on ‘home’ and jack sparrow…

16Jan09

i used to complain that i cannot ‘name’ people… that is to say, i cannot invent nicknames for people so that i can mention them in my blog posts, and at the same time keep their identities teasingly unrevealed… though somewhat guessable… a dear dear friend of mine has got this gift of inventing such ‘names’… and i used to complain that i cannot do it…

but it seems that the new year has brought some gifts for me, and one of them being the partial clearance of this ‘naming block’ (as in ‘writer’s block’)… so my dear mib (mean intelligent babe, an older ‘naming’ though), let this post mark my unleashing of ‘names’…

>>

this post directly takes off from recent conversations with wonder woman: the ultra-speed multitasking superhero… the discussions were respectively on difficulties i am facing in renting an apartment and on various issues related to love and politics (including love of politics and politics of love)… the latter discussion was inspired by a wonderful performance by kabeer suman…

as is commonly known, for some time now i am having difficulties renting an apartment… i know exactly in which locality i would like to have a place – munirka… i also know in which streets of munirka i would like to have it… but it seems that those streets do not have a vacant place which i would like to rent… as wonder woman pointed out i almost have a fair idea of the room i want… or rather the qualities i seek… but then again i would be happy to be surprised… in the sense that i am open to get attracted to a room that does not exactly match my ideas… in any case, the room must have a spatial charm that gets hold of me… the space of the room must make me feel at ‘home’…

but the feeling of ‘homeliness’ is also a thing re/produced through performances of the ‘homely acts’… for example the way i claimed my space in ‘the flat’ through doing chores in absence of calvin… i, however, am a person who has lived in four different houses with his parents, two different houses with his maternal grandparents and paternal uncle, three more houses in kolkata, and one in burdwan, and two rooms in jnu, and a house in delhi, and ‘the flat’ too… and all these houses i can call ‘home’… and right now i am looking for another ‘home’…

i am sure there are people who have stayed in more numerous and/or varied ‘homes’ but the point is ‘home’ does not yet signify for me a relationship with a singular place… i keep moving from home to home, but do not come back to the home… and i wonder whether that is a good thing… good not in an absolute sense, of course… but in a very personal/subjective sense… clearly, at this stage of life, i do not wish to have a singular ‘home’ to which i come back… what bothers me is why is that… guess i want to sail the seven seas now… and without a home port… and that gets us to cap’n jack sparrow… but such sailing, and especially the immediate reference to cap’n sparrow, has a certain ulta-masculine element… and that is what REALLY bothers me…

now whether jack sparrow is masculine or not is a question i would not dwell into… clearly he has homoerotic fan-following but that does not invalidate the possibility of his masculinity… so leaving that question apart, i would move into the discussion inspired by kabeer suman…

suman’s performance (including the songs and the reflections on his life and times that he was offering) and the discussion thereafter hovered around themes of love and politics… suman has travelled through many loves, as well as many political inclinations/supports… and there was certain unavoidable similarity in the way he deals with both… as we discussed, for us, the generation that gew up in to the age of liberalisation, suman represents an intensity of the previous era… when we say the ‘previous era’ we directly refer to the era of naxal movement… a question that reverberated around out minds is that have our generation lost that intensity (both in politics and in love), have we become more cold calculators (both in politics and in love) than hot passionates? of course passion is here still… as wonder woman pointed out an unusual example of contemporary passion/intensity – riots, and the scores of young people who carry out such acts… but when it comes to actual political thinking, deciding the course of action, we are perhaps far more cold… or at least the coldies outnumber the hotties in positions of political decision making… which made was wonder can there actually be a ‘movement’ (instead of a planned political maneuver) again, led by our generation?  the apparent hot popular politics of jnu students’ union, just to give an example, is just an illusion – it is fueled by very cold political calculations happening from hostel rooms, and not in the ‘dera dalo’ places… curiously, the most hot, passionate political organisation of the campus is also the one most commonly ridiculed for their lack of political foresight – an issue that i dont want to comment upon now, as it demands a more detailed exploration than it is possible here…

this hotness/intensity of suman that we refer to is explicit in the ways he supports mamata (trinamool congress) and her fight against cpi-m, and is also similarly present in his repeatedly publicly expressed love for sabeena yasmin (whom he is married to)… and simultaneously, suman speaks openly about his past political affiliations, and loves… the ‘openness’ do betray a sentiment of i-have-moved-on-and-they-haven’t-so-it’s-their-bloody-problem-and-i-don’t-care… it is this sentiment that got me disturbed … not because it is an entirely hypothetical sentiment, but because there has been times when i have lived that sentiment, and am sure that goes for most of the readers of this piece… it betrays a denial of my complicity to whole lot of things, for the consequence of which i don’t care, or don’t wish to care… and there is something masculine about that… and that bothers me a LOT…

the strain of this sentiment in suman’s performance did not disturb me because of what it reveals about the person suman is… it disturbed me because it reminded me of a certain common strain of personality (which i believe i share with many people out there) that i am not very comfortable having, and struggling against constantly… and i also believe that certain to have elements of masculinity in it… though by saying that i do not by any means claim that such strain, since masculine, is found only in men, or in heterosexual men – guess masculinity is more pervasive than that…

and we come back to jack sparrow… however not to give a concluding remark upon his character, or to this particular loud thinking on homes, ports, sea, sailing, politics and love… what bothers me is the contradictory processes created by changes that takes place within persons, and the habit of proximity created by staying together… it is only too natural that people change… of course cpi-m has been a progressive force at a certain point of history, which it is clearly not today… so for the people who have been politically active (not necessarily within organisations, but say people like sumon) throughout the period of last 30 years, it would not be surprising to find them shifting their allegiance… but what about the once-progressive organisation, what about the once-loved-person? don’t we remain complicit enough so as not to have the luxury to say i-am-moving-on-and-if-you-don’t-then-it’s-your-problem? well in reality, we often abuse that luxury, but at the cost of what? is it possible to reconcile the apparent contradiction of ‘change’ and also a more equal bearing of the burden of ‘not-change’?

jack sparrow, however, is sure that his first and only love is the sea… at least that is what he says… and me not going into pointing out the scenes where he betrays contradictory emotions… so by proclaiming his one and only love for the sea, he steers clear of his complicity in all other relations – because love comes first… which does sounds to me like a reasonable position, at least cap’n sparrow do bear the pain of not being able to afford ‘love’ with anybody else other than the sea… the pain of that loneliness is visible on jack sparrow at various points of the narrative, especially in the context of his impossible love with liz swann…  the sea is a cruel lover… 

well, for me, i am not too sure – whether i love the sea or want a home port.. and i am happy to lay the responsibility of not-being-too-sure to the current stage of life i am in – ‘i am too young to say whether i want a home port, let alone which port is my home port’… but is it that a deliberate procrastination? perhaps… but i dont see a reason to hurry it either?

Filed under: reflections   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: calvin, captain jack sparrow, feminism, jnu, love, masculinity, mib, munirka, politics, wonder woman