The gift of laughter

Some people are born colour-blind. Some are born without a funny-bone. On balance, the latter group is more to be pitied

Growing up, I disliked the boys who were held up to me as examples. (No, I lie - I loathed them, I hated them with a deep and abiding malice.) “He’s so serious about his work”, I’d be told. “And an intolerably self-important little twit”, I’d think to myself. That could be one of the reasons why today I mistrust “serious”. What does it profit a man if he gains the world and loses his last belly-laugh? “Serious” is over-rated. Schopenhauer? Pshaw! I’m a Marxist – of the Groucho persuasion.

  “He was born with the gift of laughter, and a sense that the world is mad.” That's the first line of Rafael Sabatini's "Scaramouche", written nearly a hundred years ago. One could scarcely find a better maxim to live one's life by. I hold that just as there is no issue good or bad but thinking makes it so, there is no truth to grief or mirth, it's all a point of view. Granted, it may not be politic to crack Irish jokes when there's a bereavement in the family (especially if it's your boss' family). You won't get the guffaws that indicate your delivery of the punch-line was perfect. On the other hand, it can't hurt to raise a smile or two.
Humour, if leavened with sensitivity and compassion, lightens the burden of sorrow. The Monty Python group read a hilarious speech at their comrade's funeral. I can think of no better tribute to a man who brought happiness to people

Sadly (pun intended) enough, we as a nation tend to mistrust laughter. We persist in the belief that a sombre demeanour is a sign of great intellect or efficiency, whereas if the truth were told, it's far more likely to have been caused by colitis or tight underwear. To be fair, humorists have a tough time anywhere. Around the world, a man who lightens your mood is oft taken lightly. Remember P.G. Wodehouse's utterly hilarious lament at being dubbed a "burbling pixie"?

Humorists should rather be placed on a pedestal, for they create something that defies analysis. IF I am permitted another Wodehouse reference, it was said that criticising him was like taking a spade to a souffle. Why devalue this rare gift?

In India, this wariness about laughter cannot be a cultural relic. From Gopal BhNaar to Mullah Naseeruddin, Tenali Raman to Birbal (why, even Narad), our jesters have been respected as men wise enough to understand the world and present home-truths with a laugh. In more recent times, Osho (with his famous treatise on the f-word) and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar among others have had huge followings even though (or because?) they have encouraged their followers to laugh.
Why, then, are we so insecure whenever somebody publicly pokes fun at our idols? Obviously, laughter is anarchic. Especially in a democracy, where a telling satire can finish a political career more surely than assassination.

Perhaps that is the crux - we fear being laughed at because there is no remedy for losing one's dignity. But there is a defence. Prevention is better than cure. Pre-empt your satirists. If we learn to laugh at ourselves, our critics can at best laugh with us, not at us. And we might be happier.

A moment of Marvell?

Ten years ago I fell in love.

It was a very sweet infatuation, with all the naivete and wonder of puppy love, or perhaps the wilful delusion of an Indian summer. For a few brief days I swooned over the object of my attentions, my passion all the sweeter because I knew our time together would be short. Then we parted, but for years afterwards I was firmly committed to her. None other could match her charms, no other name evoked the same wistful smile. This, despite considerable temptation; strange as it may seem, there were others who sought to seduce my stolid middle-aged affections. Some were subtle, some brazen, some endearing in their simplicity.

But none compared to Paris.

When I think back on it, my inexperience was a major reason for my being so utterly besotted. It was my first visit to Europe. My first encounter with the charm of history not just preserved, but kept alive. The first time I strolled down cobbled streets at dawn, or savoured wine and a cigar in a sidewalk cafe as the lights came on in the scented streets. My first experience of a city lit up for beauty alone, or carefully tended flowerbeds lining busy roads. Of a real van Gogh, a real poster by Toulose-Lautrec.  It was as if a country bumpkin entered the big city, and the first woman he met was Madame du Barry. No wonder I was lost.

The passion lasted some years. There was a yearning to return. It faded. And I broke the faith.

I rejected the advances of Hong Kong, but I was led astray by the brassy charm of Istanbul, lost in the strange intimacy of Prague, grabbed bodily by the direct approach of Manhattan. Time passed, new booklets were added to my passport. Memories blurred, ran into each other. The lights of Aleppo morphed into the glimmer of Rio from the Pao de Acucar. But nothing could erase the memory of a patch of green by the Champs Elysee, with spring’s first lilacs in bloom.

Last week I visited her again. And the magic was gone.

