I Have Questions

I turn 31 today. Unlike last year, when the reality of a twenty-something becoming a thirty-something brought a big change in how I perceive myself, turning thirty-one brings no such change. This number doesn’t deserve dedicated musings. 

But the year does. Or even if it doesn’t, I just wanted an excuse to write through the day. (For myself.) So I turned my ritual of reading my diary entry as material for this blog—a few of the many questions I asked myself this year. 

Just questions. No answers. 

One. 

Isn’t a slightly dysfunctional world with more individual freedom significantly better than a functional society—i.e., where basic survival needs are mostly met—with conformity as the norm? What’s the point of living for the sake of survival? To meet the objectives of the game of evolution? Huh!

I don’t know if and how we can find a scientific objective answer to the most fundamental human wants. Maybe someone has already figured it out. I am not aware. But I’d bet among all the competing wants—known via all possible ways—freedom would be somewhere up there.

And if that’s so, shouldn’t we build a society where freedom becomes the North Star? Why don’t we?

Two. 

There are those who keep writing capitalist critiques. To them, I ask: We know it already. What is your point?

There are those who are blinded to the follies of capitalism. To them, I say… nothing.

The ones that make me the most uncomfortable are those who are in the middle: those who know everything wrong with our capitalistic society but have chosen to believe this is the best among the competing alternatives. They will remind you of Lenin’s Russia and Mao’s China. They will tell you to go back to the time when the Berlin Wall fell. They will show stats on global progress. So they will tell you, this is the best we have found in hundreds of years, so why don’t you find a way to live with your values in the rules of capitalism?

But because those who say things like these are the ones enjoying the fruits of capital, they will occasionally show guilt. But what for? What good is your privileged guilt doing to those who suffer—on whose exploits you have found your happiness?

So, I ask: What does a society look like where my joy isn’t fundamentally rooted in someone else’s pain? Can we at least imagine it? Can writers and artists escape the traps of capitalism to never accept and keep imagining alternatives in their imagination? Is it too much to ask for?

And wait, sir, I ask myself: what the fuck have you imagined? Do it.

Three.

Decades later, when Instagram will finally see its well-deserved death—nothing can escape death, except ideas—scholars of modernity will scratch their heads: how did those living in those times—referring to our time—deal with such a jarring mix of sensations? How did they process a photo of the state-sanctioned murder of kids in Gaza followed by a photo of their friend vacationing in Paris, followed by a comedian cracking a joke, followed by a rant on dating apps, followed by someone else doing whataboutery of the Gaza massacre with something else they care about more?

This is not normal. Don’t we need time to pause and process the grief? Isn’t there some indecency backed into the transient nature of these ‘stories’? What does it say about our society?

What kind of psychic numbing is happening? Are we becoming numb to inhumane tragedy? Is our ‘solidarity’ restricted to reposting ‘All Eyes on Gaza’ sticker because we don’t know what solidarity means anymore?

What have we become? How will we come out of this?

Four. 

Language shapes thought. Why do we want to define multi-varied experiences into neat definitions? Why are there so many categories? We are so messy—why can’t we have fun in the chaos?

Take relationships. Why do we have to define how we feel about someone else through established categories? What if some of them can’t have names? 

Look who is speaking. Because I think this is not just about categories. It’s about writers—myself included—wanting to capture the vastness of human experience into some permutation and combination of 26 letters. We want to describe life in words, but so much is lost in this translation. It’s possible, yes, but you have to get to Proustian level of detail to go beyond the ordinary. 

Which is why I feel envious of those with the camera. How much does a properly-angled close-up shot reveal to those who have the emotional capacity to read faces? Nothing needs to be said. No categories needed. 

Five. 

I don’t think I understand my country. But I want to. That’s why I do journalism. 

But my lack of understanding leads to this perpetual dilemma: is it possible to know what kind of society we are living in while we are inside the society as a living being? Am I in Nazi Germany? I don’t think so—because I have read history, and I have stepped foot on a concentration camp outside Berlin, and it feels demeaning to compare modern India to the horrors of the holocaust. 

But what if we are on the road to a tragedy of a similar kind? Even Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir—my intellectual heroes—downplayed what was to come. Am I making the same mistake? Or are we exaggerating? 

How am I supposed to know? And by the way, even if I do know, what material change will this understanding bring to my actions? What good does truth-seeking journalism for truth’s sake—as I believe is the right way to do journalism—do if it doesn’t bring any change? 

