Breaching the antechamber of life
The exchange that prompted this project of documentation. The co-opting of alienation as a compass.
Dear Professor Hota,
Thank you for your note and for the gentle, necessary warning against formalization. Your words linger, as they always do, in that liminal space between guidance and provocation.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how even the act of painting that “most personal expression” feels circumscribed by the same alienation I carry from my academic work at NALSAR. How clinical a phrase is 'Art Wednesday' (that's the moniker for our weekly activity)! Like Art is something to be put on pause and shelved until Wednesday rolls around. Of course, that is not the intention of the organizers at all, and they are lovely to even take up an initiative like this. My frustration is coloured by my own struggle with feeling like we (the students, at least) are living in an ante-chamber of life here - saving up our doing and being for the weekends.
The University trains us to codify, to categorize, to rationalize the irrational. And now, even in moments meant to defy that instinct, I catch myself drafting mental footnotes for my own creativity. It is as though the University has rewired me to distrust the raw, the unmediated, the unconditionally free.
You’ve said to “improve the conditions of freedom unconditionally.” How do you do that in a place like this?
I went to a boarding school where kindness felt inherent, where the contours of life were soft, porous, alive. Here, at law school, I feel like we’re rehearsing for life and not living it. The disillusionment that the institutionalization of values here has led to has been debilitating for me. There is also no sense of community; and life and its people do not feel fundamentally kind anymore. The whiplash is something I still have not gotten over - I have been here for three years now.
How does one grapple with that sense of alienation? Especially when it feels like not everybody (most everybody) is not even feeling it? They’ve adapted, or maybe they’ve just accepted that this is what adulthood tastes like: distilled, sterilized, safe. But safety is a kind of death, isn’t it? Does it absolutely have to be like this?
You warn against formalization, but what do we do when the institution and the system (that we are very much a part of) formalizes us? How do you keep the wound open without letting it fester? How do you live in the gap between what is and what ought to be without falling into nihilism or worse, complacency?
These are not questions of rhetoric, but ones that I am actually desperately looking for the answers to.
Apologies for the long email, sir.
Grateful and in search of a kindred spirit,
Bharati
Dear Bharati,
I always felt as how you presented the general predicament here as Bharati’s reflection. I share every concerned expression that you made i.e. both, i.e. concern and expression.
However, I only have the concern to request you to see whether you can make your expression freely and let the world miss the part of concern in it. Maybe, your sources of reflection, if you do as I tried to put it, can re-read the conditions still as errors but also as all comic that you can laugh "away" (Comedy of Errors of an unavoidable Divine Comedy: "Jagannaatakam" of which we are the role-players... (and for me it is a radical expression, not any helpless predicament)...). Even I am trying to adopt that kind of laughter but adapting myself to its substitutes provided under what you sharply referred to above as "distilled, sterilized, safe" measures and sanctions.
Perhaps, dear Bharati, existence is fully felt when any chance to assert it is fully denied. I am asking you to note it and make the blunt edges of the world a part of your personality; who can tell you that you should not claim your helpless condition as the most tangible experience that it is?
You made a correct reference to the imposed alienation and also complemented it by saying "Especially when it feels like not everybody (most everybody) is not even feeling it?". That is where Bharati gained the real existential dimensions, I can say; she is now thorough in the sources of “self” that can not only recognize the “other” but can parcellize the self across the multiple “other” levels. Even in NALSAR, perhaps no two otherifications can bring the same danger of alienation to Bharati. Then, it seems her chances are perhaps restricted, but choices are enormous... yes... enormous because the spaces of alienation are inexhaustible and Bharati decided to be “different”, not a winner or a loser. “Self” is really a tricky spontaneity, Bharati. We have to make it a calculable constant by witnessing it (as the Vedanta puts it) not just in our deeds or those of the others but in the epiphenomena they present. Then, there is no force that can alienate you except in terms of your possessions: you effortlessly acquire the skills to silence the barkings around but go your own way, concealing a smile; your positions cannot be alienated because they are not external within the otherified world but intrinsic to your conversations with the others' world. You already have your own version of your conversations by "that" time…
Even I needed an audience many times to hear my complaint, dear Bharati. However, we may get more sympathy than audience!! Or an appreciation, positive and negative. Do you know why? Because somewhere we have fallen, perhaps between the object and the meaning. We want the others to offer, simply, an object meaningfully and they offer, ostentatiously, a meaning objectively... haha...
The ability to laugh away is the only manner of crying at a loss (and alienation) for people like us i.e for those people who lost the regular tracks of the world somewhere. My only request to you is that you locate your conditions not between their “presentation” and “alienation”, but between a typical “loss” and typological--your own--“recovery”. When you lose something like “self”, what you recover is not just the self as you put your being in it, but a “becoming” stage of your “self” as well. In every sigh of discomfiture, there is a breath breaking into a sigh of relief of a burden to prove (not your law's burden of proof...hahaha...): then your own self is “becoming” your mirror and you will be going ahead silently. I should add exactly here the real definition of “laughter”: silence that is mature enough to smile at the stupidity of the surroundings that are choosing to be blunt and losing a chance to live better, say better, and sigh better. Good God! Bharati is already better!
I am ready to write more but for my cooking obligations…, haha... haha... you can feel free to come to my office any time as our free times coincide and can find that I live at least through the alternatives of what I recommended above.
Of course,