night
And wildflowers became weeds

What happened then?

While I was doused
By apathy’s anesthetic
You (must have)
Cut open my empty chest
And like a helping to the famished
Left a warm heart inside
For when I woke up that morn
It throbbed

Epilogue: to cut a long story short

A firefly blinking
I relayed my signal to
Where you stood rooted, refusing to budge
Saying “I’m here”

intellect and cleverness

Being intellectual versus being clever. There’s a difference she apprehensively explores. Cleverness works in a tightly packed arrangement; she uses some very common form of it, which she finds in abundance in engineers and programmers, to make moves in her life (like a videogame with made-up rules). It’s a quickness she discovered and exhibited in school, where the brightest always answered first. It’s a sharpness she finds comforting, yet wants to grow out of. It hangs on to her—reminding her of the many occasions when it has propelled her from the contrails of competition.

Now is too late to escape. Her constitution has been altered. She doesn’t have a core that is worth an honest investigation. There’s nothing unknown in her, so there’s nothing unknown in her world. Convenience has turned out to be lastingly seductive; she cannot, is powerless, to leave her arms. What lies ahead?

Will she outwardly ridicule art and abstractness and intellect and the spirit of exploration to quell her inner dissatisfaction with herself? Will she marry self-mockingly? Will she deny her inner misery and dreams and undertake a normal existence? Will she never pursue the intellect and challenge the verdict of fate? Will her life be a series of limp undertakings and therefore protected from the depths and darkness of true exploration?

I choose to

You choose who comes into your life. You choose what becomes of it. If you get yourself in a mess, you better get yourself out of it. Forget the past; you can’t improve history. No matter what, you can choose to start afresh. If you believe in this, you’re ready to take the blows without looking for excuses.

Where the spirit falls short

My voice slumps
In conversations with you
What do I talk about?
My tongue hangs dry like tinder
Ready to catch fire at petty provocation
Then, as you say, I keep the phone

The new sun beams cold rays
On either side of the peninsula
Where we lie, at the mercy of geography
Chained to the remains of last night’s dreams
Distance is a poor excuse for what separates us

I bank on memories
To offer you some vestige of lingering affection
Being apart breeds new images
It stiffens the soft cotton of your sari
I somehow forget: Of the nine yards you draped
You kept the longest to shield me
From His harsh gaze

Now, I think of you as the Past
A temporal truth
The Present has saddled me with a different version of it
Teaching me the composition of silence,
And the war that wages when human beings retreat into themselves
This is a more lasting truth, I tell myself

You and I
Travellers of different landscapes
Cannot concede
That we are separated by a wilderness called human nature
Intermittently, we make cripples of ourselves
In trying to reach out

The boundaries between are not physical
They rise where the spirit falls short
There’s little place for largesse
In hearts that have shrunk with time

Yet, like all cruel/blessed things in life
You dare to believe in your notion of me
And allow selective ignorance
To eke out pounds off irrational happiness
Preserved even in a deluge of ready evidence
Against a son
Who is frugal with love