The Stranger - Not A Review

Image generated by Microsoft Designer

29-Jun-2023, Thursday

French-Algerian writer Albert Camus' "The Stranger" first featured in my world in a conversation with Ma a long time ago where she mentioned of a novella where the protagonist's refusal to grieve for his mother's passing lends to extrapolated assumptions from the same. I started reading it only in the aftermath of her passing away and its bleak logical outlook of the world failed to strike a chord with me, especially at a time when I was feeling emotions most keenly. Halfway through the book, at the point where the protagonist is arrested after shooting a man dead (for no particular reason, it must be added), I gave the book a pause.

The second half of the 77-page book I resumed yesterday and ran through it in an evening's worth of effort. The courtroom process and our guilty narrator's passionate disinterest in the same are exquisitely captured as are the visual details narrated that only a person least bothered with all the human chatter around him can observe. In a way, "The Stranger" forms the antithesis of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" where the main character of Rodion Raskolnikov is wracked by guilt and slowly disintegrates mentally. 

That I still relate strongly to Dostoevsky's projection of the world, as bleak as Camus' if not more, is possibly an indicator where I fall on the socialist-individualist spectrum. Dostoevsky's protagonist is (eventually) very concerned with the repercussions of his crime within a larger moral universe while Camus makes his narrator fume (in an intellectual manner) only about society's glee in punishing him for his differentness, for his casual battle against conformance. While Raskolnikov comes to terms with the fact that he is not above the rules at all, the Stranger waits for the guillotine confident that the due proceedings are only simply prosecuting his refusal to comply.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-stranger-not-review.html] 

Persistence

 

Jolyon Wagg - A frequently encountered side-character in the Tintin Series by Herge

Of all the professions in the world, the enthusiasm of a salesperson (probably) needs to be the most indefatigable and deep rooted. Not being fully invested in her work is not an option she has. Whatever be the product or service and its relevance to the customer, her only job is to push the sale to an often less-than-interested client. No wonder the salesperson is a favoured character in comedies, dramas and tragedies alike. We have all encountered a character like Tintin's Jolyon Wagg in our daily lives and our irritation with them is tempered with the fact that they have been given a tough job to do.

While all of us have some part of our professional lives that we struggle through, it is eased by a formal separation from the selection/rejection whatever it is that we have been giving at least 8 hours a day towards. We mostly work on a small part of a larger impersonal project and rejection, while worry-inducing, is not borne alone. The salesperson on the other hand is handed a product or service that she hasn't designed or built, convinces herself of its distinction from all other similar products and pitches the same to strangers whose interests and motivations may be universes apart from even the best features of Product X. 

I understand that sometimes the product sells itself and sometimes even the customer has an active interest. I remember the time when a door-to-door salesperson brought little plastic lights, blue and white and shaped like spaceships (as per an industrial designer and an imaginative child), that could be tapped on for a warm friendly night light. My mom and me were equally enamoured and at the price at which she was selling them, the sale was a foregone conclusion. Those lights remained at use in home long after I had ceased to qualify as a child.

In some respects, I suppose that sales can also be viewed from the frame of just another job where strategy and selection yield 'results' with the right 'execution'. But the biggest challenge in my (ignorant, inexperienced and unsolicited) opinion would be in how to make the rejection not feel personal. When you have approached someone with all your charm and conviction only to be told "Not interested", sometimes repeatedly, how do you keep the fire going?

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2023/06/persistence.html]

7571

A casual glance at the Gallery folder of my 8-month old phone gave me reason to pause. 7571 photos lay entrenched in that particular location. 7571 photos that I had consciously taken within 8 months and none of them selfies! Until that moment, I had had airs of being superior to "this generation" who spent their entire lives in front of cameras it would seem. At 1000 photos a month, I couldn't make any real claims of being above it all. Even if I wasn't clicking pictures of myself, I was spending enough time with the phone camera to lose all moral authority to judge others for the same.

Pets dominate my mix of photos with landscapes that then seemed interesting coming a close second. In a very telling contrast, most of the landscape pictures seem bland and repetitive on a later viewing but the pet photos retain their warm cushiness. Flesh and blood even as a static image have a life of their own but rocks and trees lose their vividness once the environment they were clicked in is not immediately accessible. In a desperate attempt to take some of that beauty back with me to my less scenic daily life, I had clicked vigorously and to an extent, indiscriminately. The end result is a lot of high definition pixels which only re-emphasize that it was so much better in person.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2023/06/7571.html]

The Longest Day

The longest day is already upon us and with it the arrival of the monsoon. A morning person like me has hardly any reason to complain in that regard. Extended hours of sunlight shielded by clouds loaded with relief is a win-win in my book. June is almost over, with it the half-way mark of the year, causing the well-organized to recap what was achieved thus far. Unlikely to be accused of such good qualities, I take the time to savour the change of air after summer’s long sultry goodbye. There’s a thrill in having survived another sun-fest season in a top floor room.

What do I do with the extra 2-3 hours that I get by waking up early? I use it to breathe a little easier and enjoy the luxury of not having to plunge into the day’s frothing pool of activities in a barely awake state. This is not to say that I approach the dreaded work hour with a confident calm. It is more about having some free time before rushing into the due-yesterday channel of professional commitments. In its favour, besides the long daylight hours, summer offers the chance to be less drawn into the infinite charms of sleep as its co-conspirator, the blanket, has been put away for the season. 

