Dibyendu's WallScript

“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habits.” – Henry Brooks Adams. Yet, truth itself is a mountain of weariness. If there had been only a single lie in the world, death might perhaps have sealed it into permanence. The French have a phrase – La Vie en Rose – life seen in rosy hues. In Camus’ The Fall, La Vie en Rose was not poetry, but the false glitter of a youth’s life drowned in self-deception. For in this world, what unfolds cannot be untruth. The very phenomena of human life twist truth into falsehood and falsehood into truth. The difference lies here: in truth abides an endless melancholy, while falsehood is cradled in gaiety. Humanity flees from truth, fashions instead a magical realism in which the heart may dwell at ease. The lover adores a parrot, dreams of a serpent-maiden for his bed. The clash between imagination and reality is staged in this manner, through the upper chambers of consciousness and the subterranean caverns of the unconscious. Thus does a thinking ma...

One of the most condemnable and shameful acts in human history has been unfolding relentlessly in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province. The tallest statues of the Buddha in the world are being destroyed with cannon fire by Islamic fundamentalists. The entire world looks on in stunned silence as the final remnants of a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old Buddhist civilization, hewn into mountain rock, are reduced to dust by the barbarity of Taliban devils. Rage, grief, and revulsion twist the hearts of civilized people everywhere. Against this conspiracy to erase human history, culture, and civilization, the voices of humanity cry out in protest. And yet, the great powers of the world, disguised as mere spectators, continue to observe, unwilling to intervene with moral or material strength.   America and European museums want to “buy” the statues. India too offered to preserve them. Yet the Taliban remain unmoved in their brutal resolve. Their goal: to eradicate from Afghanistan every trace ...

Can recitation be called an art? On the 22nd of April, 1978, at Rabindra Sadan, in a programme organized by Raskoli, the legendary playwright Shambhu Mitra himself answered this question. He said: just as in music, where a lyricist composes words, a composer sets them to tune, and a singer delivers them before the audience — in the same way, recitation too is an art. If a singer is to be called an artist, then why should we hesitate to accept the reciter as an artist, when he presents a poet’s words before the listener with equal artistry? This unassailable reasoning of Shambhu Mitra elevated the very stature of recitation, granting it the dignity of a performing art.   And yet, owing to the perceived lack of depth and expanse, the patrons of the more established art forms still refuse to acknowledge recitation as an art in its own right. In schools and colleges today, cinema is taught as the “youngest art form.” Postmodernism, however, has expanded the horizon: photography, recita...

“ Marriages are made in heaven”—I do not believe it. With all my heart, I believe in every institution outside the confines of marriage. Made for each other—that seems far more relevant. Yet this cherished maxim, through constant overuse, has become so burdened with vulgar suggestion that even Plato’s imagined lovers might sink into despair. The irony of modern society lies here: old sayings survive intact—with commas, semicolons, and full stops—yet their meanings shift and curdle with time. The phrase Made for each other has borne witness to such a transformation, and those who have lived its bitter philosophy know the truth better than anyone.   Let us first glimpse this idea through the eyes of a man. A successful man desires a beautiful woman. If he is greatly successful, he will want the woman to possess a little learning, a touch of intellect to go with her looks. The proportion is simple arithmetic: if the man holds a master’s degree, the woman must at least be a graduate; i...

The burden of man, the burden of the great soul — it knows no bounds. Rabindranath once wrote in his essay The Religion of Man: “Man feels, within and without, that he exists in the Infinite. It is only through conscious and deliberate union with that Infinite that he comes to know himself in truth. In communion with the outer world lies his growth; in communion with the inner world, his fulfillment.”   That immense burden — the burden of being human — is what gives rise to the act of relief. When a lion in the forest attacks a deer, rarely do the other deer rush to save the one under assault. But civilized man alone will run to help another man in distress. Perhaps this is the one profound distinction that sets humankind apart from the rest of creation.   And yet, even this distinction is slowly eroding. There is a Sanskrit proverb: Chakravart Parivartante — everything comes full circle. Primitive instincts, long suppressed, resurface anew. One writer even imagined the man of...

For forty days and forty nights Noah’s ark drifted upon the raging waters of the Great Deluge. God’s intent was to cleanse a sin-laden earth of its corruption. In that terrible calamity, He afflicted all living beings. And yet, in the very moment when humanity seemed on the brink of extinction, God discovered Noah. Only Noah’s family was spared from annihilation. At God’s command, every species upon the earth found at least one representative within Noah’s mighty ark. Thus, amid unimaginable peril, the great multitude of living creatures was preserved.   At last, after forty relentless days of flood, Noah’s ark came to rest upon Mount Ararat. God let light dawn again upon the world. The clouds parted, and the rainbow appeared. God told Noah that He would never again drown the earth. However mythical this Biblical tale may appear, whenever we think of deliverance from disaster, it is Noah who comes first to mind. Though Noah had foreknowledge of the impending deluge, he yet remains ...

Modern men no longer live in the intoxication of heroic delusions. A storyteller once observed: Cervantes’ knight Don Quixote, though not a hero in the real world, behaved in heroic fashion — and for that he had to suffer its terrifying consequences. In truth, whether in the history of world literature or in the dawn of modernity, Cervantes’ Don Quixote stands as the very first human hero. Before Don Quixote, all who bore the mantle of “hero” were either gods themselves or divine messengers sent by heaven. That a mortal man could himself become a hero — this was first proven through the quixotic figure of Cervantes. Yet, there are formidable obstacles barring man’s path to true heroism. First, man can never wield the sorceries or miracles of the godlike super-hero. Second, his actions are often flawed, morally grey, at times downright ungodly, confined within the small circle of his own existence. Third, his nature is not celestial but animalistic in part, prone to instinct and desire....

Ingmar Bergman, now eighty-two, is deeply angered. The patriarch of European cinema, the immortal creator of Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Persona, and Cries and Whispers, has turned his fury upon his own country’s filmmakers. For long, Bergman had withdrawn from the screen, vanished into silence. Today he lives in seclusion on the remote Swedish island of Fårö, far away from the bustle of cinema.   Yet even from that lonely island he could not remain indifferent to the current state of European film. With a bitterness that stings, he has compared the business of filmmaking to the trade of butchers and prostitutes. What provoked such a declaration? The creeping importation of pornography and fabricated sexuality into Europe’s mainstream cinema.   Recently, the Stockholm newspaper Expressen published one of Bergman’s strangest dreams. In this dream he saw: “Pernilla August and Lena Endre were sitting by the swimming pool in transparent bathing suits. I swam swiftly towar...

The book in which I find peace of mind and ease of spirit— yes, that book makes me a worm! A bookworm—that is what I call myself. Man may stand a little higher than worm, yet I feel no shame in accepting this epithet. Listen further: I wish to remain a bookworm all my life. In the weariness of civic society, in a life stripped of variety, in the dull monotony of days, in the arrogance of neighbours, in the indifference of nature—who else can bestow meaning upon life, if not books? In the modern world, true friendship is a rare luxury. In the old days, a lonely man sighed, “God is my only friend.” I have changed that saying. For me, book is my only friend. The throne once occupied by God, I have offered to the book. If in some prison, surrounded by walls, a despot were to condemn me to life-long exile, I would not mind—so long as that prison were a vast library.   Yet, in the present context of the world, the place of the book in human life is strangely complicated. On one side i...