Dibyendu's WallScript

A renowned female pornographic actress had visited a college campus to participate in a public debate on pornography. Of course, speaking openly about pornography is never easy. In any country, it is a most delicate task. Yet, by the law of nature, the raging hormones of students bear uncanny resemblance to the hormones of pornography. Therefore, in practice, one might expect revolutionary students and the pornography industry to share far-reaching agreements—though they may never confess it aloud. Whether such an alliance existed or not, the undivided attention of the students was locked upon that debate. Inside the campus, there was but one subject burning under the fluorescent lights.   Professors and rival students alike had been sneaking glances at the classical works of this actress, buried deep within the university systems. Elderly professors, unwilling to lag behind in knowledge, had also gravitated toward this unfamiliar medium—drawn by a strange joy, a voracious hunger...

Gabriel García Márquez’s prose — with its cadence that flows like an ancient river and its warp and weft of imagery spun like a loom of myths — renders the reading of his work a ritual, not mere leisure. That this creation earned the Nobel Prize for Literature is no exaggeration: rather, it is one of those rare occasions when history, like a blind archer, accidentally struck the true target. Too often, the custodians of literary canon resemble negligent wage-laborers, carrying out the drudgery of their charge with little passion; most laureates vanish into the dim mist of time, remembered only in footnotes. But Márquez’s work — like Homer’s epics or Dante’s Commedia — has entered the bloodstream of global imagination, refusing to fade.   The Baptism of “Magical Realism”   Across universities of the world, his novel is now studied as the very emblem of magical realism. Why “magical”? Because it dares to narrate the improbable with the solemnity of scripture. Why “realism”? B...

When Albert Camus composed his classic essay The Myth of Sisyphus, he attempted to portray the overall absurdity of human existence. That most wretched of labors — to push, with all one’s strength, a boulder named human civilization up to the summit of a mountain, only to watch it roll down again for all eternity — could only be the peculiar task of mankind. Stranger still, he dared to compare it with the pursuit of knowledge, and even ennobled it with the romanticism of survival against odds. In doing so, he hurled down the grand conservative ideal of a harmonious cosmos from its heavenly pedestal onto the coarse pavement of the street. Only man could achieve such a desecration. For there exists no creature more terrifying than man himself.   This is the comic, almost grotesque, side of human existence — what philosophy calls existentialism. It lies at the very center of speculative thought. To an otherworldly observer, how laughable it must seem that, knowing full well we are des...