Six. 

Oh. My. God. What do I do with the immorality of my imagination? 

I live two lives. One the world gets to see. Where—like everyone else—I am playing a character. And I diligently follow to the best of my ability rules for being a fairly decent co-existing human. Where certain ideas of morality—like don’t kill others—exist. 

But my imagination knows no such rules. Because my imagination can do anything and no one will know anything and it won’t do good or bad to whatever I am imagining. Yet, what if some ideas in there are grossly immoral based on the real world’s morality? Does that make me a bad person?

Seven. 

Why do so many people live in a perpetual state of fear? How many of these fears are real and which ones are manufactured? What does it take for people to break free from it and experience freedom? What can writers do to help? What can I do? 

Eight. 

Is there any point in trying to escape suffering? If there is no suffering, there is no life, right? Because only death can eliminate suffering. So why try to escape suffering at all? 

Or is it actually possible that the idea of romanticising suffering is just another writerly delusion because they can’t imagine a society organised around joy? Do I just see things more clearly or am I falling for the trap?

Nine. 

Oh hello. Do those who don’t create (and mostly consume) ever realise how vulnerable creators are? Especially those who create art, especially those who create art by scratching the depths of their heart? Do they know the creator is mostly creating to ask:   

“I have something to say… do you see what I am saying? Do you get it?”

Do you know or you don’t? If you are friends with anyone who dares to create, is it really hard to hold them and tell them that you are proud of them? Can’t we as a society do that?

Ten. 

Falling in front of my own eyes often feels it’s (even though not-really-quantifiable) worse than falling in front of the world. Know what I mean? 

Like I often ask: What kind of person do I want to be?

Which reveals my values. That given I had full control over my actions and behaviours and motivations, this is who I would be. 

But then real world is so messy and we can’t always be that person. And as someone said somewhere, the project of life is going from who you are to who you want to be. And so, in that process, repeatedly—endlessly—you have to meet yourself in the mirror on failing to live your values as you’d like to. 

Because I am just another man, and I will probably repeat the follies the previous men have committed—who the fuck am I to think I’m different? 

So should I just change the destination? No one has forced the values upon me. I can change it and pick the easy ones. But that sounds so cowardly. So I ask: Do I have the courage to stay on track? 

Eleven.

I don’t understand why we as a society are obsessed with consuming knowledge and stuffing our brains with so much information. Were our brains designed for this? Did evolutionary forces know we will become an information species?

We really need just a set of limited information to get through life. One can pack all of that in countable pages. For a good life, I mean. 

Most information is anyway about problems that humans have manufactured. And then they created information around it. And then they complain of information overload. Right? Are these even real problems?

Why obsess about understanding when you can just be? Or maybe I am in the wrong subset and people are just really being? 

Is it really hard to know that wisdom isn’t neatly correlated with knowing more facts, more data or reading more books? 

Twelve. 

Growth. Growth. Growth. Everywhere you see, everyone wants growth. A country wants economic growth. Employees want career growth. Well-meaning people want personal growth. And oh lord, lovers want love to grow and become the best version of themselves. 

But why? What kind of ideology has hijacked us into believing that growth means progress? I mean… growth as a means to an end is acceptable. Economic growth as a necessary condition for global poverty is a fair (though debatable) premise. 

But what about this continuous obsession with self-improvement? What is it for? What is the end goal there? A better society? But that’s weird because it’s hard for me to believe a good society would want people obsessed with improving themselves, always believing something requires fixing. Will it?

What if I don’t want to fix things? What if I like things broken? What if don’t want my life to be efficient?

Do you know what I mean? If you don’t, I am just asking: Can we please just have a little more fun in this one little life of ours?

Thirteen. 

What if the aims of art don’t align with what most people want? What if art isn’t really useful? What if art negates growth? Wait: does art need a justification to exist? And if it doesn’t, then are artists the most self-indulgent and selfish breed? 

Can we imagine a world without artists? Has someone created art to help us imagine an artless world?

Fourteen. 

I am operating at the rate of one heartbreak per annum. (Optimal?)

And so my diary is inked with questions. It’s book-length material, so we’ll skip it for today. But given the energy I have invested in capturing the depths of my feelings and remaining as clueless as I was before the capture began, I wonder: is love the greatest mystery of humankind? Can we ever figure it out? Is there any point in trying?

“I think… if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts,” Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina. 

What if he was right?