Literature has never really been the love of my life. How can it be? Yet I chase it, book by book, page by page, and word by word. It’s not out of compulsion, it’s not out of choice, it’s just casual. And love can never be casual, or can it be?
You see, Literature is not ‘professional’, ‘practical’, or a ‘21st-century-driven skill’. So I often question myself in the court filled with glorious LinkedIn profiles who stare at me and search for my ‘marketable’ prospects. Not long ago, I was asked about the ‘real-life applicability’ of my discipline, and I found it quite absurd.
After several rounds of heated exchanges, I was left speechless and eventually gave in. And for me, though Literature is just casual as I told you, it is still my Chase, and I had to write this paragraph by paragraph, line by line, and clause by clause (pun intended).
I don’t know if it is good that my brain fishes out Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett when I glance at a woman who walks with a thump while the mud clings on her brown gown but she is walking because she has to reach or if it is good that my brain digs deeper if the two middle-aged men sitting in haunches at the crossroads blowing out smoke from their cigarettes are waiting for the ‘Godot’ in a world mired in existential crisis.
I don’t know if it is good that my mother’s hair twirled throughout in the comb becomes sacred to me or my adolescent brother’s looking into the mirror at himself with both assuredness and ambiguity as he navigates through his formation of self-concept becomes intriguing to me. The thing is, I want to peek into others’ stories, if I don’t see it, I carve it, and this carving has begun only after my ‘casual’ affair with Literature.
I have always thought that clarity will bear fruit, but my contradictions have given me far greater returns. Talking of contradictions, Literature is full of them. Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” from Act 3, Scene 1 of Hamlet could not be better articulated about it. Lately, I have become more accustomed to this division. I thrive in these thresholds now, and the tightrope called life often demands this balance.
True, this might be brushed off as bluffing but, one time or the other when darkness descends, and the heart goes out once here, and once there, when nobody knows where to go, where to lead, and that is not the point anyway, it’s just acceptance and acknowledgement, a little surrender there but a greater serendipity later.
As I have progressed with Literature, Frost’s ‘The Road not Taken’ seamlessly integrates with a desolated street at Delhi’s Janpath at night, Plath’s red ‘Tulips’ become one of the red roses in my balcony that shines so bright that it bothers me, Premchand’s Ghisu and Madhav’s hunger when they devour hot potatoes like a raven even though their eyes water, is the hunger that pervades me and the society, which rises above all of us, instinctually and inadvertently.
Is it negative, a drag, this dilemma? I don’t know. Literature does not give answers; it never claims to provide anything. I do not claim that Literature makes emotionally intelligent people or that what I experience is not felt by those who are not into it. How can I be an advocate of anything? It’s when the professor tells us to write anything and listens to it as if their soul consumes whatever we could jot down from an endless stream of random thoughts.
It’s the multiple critical interpretations by all of us in classrooms of that one paragraph that bind us all. It is that quiet tear in the eye of someone, or a hearty laugh that is exchanged while reading a narrative together. There is a vulnerability, but there is a recognition. There are opinions, but there is solidarity. So, I will listen even if I have heard it a thousand times.
I know this was not an objective defence, without data, dimensions, or details as it was. It was not even representative of what encompasses literature and varied subjective experiences of those who study it, dive into it, and lose themselves in it, to find themselves again.
My ‘hunger’ for writing this might even be mere tokenistic. I know this does not necessarily count as ‘marketable’, and it might even seem like an ego-satisfying, delusive rant, but I told you, I had to write it. Literature has never really been the love of my life, but perhaps Literature is my life, and the will for survival is the strongest.