Perhaps it was because the first time I had visited had been in February, with the streets comparatively deserted, whereas this May I had to share her with a million other admirers. Perhaps it was because I was coming off three months of hard grind, mentally drained and physically exhausted. Perhaps it was age. Or perhaps it was just experience. 

In the ten intervening years, I have seen too many cities, savoured too many meals, shared stories with too many friendly strangers. Paris is no longer a realm of wonder. This is not bragging; it is a lament. I have lost the capacity for wonder. I have lost the innocence of the first-time traveller. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

For two days I walked the streets of Paris, trying in vain to recapture that first fine rapture. But the Ile de la Citie seemed smaller and duller, the alleys on the Left Bank no longer beckoned. The sidewalk cafes were full of tourists, teenagers and cigarette butts. The Centre Pompidou seemed incongruous rather than witty. Even le quarter Marais seemed a little grumpy, as if sulking at the weather on a weekday afternoon. 

Then I retreated to my room with a paper sack full of bread and sundry viands, opened a bottle of port and gazed morosely out of the window. The sky darkened into the late late night of northern summer. Lights came on in the house across the street. A snatch of accordion music drifted up from the corner. 

I knew the young chap in the apartment opposite would go to sleep early because he left for work at 6 in the morning. That the accordion player was not rubicund and beret-clad, but a fresh-faced single mother who played gigs on the weekends. I knew that later in the evening the boys would congregate at the side door of the “Irish” pub, ten paces round the corner, for a smoke and a bit of a chat. That a little before 7 in the morning the garbage truck would edge cautiously down the street, taking special care not to make a noise around No. 26 or else Monsieur Everet would shout at them from his first-floor window. I realised I knew the pulse of the neighbourhood. Even it was for a very few days, I fitted in. I may no longer have the wonder of the Trocadero under the evening sun, but I could down a pint with an oddity, a Frenchman who preferred Guinness to Bordeaux.  And with the epiphany, “peace came dropping slow”.

No, I could no longer feel the keen thrill of novelty. But I had in its place the comfort of familiarity, the pleasures of the everyday. The cement that binds any lasting relationship.

Evolution

I was a dinosaur.

Not, alas, a snarling male-fantasy T-Rex, or even a velociraptor.

I was a brontosaurus. Or perhaps a mastodon. Slow, ponderous, quite content to wallow in turbid swamps as long as there was enough forage available. Not succulent greens, but paper. More enticing, more delicious than the freshest ambrosia. To wit, books.

Growing up, the keenest pleasure I experienced came on every alternate Saturday. My grandfather would take us to the British Council Library on Theatre Road, where there was a whole section devoted to children’s books. (It no longer exists; Attila the Hen cut down the funding for British missions worldwide, and the children’s section was one of the first casualties.) My cousin and I would fight tooth and nail over the library cards, gleefully raid the shelves and then, on the ride home, finger the books lustfully, barely able to contain the excitement, the anticipation, the sheer joy of having so many books to read.

Books.

Paper and glue and printing ink, the texture of the old leather on the spine, the crispness of the pages against the fingers, the unique smell – whether the brash presence of a new book like the perfume of a parvenu, or the more muted, musty, faintly apologetic miasma of old books – all adding up to the sheerest magic. The FEEL of books as much as their content. The purest pleasure I have known.

And yet ... This morning I realised that it has been WEEKS since I read a book from cover to cover. The long shelf facing the bathroom gathers dust. My last three visits to bookstores were for book launches – where I did not pause to browse the shelves. I have been seduced by e-books.

In the first week of January this year, the Wall Street Journal published a bout of the sheerest havering, citing irrelevant statistics and using contradictory arguments to argue that e-books are no threat to paper-and-ink publishing. A year ago, this dinosaur would have thrown his weight behind this argument, but not now. Not since I was bought over.

First, I moved from a laptop to a tablet. Then I discovered the seductive convenience of reading a book that I can adjust to my own requirements. After years of badly-bound paperbacks with barely legible fonts, I can now change the size of the font and often the font itself to my convenience. I no longer have to prise apart the book to read the ends of sentences that run into the spine. I don’t even need a bookmark, since the e-book will automatically open to the point where I left off reading the last time.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

There’s more. A generous friend has shared with me his entire library of e-books. All. Forty. Thousand. Of. Them! All of them put together take up a little part of a hard drive which is itself no bigger than ONE old Bantam paperback. 40,000 books! To put this in perspective, my father and I have been at our combined wits’ end to accommodate our collection of some 7000 books (not including his treasured edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which always has its own place next to his armchair!) No bookshelves, no cartons, no trunks too heavy to be lifted. Just a hard drive and a tablet.

