The idea seems to be that the doctor gives you three kinds of pills, all of them in doses that are below their maximum allowed dosage, and keeps increasing the doses of each, one after the other, when the symptoms fail to disappear. This is a respectable way of treating diseases, I suppose. After all, the years spent dissecting bodies and piercing minds cannot be that hollow. The doctor tells me that if the symptoms do not clear up despite the main pill hitting its ceiling, we would try upping the other pill. I wonder what would he do when all the degrees of dosing disappear.
The first symptom is that the world has become loud, bright, and amplified in all its attributes. The mid-day sun is bright, but so are the street lamps that tend to be either tame or inutile. The jackhammer pulverizing concrete on the floor above mine is definitely loud, but so are conversations that used to be mere background voice. I, in those moments, can imagine—and most importantly understand—a newspaper headline which says “Student kills three in unexplained attack.”
Rest of the symptoms are classic, textbook-style stuff. They can be wooed easily.
In other news, I got paid to speak to a group of students/researchers about memory studies. Half of the money went away as Doctor’s fee on the same day, and the other half was spent on grapes, juice, and strawberries. If this is not the foreshadowing of my possible future, I don’t know what it is.
I began reading Ways and Means by Daniel Lefferts, and began, yet again, working on Proust. This time I will read Proust a few pages at a time, slowly and regularly. Reading with a pencil makes it slow anyways. Reading Proust and Vargos Llosa is a treat in itself. How does one write about shitting or sleeping in over tens of pages? You could say that Stanley Fish also does this in Is there a text in this class, but Proust and Llosa are much more supple and sexy.
For a long time, I used to go to bed early. The next time you come across that sentence, look ahead for long and lugubrious paragraphs that could swallow you whole. Speaking of sentences, I have been looking for a particular translation of Anna Karenina and found an exorbitantly priced copy. So is the case with good translations of Proust. Pricey and unavailable. Something something third-world.
Song of the week is Unna Vida from Virumandi sung by Shreya Ghoshal and Kamal Hassan. Also, Kathivanoor Veerane from Kaliyattam. Ballads are not really rare in Malayalam, but this hits closer to home both geographically and life-worldly.
I read Udakappola and watched Thoovanathumbikal in a day. I keep thinking about how characters were collapsed and sub-plots omitted and some amplified. It felt like watching myself lift-and-paste stuff from old assignments into new ones. I am pretty sure Padmarajan must have felt the same. Reading Ulkkadal has been a chore, so I’ve kept it aside for now.
I went to watch Dune: Part Two for the vast landscapes and was slightly disappointed because I had to watch close-ups of people grimacing, kissing, raging, believing etc. The ambient music was top-notch, however, I did not notice the music affecting me till the credits started rolling. After watching slice-of-life and mumblecore films from MUBI, Dune is a fresh breath of epic narratives and epic scales. Watching Premalu did two things to me: I noticed, for the first time, how Love is almost always predicated on guilt—at least in the Malayali psyche, including mine; the movie made me feel, again, for the first time in life, how much it hurts when friends leave. I also got excited when the electric scooter for which my brother developed the brand-identity showed up unexpectedly in the movie.