The ‘Unconventional’ Choice is not a choice
Photo: Karan Madhok
Personal essay by Sourima Chakraborty: ‘I opted out of my profession soon after, much to the chagrin of my well-wishers. The day I told my mother how I wish to live—or rather, how I need to live—she suspected that I might be reading the wrong kind of philosophy books.’
I sit in the supervisor’s office. There is a settee at the side, and somehow, I feel undeserving of it. So, I take the chair. I have been summoned for sliding down the ‘performance curve’. The job is like any other job: Not too bad, yet with nothing much good about it. I know the prescriptions by heart—work lengthy hours (or, pretend to, at times), talk to the right people, show up at the right place at the right time—and yet, I can hardly find myself keen enough to follow them.
When I dive into a colosseum of memories, I wish I could stumble upon that instant, that Bollywoodesque moment of indecision, where the man is at the door of a dawdling train, his arms reaching outwards, the woman foxtrotting not far behind, perfectly torn between destinies and choices, and sentimental music playing in the background. But I never find it, and thus, all my beginnings are nebulous in nature. What I find, though, are fragments—a few of them brighter than others.
The supervisor asks me, “What do you want out of your life?... Do you have any ambition?”
And at times, it also happens that your universe finds expression in recurring abstractions—a colour, a song, a lover. Then you see that you are just a point where a bit of the worldly matter converges.
At first, I am taken aback by being addressed in person, and I don’t know how bad it is. But soon it dawns on me that I am utterly out of words. How ridiculous, and even rude, it is for a person to not be able to respond to this question. I sit there, in the quiet, craving for a more technical question, to which I don’t know would be a befitting response.
“The work is challenging because it needs discipline and hard work” he says, “It has very little to do with your intelligence.” Though I am not sure how he uses the word ‘intelligence’, I think about the copy of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, which lies on my work desk, and wonder if my colleagues think I am an intellectual snob and have not kept it to themselves. Always a misfit in social circles, I have never bothered much about being in control of narratives. He adds, as if right on cue, “You have to be a good competitor to your colleagues. Either you aim for the best, or you are not in the game at all.”
Perhaps, no other society glorifies competition like ours, and at the base of it lies our threadbare insecurities shrouded by aspirations of more affluent and luxurious lifestyles. Ours is a culture of material ambitions, otherworldly hope, and plastic promises of well-being. There is no dearth of meaning felt as long as one is playing the cutthroat game of survival, simply because it keeps one busy. But, in times of great uncertainties and hopelessness, I have found myself resorting to words, residing in rhythms, dabbling in colours, and breathing in nuances.
For often it so happens, that when you are struggling to express something verbally, you find a string of words embedded in a book, which stare right back at your inability. In her book, Bluets—about her obsession with the colour blue—Maggie Nelson writes:
At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my cv it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel “in progress” rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette. One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.
And at times, it also happens like in Nelson’s book of blue, that your universe finds expression in recurring abstractions—a colour, a song, a lover. Then you see that you are just a point where a bit of the worldly matter converges. You know that your supervisor means well, he is only trying to understand, but so are you. You find the exhaustion in your eyes reflected in the figures from Edvard Munch paintings. You feel longings spoken of only by the likes of Pessoa or Kafka. Or as Fernando Pessoa writes in The Book of Disquiet, “And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.”
Needless to mention, I opted out of my profession soon after, much to the chagrin of my well-wishers. The day I told my mother how I wish to live—or rather, how I need to live—she suspected that I might be reading the wrong kind of philosophy books. The existential angst of Camus or Sartre did not make much sense to her. She asserted that life is not like those French neo-noir films that I devour—the films which speaks of a life not taken too seriously, of doomed romances, of the heartbroken car thief, Michel and his belle Patricia (A bout de souffle, 1960), or of the misadventures of Ferdinand and Marianne by the sea (Pierrot Le Fou, 1965).
“And you can always write if you want to while working a well-paid job,” she said. “And you can give it up later, if you ever become famous.”
