This month has been an especially introspective one not only due to the holiday season and the time spent at home with family, not to mention the usual hulla ballu about New Year, but also because this winter break is the last break before the last semester of college life. There has been a lot of soul searching regarding future goals, career options and the kind of adult I want to become. This blog is a result of such countless musings too, to channel that line of thought. The experience is similar to the time after school was over, when one was taking stock of the past, present and future, reassessing interests, aptitude and there was a general lack of confidence about the time to come. This time though, there is a difference and this post is about the why of it.
School was not a boring place; quite the contrary. I have been very lucky to be a part of such amazing institutions, both my school and college have moulded me to become who I am today and there are cherished memories attached to both places. But today I want to talk about the journey that took place alongside these institutions, the memories that are not attached to places and faces. The memories that will always remain an intrinsic part of the way I think and talk and influence the way I perceive the world and in turn, be perceived by it.
Studying literature and taking it up as a major in the country, or even in the world, is usually not seen as a ‘fruitful’ activity- in the sense that literature graduates are usually seen as whiling their time away, talking about abstract ideas in some jargon, disconnected from reality and the job market available to these graduates is shrinking by the minute. Apparently. When I took up literature three years back, it was a choice I had made consciously, something that I wanted and many times since then I have found myself second guessing my decision too. There have been days when I have wondered about the need to analyse seemingly unimportant details and even the impossibility of a job that can pay bills with this specialization. There have been moments where my friends and I have discussed about the insignificance of Freud’s parapraxis, the analogy between the landscape of the mind and the landscape imagery of the book and the sheer futility in such critical analysis- this needs to be seen against the backdrop of growing anxieties amongst graduates about getting a job- how is this information going to get us placements after college?
If there was a time machine at this point, I would want to go back to those times and whack myself on the head for such naive presumptions and such stupidity. Studying literature was never about reading ‘Jane Eyre’ and closing the book. It is not about reminiscing the heroic times of “Iliad” or ideal glory of “Ramayana”. It is not about the protagonist, the author, the poet, the government, the King, the mad woman in the attic- no, it is about all this and more- it is about you and me and everything around us. Even today, when people ask, “so you just read books?”, I want to jump “Yes! And isn’t that everything?” Very few courses are as interdisciplinary as literature- we get to study about countries, their economies, how it affected the people, what the people wanted and what their reality was like, how developments in science made reason paramount in the Enlightenment Era, how the next era considered it over-rated, the social context, the political context, the historical context and its relation to the present context. Reading literature has widened so many horizons, allowed me to inhabit so many places and realities and live so many lives in one lifetime. It has given me a new pair of lens to look at the world and equipped me to understand its many inadequacies as well appreciate the gift of life.
There are so many mistakes I have made in life and so many instances that given a chance I would do them differently. Taking up literature though, is not one of them. Reading Beckett, Camus, Kalidas, Amitav Ghosh has left a resounding impact on me and once you read them, you cannot see the world as you once saw it. Today at yet another junction of life, I cannot but help look back fondly at our discussions on feminism, language, the government and everything else. Each time I am left a little unsettled, whether by a tragedy or the current affairs and at the same time, I am glad because I know the task of theory or analysis is not the right answers, but asking the right questions. “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” (T. S. Eliot). At this point, it is futile to wonder if there will be anything for me to do in the future. There is so much to do in this world, so much left, so much unspoken- the question here is, will I be able to do it? I remember last year, when a senior of mine had graduated, she had said, it should not be B.A. (H) Literature; it should be B.A. (H) Life. I laughed that time. I knew what she said was true. Today, I really know it is true.
Sparks in Vacuum 