Dibyendu's WallScript

Perhaps mankind’s only true pride lies in the capacity to hate. From this stark aphorism unfolds one of the most brutal truths of urban life: what is most intolerable to the modern human is the very existence of his neighbor.   A person, deep within, harbors a quiet, persistent resentment toward the other who lives next door. Perhaps the perennial solitude of city life germinates precisely from this unbearable envy, this pathological resistance to coexistence. We often say Bengalis are like crabs in a bucket—dragging each other down at the first hint of escape. But why stop at Bengal? This affliction of spite is pandemic across humankind.   The thinking man—conscious of his own flaws, often secretly remorseful—still wears, in public life, a stubborn arrogance sanctified by logic. The modern man would rather mount the gallows in broad daylight than admit fault. Instead, he builds a wall of arguments to defend even his most evident mistakes. Yet when it comes to another's faults...

Almost a decade later, while watching a familiar play, an old saying suddenly resurfaced in my mind. I had gone to see Nandikar’s Football. After a long time. After so many changes. Lines once spoken in another age suddenly took on a contemporary resonance in the new context. Old wisdom, like vintage wine, intoxicates more with the passage of time, never less. New experiences can be steeped in that wine and thus reframed in a wholly fresh idiom. That is how moral lessons are born. Human beings memorize proverbs for this reason. Whenever the immediacy of the present resists explanation, pseudo-intellectuals anoint it with the fragrance of old mustard-paste metaphors. Watching Football that evening, I too became one such apprentice commentator, uncovering again that same ancient thread which links past, present, and future. Countless apprentices before me had “discovered” it and felt satisfied. It has been invoked again and again. And yet—how strange!—hidden beneath its apparent crudity ...

During his lifetime my hero is sometimes an atheist, sometimes a believer; now a fanatic, now a dissenter, and then once more an atheist… — to explain the inner world of his self-created protagonist Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote these words.   In a letter to Maykov from St. Petersburg in 1870, Dostoevsky revealed that the religious character of his forthcoming novel The Brothers Karamazov would be just such a figure. At different moments in life this hero would behave as a non-believer, then as a believer, then as a sectarian, and then like one possessed by religious frenzy. He himself would never truly grasp whether he was atheist or theist, devout or godless.   Dostoevsky began writing The Brothers Karamazov in 1878. He completed it three months before his death, in October 1880. For the ten years before this, he had been studying atheism and belief with obsessive devotion. His second wife Anna wrote that he had devoured an entire library on the subject — every boo...