I know. Wishing to be close to a life stripped bare of its embellishments cannot be called an ambition, per se. A career has to be built out of shuffling resumes, spewing out business jargons, and at the end of every ambition, there is a truckload of money to buy perks and stupor. To be practical is to be calculating—and anything else is madness. Everyone who tries to ‘go out of the way’ must surely have tons of ancestral money to fall back on. (In every Bengali household, a common notion prevails that the greatest writer who ever lived is Rabindranath Tagore, and he happened to belong to a well-to-do family)
I live in a society which predominantly believes that art and literature are only pastimes of the elite. In a country where two-thirds of the population still struggle to access the most basic of amenities, prevalence of such notions is not unwarranted. It’s a humongous and populated country, replete with its own history of wars, invasions, famines, and plagues, where fear is often at the forefront of individual survival. I read in Salman Rushdie’s autobiographical essay called “Another Writer’s Beginnings” that, when asked as a child what he wished to be when he grew up, he would say, A writer. My childhood responses were more aligned with my parents’ bourgeois dreams—a doctor, a scientist, or a millionaire—and my own realization did not come easily to me, not without the accompanying guilt of burying their hopes.
To an artist, it is as much about each stroke of brush, as it is about the final painting, or the vision of the painting that he carries all along. Each caress of a paintbrush is his confrontation with his own naked reality, and there is nowhere to escape to, not even in the promise of the beautiful picture he might think he’s working towards.
I often think about how wishes are spoken with such marvelous simplicity, to the Gods or stars, and a gnawing realization follows that often they actually come true, only not in the way we had imagined. Just as, if a paper man were to find himself alive one fine day, perhaps, he’d be exhilarated, confused, and fascinated at the same time, admiring at the fact that he could contain so much. He had lived all along, in his books, knowing there are only two sides to the page, and that is all there is. Our choices are no different, which are almost always reduced to a single glorified moment of action, that, in the most cliched words— ‘changes a life forever’? As if, what one hopes to get out of this choice (happiness, whatever it might mean to him) and not how he lives with it day after day, tells the tale.
On her own ground, my mother was right. What we all seem to be working towards, is adorning our own bubble of existence, to protect ourselves from the greater, darker, cynical picture. It is no wonder that, in the ‘real world’ which runs on chariot wheels of anxiety, there are always a few who tend to fall out of line. But, contrary to what spiritualists might say, this ‘falling out of line’ is not a moment of salvation, either. Can one fall out of one’s human tendencies or necessities? And when he is standing all by himself, having given up all designated roles played in the world, can he help being afraid?
In a letter to his brother, the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh once wrote, “I shouldn’t precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice.” Indeed, there are certain necessities, as human as any other, which manifests quite inexplicably, irrespective of a person’s immediate circumstances. Perhaps there are as many layers to perception, as there are brushstrokes in a painting. Any layman would agree that a painting is more than just an assemblage of individual brush strokes. But to an artist, it is as much about each stroke of brush, as it is about the final painting, or the vision of the painting that he carries all along. Each caress of a paintbrush is his confrontation with his own naked reality, and there is nowhere to escape to, not even in the promise of the beautiful picture he might think he’s working towards.
And yet, he learns the strangeness of symmetry from sunflowers. He is fascinated by patterns which speak to him in a language he does not understand. He understands the mystery of symmetry better when he looks at the whole picture with an objective clarity. By objective clarity, I refer to a quality which prevents him from searching for pockets of familiarity in the foreignness, or from disregarding the foreignness in the familiarity. But nonetheless, he harbours within him an overwhelming appreciation for each and every detail, and also revels in their insignificance.
One time, I had undertaken the task of making pizza (from scratch, that is, bread, sauce and everything) for ten people, along with a friend. Till date, the art of baking is a mystery to me; you never know how it will turn out. I was jittery, kept my hands busy, and resented my friend who seemed to be having a good time. He dug out a book on baking from the internet and said he wanted to understand the proportions better; I thought he was just stalling. Later, he showed me a sentence which said that one knows that the yeast is properly activated when the mixture starts to smell like sex, and laughed. Irritable as I was, he received nothing but cold rebukes from my end.
But as I look at it from a distance now, I am amused through and through, and the memory brings with it only a feeling of fondness. I marvel at the audacity of the metaphor—the sheer nerve. And I realize that I was too timid in the face of it. And I understand that I lost love in the face of time, or my idea of time. You cannot help but know how you have been too afraid to love. But, to write that metaphor, you must have a grasp on love itself. To tell a story, you must have the nerve.
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Sourima Chakraborty hails from Calcutta, India. Abandoning the itineraries known and often chosen by engineering graduates, she has been reading, writing, reimagining, and curating science education for school children. You can find her on Instagram: @lyricalexistence and on Twitter: @srimz96.
