Reading a book is an investment
of time and effort. So, you have to be careful what you choose to read. Located
in a society with mostly low caliber pretentious writing, the collective premium
on quantity rather than quality, it become an arduous task to choose good
books. It took me few months of reading the best of Indian writers to realize
the pattern that lack the fervor and sincerity, it is a patch up staid work of
patronizing and proprietorship meant to awe the herd, an extension of self as
entitlement, guardian of society as wise writers and creative people
automatically elevated as overseer of wellbeing of unfortunate mass. In this
crass conception river is no longer river but god’s braid, land becomes godly mother,
trees are undoubtedly god’s miracle…such self righteous sacred sickness...and from this blessedness of profound disconnect
from reality they carry persistent civilizational itch and overbearing
self-assigned responsibility to search meaning of their goddamn life. Writing
in all-encompassing flourish and uncommon confidence lacking qualities and restraints of self-reflection with meagre skills they rush to quainter aspects
and bigger questions of life for which they are naturally fated to find answers, existing all the while in plain sight as greatness of ancient mythical wisdom
and uniquely gifted cave dwelling ancestors. Having appropriated miracles through words in simultaneous
immunity from nuance or empathy they stampede for recognition for their
nonexistent abilities, to claw to greater showcase, a grim battle to anchor
their mediocrity into rewards, positions, recognitions without which they face abyss of anonymity hence all the attributes and desperations to social climb of middle class -the
one that truly connects them to common people by default, and validate veneer of
sophistication over crude nouveau rich amass. It is when I read best of international
writers that I realized amazing depth of lack in Indian writing -ofcourse with
very few and rare exceptions. As a reader it took lot of effort to create
framework for accessing better writing.
I have read the best of fiction
over the decades, and shifted to short stories due to personal lack. Recently
as reality barge with alarming consequences I shifted to nonfiction to tighten
my bearing, I truly thought I am done with fiction. And then I came across Orbital
by Samantha Harvey, it is the premise that excited and immediately riveted me.
Never have I read a fictional perspective from space, and none written as far
as I know. What further fascinated me was that it is not science fiction, I do
love to read science fiction but possibilities of factual description from
space in the framework of fiction was too good to miss. I have watched NASA
footage of earth from space (stunning movie ‘Gravity’ too) as also videos of inside
of space station and always wondered about day-to-day life, feeling and
thinking through this space capsule observing as they are something very few humans
have (few minutes in space left William Shatner in deep sense of sadness and grief
“made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound”). A limited writer
would’ve messed it up but Harvey is brilliant. “And in time we come to see
that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a
universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just giddy mass of waltzing
things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate
and ever evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of
mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a
shattered edifice that lets light through.” The book is a prose on life
from space, a poetry of life in all its fragile splendor. It is quite a thin
book (capsulated as a day in space with 16chapters as 16 orbit around earth
with sunrise every 90minutes), but I spent near about two months to read it. “Maybe
the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead
of being, of decentering ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to
understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and
wave tossed offering of peace.” It is such a beautiful expression that you
reread paragraphs, pages and chapters (for instance the last page I read for
three days!), and start to have surreal dreams about earth as if moving across
the window. This is a defining book in many ways, this book places iconic earthrise
picture (William Anders, Apollo 8, 1968) in its entire perspective,
overwhelming context. “Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold -to
protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre
loveliness. This thing, that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably
home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can human not
find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but fretful
demand. Can we not stop tyrannizing and destroying and ransacking and squandering
this one thing on which our lives depend? Yet they hear the news and they’ve lived
their lives and their hope does not make them naïve. So what do they do? What action
to take? And what use are words? They’re humans with a godly view and that’s
the blessing and also the curse.”
“It seems easier on balance
not to read the news. Some do and some don’t, but it’s easier not to. When they
look at the planet it’s hard to see a place for or trace of the small and babbling
pantomime of politics on the newsfeed, and it’s as though that pantomime is an
insult to the august stage on which it all happens, an assault on its gentleness,
or else too insignificant to be bothered with. They might listen to the news
and feel instantly tired or impatient. The stories a litany of accusation,
angst, anger, slander, scandal that speaks a language both too simple and too
complex, a kind of talk in tongues, when compared to single clear, ringing note
that seems to emit from the hanging planet they now see each morning when they
open their eyes. The earth shrugs it off with its every rotation. If they
listen to the radio at all it’s often for music or else something with an innocence
or ultimate neutrality about it…something with a sense of play, of things
mattering and then not mattering, of coming and going and leaving no mark. And then
even those they listen to less and less”. Reading these lines seems something
similar to what you experience in meditative silence in nature, the stillness that
lasts in profound awareness and becomes part of your being, an armor against overwhelming
crass. But then there is also an inescapable realization “…then one day
something shifts. One day they look at the earth and they see the truth. If only
politics really were a pantomime. If politics were just farcical, inane, at
times insane entertainment provided by characters who for most parts have got
where they are, not by being in any way revolutionary or percipient or wise in their
views, but by being louder, bigger, more ostentatious, more unscrupulously
wanting of the play of power than those around them, if that were the beginning
and the end of the story it would not be so bad. Instead, they come to see that
it’s not a pantomime, or it’s just not that. It’s a force so great that it has
shaped every single thing on the surface of the earth that they had thought,
from here, so human-proof.”
Apart from each and every sentence
what I found particularly brilliant was unique take on Apollo11 moon landing,
the view of Michael Collins -the third astronaut who stayed behind while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. “Everybody is invisible -Armstrong and Aldrin
inside the lunar module, humankind unseen on a planet that could easily, from
this view, be uninhabited. The strongest, the most deducible proof of life in
the photograph is the photographer himself -his eye at the viewfinder, the warm
press of his finger on the shutter release. In that sense, the most enchanting
thing about Collin’s image is that, in the moment of taking the photograph, he
is really the only human presence it contains.” So is the disquieting
reference of Sergie Krikalev -the soviet cosmonaut who got stranded in space
for almost a year as Soviet Union disintegrated. “Humankind is not this
nation or that, it is all together, always together come what may. He sits in
timeless stillness amid the module’s perpetual eighty decibel machine vibration
while around him the green Velcroed flammable walls close in airlessly. And each
day and week the crack on its hull widens and Krikalev’s smile seems more and
more vaunted and more and more godly. Let there be light, he seems
quietly to say”.