And the clinching argument – when I’m reading an e-book through the night, the page is back-lit. Ergo, no need to keep the light on, and no squeals of complaint from the Better Half!

Now I know why the dinosaurs vanished.

Making friends. Or not.

Scum usually does rise to the top, often by sticking close to more solid stuff that floats.

I was in a little rowing boat, observing this phenomenon in a water body on the IIM Joka campus, when a half-brick splashed into the water a few feet away. A half-brick, not a pebble, not a stone. Two more followed. My friend and I were more concerned about getting brained than getting drenched, so we rapidly rowed to the other side of the pond. Got out, ran around to get the psychotic half-wit who was chucking the bricks. Of course, by the time our feet were on land again, the brick-chucker was a rapidly retreating blob in the middle distance.

That was in 1986. I still don’t know WHY he threw those bricks at us. It’s quite possible even HE didn’t know. (Incidentally, his hair was not so curly then. But the rest of him was about the same shape as it is now.)

Cut to 31^st December 2002 (or was it 2003?). Calcutta had a new hotel and they’d thrown a party for the formal launch. I walked in late (as usual) and went to get a Coke for my wife. As I turned from the bar I saw … you know how some memories stay with you visually, like a freeze-frame? This was one of those moments, a mental photograph that has stayed with me. What I saw was this - about twenty feet away, the man-with-friends was keeling over to one side, one hand pressed to his jaw, obviously the effect of a close encounter with somebody’s fist. I confess I was actually happy that the guy had got his come-uppance (college hates tend to stay with you, don’t they?). I called to my wife – “***** **** just got punched in the face!”

Five COMPLETE strangers in the vicinity turned towards me and practically chorused – “WHO is the guy who punched him?! I want to get him a drink!”

Obviously the man-with-friends was as popular as he had been in our college days.

****

So Mihir Sharma has spent a lot of time going through this awesome self-help (?) book, then dissected it in some detail, and even published the resulting article in “Caravan”. The article has almost “gone viral” on the Interwebs - it’s trended on Twitter, been discussed on Facebook, inspired blog-posts, telephone conversations, reminiscences (yes, I KNOW this post is in the same category!). In the process, it has ensured wide publicity for a book written by a man who believes that there is no such thing as bad publicity. Sort of winning a battle and losing a war, surely?

Why bother spending so much time on a person whom you obviously dislike, Mr. Sharma? You’re just giving him the kind of importance HE thinks he deserves. A self-defeating exercise. You’re surprised that he’s made a lot of money by sucking up to the right people? You still wonder at the levels of hypocrisy that famous people are capable of? You find it worthy of comment that people put up with each other in hopes of making money? You secretly believe that our public figures are the spiritual descendants of MK Gandhi, Gautama Buddha and the Good Samaritan? You were on an extended holiday to Mars when the Radia tapes became news?

Lose your naivete, Mr. Sharma. Your diatribe is not going to make an iota of difference to this man everybody seems to hate (whether secretly or openly). People associate with him despite being told he is shallow, scheming, sociopathic, sycophantic (selectively?), grating and utterly obnoxious. Unless you can establish that associating with him will cause financial loss or imprisonment, a donkey’s amours will have more value to his associates than your article ever will.

Consider this. When, some years ago, IIPM was being generally loveable and altruistic to Rashmi Bansal and Gaurav Sabnis, I spoke to the head honchos of both the major English newspapers in Calcutta about the reality behind IIPM’s claims (e.g. Stiglitz as visiting faculty). They nodded gravely, looked uneasy, then wandered away. The mainstream media never published the data that emerged, they mentioned the issue only in passing. Very strange. Of course, the fact that IIPM were India’s biggest advertisers in print media during those months of July and August was completely irrelevant.

So wisen up, Mr. Sharma. You are an alumnus of a university that (creditably) states openly that one of the biggest gains from studying there is the social network. Yet you’re surprised that the object of your dislike has succeeded through networking? You will notice that I have not named the man here; I don’t want to face a civil suit filed in Dimapur or Jammu. I’m playing safe, while you have the guts to call a spade a bloody shovel several times over. All credit to Caravan and to you for your honesty in publishing an article that could invite retribution. But sadly, your article won’t make any difference to its subject. He will still be available as a motor-mouth to make up the numbers for TV “debates”. He will remain on contract for an incredibly insensitive and stupid weekly agony column. He will still be famous for being famous. And he will still make oodles of money as a front-man and lobbyist. So what’s the point?

Please get a life, Mr. Sharma. Don’t waste your intellect and talent on stupid trivialities. And oh - do try and write shorter sentences. It would make your point of view so much clearer to non-intellectuals like me.