Nomad

The Past, haunting

The Present, taunting

The Future, daunting

Notwithstanding

Beyond the faulting,

the wanting, the flaunting

I know I will, one day, find a place worth halting.

•÷°

Joie de vivre

A happy life, a fulfilled life

They say is an idealist’s lie

How can one be true to oneself

when the world conspires to make all comply?

We oft forget the world has no power

over the little things, the daily stuff

the only things that truly matter.

Notion #10 (Part 1: Setting the stage): Every story has atleast one other story hidden within

I have been meaning to write this post for quite sometime now (to be precise, since a couple of months).

The notion started taking root around the time when a few colleagues and I embarked on a lively debate on classic literature over lunch one fine afternoon. My friends felt that genre was either too elitist, boring and/or irrelevant in our present day. They also vigorously disapproved of some contemporary pop-fiction especially the ridiculously successful teen fictions. They dismissed them as being too silly, crude and/or lacking depth/character.

Last evening, I had been to a theatrical play called ‘Who let the dogs out?‘ enacted by one of my colleagues who is also an aspiring actor and his team of very talented theater artists led by a promising director. It was a light-hearted parody on theater itself: Plays within plays, caricatured characters and the utter chaos that results from the embroiling confusion.

I could not put off posting any longer. Every story has at least one other story hidden within.
While some of the accusations by my friends may be true, such as Austen being excruciatingly slow paced or Meyers’ being of a very poor literary standard; I believe if the text were viewed in a different light, the reader could gain quite a bit of insight into life and perhaps into himself/herself as well through stories.

Now you might wonder what do these three very different genres of storytelling dispersed in time, form and content have in common and why explore them side-by-side? And perhaps also wonder, do we gain anything of real value from stories we are exposed to? As a life-long student of communication, these are very interesting questions to me, the meta-text, the sub-text all included. As human beings trying to make sense of the world around us and coming to terms with ourselves, these are also questions of an existential nature to some extent. In this light, the essence/moral of the stories and questions raised within the stories become even more critical.

I hope to explain the notion ‘every story has at least one other story hidden within’ through the analyses of two of the most well known books in our history and in our present times: Classics represented by Jane Auten’s Pride & Prejudice and contemporary pop fiction represented by Stephanie Meyer’s The Twilight series: both fanatically loved and detested. I am breaking this notion into three posts. We’ll explore the background, and start with the main characters before moving on to the crux of the stories and the stories hidden within the stories: the subtext and how they link back to us and the real world in the succeeding posts.

Background:

Both books have a strong following as well as a strong critic base though only a few falling at the intersection of both. Both books are written by women and narrated predominately through the female perspective exploring themes of love, marriage, family, friendship and authority/societal compliance. This could be a reason for the general reluctance of the male reader to pick these books. The similarity, however, ends there. Austen’s P&P is set in the 20th century ultra-conservative hierarchical English society exploring mundane realities of everyday life while Meyer’s Twilight is set in modern day liberal USA plunging headfirst into the fantastic and supernatural.

Lead Women:

Austen’s Lizzy is a free thinking woman dressed conservatively who values her independence above social security. She is a woman who does not require rescuing, on the contrary, goes rescuing others on several occasions. She believes love is possible only between two equals of character, mind and heart implied in the line “Only the deepest love will persuade me into matrimony which is why I shall end up an old maid.” She rejects her well-off suitors on various occasions on grounds of lack of affection, unlike other women in her circles. She does not consider herself beneath anyone and does not take lightly such remarks even when it comes from the most feared Lady Catherine or the most sought-after Mr. Darcy. She is proud, she is prejudiced; she is not easy to love.

Meyers’ Bella is a timid damsel in distress who unaware of her charm has a self-image problem. She prefers to get lost in the crowd and stay invisible. She is easily swept away by the mysterious knight in shining armor, Edward Cullen. She considers herself inferior to Edward at all planes as evident from the line “And so the lion fell in love with the lamb.” This forms the basis of her commitment to him: to be in love is to be enamored. Throughout the story, she is always trying to fit in, pleasing everyone and dependent on another at any given point in time. She is simple, she is vulnerable, she is submissive. She loves easily and is easy to fall in love with. This is her boon and bane.

Lead Men:

(to be continued in the next post)

Life’s surprises

“Life, if you live it right, keeps surprising you, and the thing that keeps surprising you the most…is yourself.”

– Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Figuring things out through poetry

Excerpts from the amazing poem, “If I should have a daughter” by Sarah Kay

…This world is made out of sugar, it can crumble so easily, but don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it. Baby, I’ll tell her, remember your mamma is a warrior, your papa is a warrior and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more. Remember that good things come in three.. and so do bad things… Always apologize when you’ve done something wrong but don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining. Your voice is small, but don’t you ever stop singing…

Here is the TED talk that pushed me to actually start writing poetry, given by another of my inspirations in contemporary times, spoken word poet, Sarah Kay.

 

Living Beyond Limits – Amy Purdy style

If your life were a book,

And you were the author

How would you want your story to go?

A most inspiring and powerful talk by one of the world’s most cheerful persons, Amy Purdy

Retirement

It is not death itself that so terrifying

It is but the end of a journey,

A time of rest.

What I do dread is:

The futility of life lived so far,

The uncertainty of what lies ahead,

The inevitability of fading into oblivion.

Γ¬…

Into the deep

Stepping into the unknown

Falling

Faster, and faster,

As she tumbled down the rat-hole

she sees stuff that made her exclaim

“Curiouser, and curiouser!”

***

People hoarding worthless papers,

People forsaking personal values

People Love less,

Clueless. Helpless. Hopeless.

***

Courager, and courager

She must stand in her conviction

To call a spade, “A spade”

To leave this Horrorland.

Ξ§Ξ