“Imagology is stronger than reality, which has anyway ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked…what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world……she had, so to speak, personal control over reality………My Paris neighbor spends his time in an office…..drives home, turns on the TV…..the latest public poll where the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest…..he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

It is naïve to believe that our image is only an illusion…….the reverse is true: our self is a mere illusion, ungraspable, indescribable, misty while the only reality, all too easily graspable and describable, is our image in the eyes of the others”

Milan Kundera has a way of saying things. The above extract is from different parts of the book ‘Immortality’.

In the end aren’t we all this and only this? With the number of imagologists around, do we even realize that maybe we are all just acting out our roles. At the end of it all, I think our generation is so completely confused and I am not even sure we even realize what the self is and what the image is. We are living our lives just based on the images that we have been exposed to.

I think the ones in most danger are the pseudo-intellectuals who may have high opinions on things but in the end don’t really care about anything at all enough to do something about it. So the ones who are running the nation are imagologists in the guise of care-takers of religion, castes (be it the Sikhs who are fighting it out or the moral policing RSS or VHP) who are creating the right images in front of the audience that ‘matters’ who are lapping it up and we the ‘educated’ are just incidental to the entire process. This is why this piece by Hindol Sengupta of CNN-IBN struck a chord.

In fact, even if we talk about personal relationships and people, the ‘image vs self’ conflict is omnipresent. Since the protagonists themselves are not sure of their position in many cases, I think the whole process of working out a relationship between two people (especially when we talk of the new age woman and man) has become so much more complicated.

I do not know when or how the end state (if there is something like that) can be reached. As I have written before in this blog, in India, I think our generation (what I call the possible Indian baby boomer gen) is definitely in for a ride – traumatic and cathartic but exciting.

“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi’s shoulders.
Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences.

Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. …… but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”

~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

These words kind of stood with me. Is it indeed true as Milan Kundera says, that what our lives are, are a result of what fortuities we notice and what we let go by? Is it as simplistic as that and is destiny just an aggregate of all the coincidences that we act upon? Or is it more a pre-defined one and what fortuities we notice was actually pre-defined as part of the destiny package? I guess that is a function of what our belief system is.

I have always been fascinated by the concept of the ‘unknown alternative’ and do believe that for most situations in our life, there is an alternative that was finally not taken. There have been any number of situations where my mind goes ‘hmm….this is where I am today…where would I have been had I taken that option?’. I have written about the movie Sliding Doors before. Though the movie was not really a classic, I found the concept interesting when I saw it a few years back. They make it a ‘known alternative’ and take both stories forward.

Of course this is not a simple topic to write, think or talk about. But sometimes there can be the right triggers to set a few scattered thoughts on…..

Afterthought: It does seem like my posts are becoming more melancholic than I would have wanted it to be. Have I been ignoring my birds of fortuity for too long?

Finally Kaps passed the book tag to me. To tell the truth, I am not a fan of these chain mails. Everytime I see something like this, I usually do not respond to it. It is almost a matter of principle for me that I should not fall under the pressure of spamming more people. Hence I am not going to pass this on.

But I am very bored today. Hence, here goes:

Number of books that I own: 100-200

Last few books that I bought

The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
A House for Mr.Biswas by VS Naipaul

Last book that I was gifted
Well almost never looks like…I cant remember when the last time I got a book as a gift.

Last few Books that I read

In addition to the ones I bought recently, I have bought and read:

The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
O Jerusalem by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins
Toxic by Robin Cook

Currently Reading

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Five Books that mean a lot to me

The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt - I think it is one of the best books ever that explain a concept in the simplest manner possible

Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie - If I was asked to choose one author, I would pick Rusdie. I have never read a work from a more intelligent author.

Atlas Shrugged/The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand - Really excellent. I have always admired the thought process behind these books

Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart - One of the books that was recommended during my B-school days when I still believed that I had it in me to do a finance job. Nevertheless, the book is a fascinating view of the Investment Banking world

Books I mean to read

The Moors Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
White Mughals by William Dalrymple