My dogs are happy campers with regard to the hours I keep. Dawn is their golden hour too. At the slightest movement showing my emergence from slumber, they pop up at my bed-side eager to wage battles or pursue alliances in the as-yet unplanted fields behind my house. The seriousness with which they survey their home turf and the protocols with which they deal with friends or foes makes me wonder if inefficiency and error susceptibility are the best markers of being human? 

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-longest-day.html]

Airport

 

PC: Dall-E, Open AI

Maybe because it was December, her favourite month - with its cool weather, her birthday and Christmas in sequence. Maybe because it was seeing the variety of people streaming out of Dehradun airport - all manner of personalities and styling choices. She would have had an observation on all of them - funny and/or deep. As I waited at the exit gate to receive a senior conservationist for a work conference (someone whom I always look forward to meeting), a wild wish bubbled up unbidden. What if Maa also emerged from the gate? Wouldn't that be awesome? The impossible, the illogical wish should have induced a chuckle in the always rational me. I knew that it was a ridiculous thought.

As the wait grew longer, the wish grew bolder. The more I pushed it away, the more it popped up front-and-centre. My brain was outright refusing to co-operate with reality. With a drying throat, my eyes scanned the gate ever more intensely. Could it be her? Would it be her? Every burst of laughter, every embrace of the travellers and those waiting for them added more detail to the wish. How she would emerge (a slightly harried expression on her face, as long journeys usually made my otherwise high-enthu Maa feel), how she would smile (when scanning the crowd, she would spot me), how she would wave (both arms fully committed to the cause, as she was in every other aspect of life).

Come on. Get a grip. I told myself. It's been so long since she's gone. Don't you remember how you tried - not acknowledging her limited time, insisting that her comeback was just around the corner - in the fierce belief that not talking about it would keep her here forever? Don't you remember the searing failure of that 'plan'? Don't you remember all the details of your rushed journey home? Don't you remember the nightmarish wait outside the ICU, not allowed into that cold world of expertise, knowing that inside she was slipping away? Physically I was at the airport, but inside my little boat of logic battled huge swells of emotion. It tried, it fought, it lost.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2023/03/airport.html]

The Batman (Overload)

 

In what may be perceived to be a good sign in certain quarters, maturity may have finally punched through to me. Before giving too much cause for celebration, I ought to clarify that this is to do with my expectations and emotions for a Batman movie. Another Batman movie.  Grungy voices, dark settings, childhood traumas, contested heroism - all classic Batman tropes I was previously invested in feel like excessive melodrama even before I step into the theatre. With no new supervillains and an underwhelming choice for the central role, I go in with a ho-hum attitude. That's a first.

In the real world, supervillains are rarely contested and as the Russia-Ukraine madness plays out, it is more like a supervillain v/s supervillain scenario as citizens of Gotham negotiate their survival in between the two, pleading with one to survive the other. Batman with his 'no kill' rule is an absolute buzzkill in the face of oxygen sucking, thermobaric ammunition from live news. A superhero specializing in non-lethal combat (eventually) and spouting monologues on justice is so out of sync with these times where even narratives are out to murder each other.

But I do have to watch the movie regardless. Familiar characters and backstories tweaked in a certain manner to suit a director's vision at least inspire some sort of opinion about his choices. Having watched a few cast interviews and friends' reviews, I have a vague idea of this movie's uniqueness too - the ol' How-this-Batman-is-different spin. Practically speaking, I go in without any anticipation of surprise and revelations. Maturity dictates a stony acceptance that the Batman can exist only on that side of the screen, not this. Despite its honest efforts, fiction can hold but one lonely candle to the many dark streets of reality. Come to think of it, I am beginning to feel more like Batman, less like a fan!

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-batman-overload.html]

Kriti Arora Profile - A Post on Orkut

 

This is interesting. 

I swear I don't know who Kriti Arora is and what her Orkut profile looks like but the Blogger team seems to have decided that I should write about her. An 'Ideas' panel has automatically popped up on my Blogger homepage and among the many AI-generated blog ideas for a post most of which were about cricket and cricketers, this one seemed the most outlandish as I had not the slightest notion of why such a thing was suggested to me. 

May be I have written about the long dead Orkut social network in the past thereby triggering the AI to suggest something guaranteed to give me more views? Thank you, Team Blogger, for taking pro-active concern at the state of my decade long stagnasis on my blog and suggesting some motion. 

I now have one more opportunity to learn something completely new and have the luxury of not writing about it. 

In all fairness though, I did find it interesting that the original Googler, after whom orkut.com was named, has brought the defunct domain name and is now using it to promote another social networking site named Hello. Quoting the first paragraph

"Hello,

I’m Orkut.

You may not know me but 13 years ago I started a social network called orkut.com while I was working as an engineer at Google. I'm the guy orkut.com was named after. In 2014 when Google announced that orkut would be shutting down, it was a sad moment for us. orkut had become a community of over 300 million people and was such an amazing adventure for all of us. Nobody wanted to lose what we had created together. We met amazing new people. We went on dates. We found new jobs. We even got married and had kids because of orkut. We made it happen, together."

His thing, the baby that brought the world together, actually mostly India and Brazil, may be a faint blimp on our generational memory but that it lived for a short while, back in the day when all of these concepts were brilliantly new and shiny and Google Chrome still needed to promoted, is reason enough for its happening.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2021/11/kriti-arora-profile-post-on-orkut.html]