Are these notes existential?
I recall Notes From The Underground. I read that in college. It immediately struck a chord despite being a translated work. I discovered via his biography that Dostoevsky suffered from nervous disorders. Epileptic seizures.
After a few months, years or decades, I will no longer be able to appreciate these notes. What exactly inspired me to write them down. Why did I start publishing again and why did I stop publishing before. I think I agree with “everything is the cause of everything else”.
That offers no clarity.
Gives no immediate credits.
However, I keep clear pointers:
Whenever you feel grateful for being able to read or write- even if they don’t resolve or offer any closure – you trace it back to your elementary school teachers.
In a toxic culture- some of these don’t trace the sources of their own.
For example: I learned counting numbers or basic Arithmetic from my father but he must have been taught it by someone else: I failed to observe that gratitude while being made to acknowledge it at every step.
When beginning to acknowledge publishing online I often attributed it to The Einstein Factor by Win Wenger though my parents encouraged me to practice calligraphy in my early childhood and that’s needed to mould basic motor conditioning for writing.
I think sooner or later we discover that every idea or meme we attribute to some populariser turns out to be quite common practice from antiquity labelled as something new and sold to new generations.
I invented verse form using complex words. There were no buyers for that. Subscribers for conventional notes dwindled. Space needed to publish ordinary notes started getting costlier. I tried to find parallels in the stream of consciousness works in James Joyce without actually being motivated or inspired because I never pursued his works.
Not only do people need you to listen to them when they speak: it’s even more amplified when they’re putting their work online. They need agreement alone.
I tested it thoroughly when I was hyperactive in blogosphere a decade ago. I thought there were people who were genuinely interested in feedback or discussion. I was hoping to recreate discussion forums from 2007-8. They were not. Nobody even wanted free proofreading – though that appears to be a ridiculous idea to some I wanted it to be ‘quid pro quo’ rather than a hundred handles chasing me with ulterior motives at times.
How simple is that?
I help out with your typographical errors. If not all of them then maybe one or two. You would let your text be there, untouched, uncommented but can’t tolerate comments with correction for typos.
These are menial jobs which were later replaced by AI or Grammarly. Perdue Owl etc
I tried Gemini for proofreading today.
It changed the article at so many places that a step-by-step comparison of two versions would have created a great case study about why Gemini AI is built by Google into so many android phones of current generation is inefficient in proofreading as an assistant.
Another test was asking simple questions on Astrology. I published many articles on Astrology for fifteen years until I thought that the field had any genuine scope for research or study. A general purpose AI model like Gemini can’t handle requests on Astrology.
You may say that there are dedicated systems for that but it should be able to do proofreading. It can’t.
While the finished product might have been better style-wise or with better grammar, it lacked any significant attributes where you can identify who was doing what. Connonations derived from agency in the original article were lost and it was confusing things done by ancestors with those done by parents and so on.
I was once writing 5000 words of prose on a regular basis. It was needed because there was too much to process. There was a book worth of processing in almost every long walk in the last few years though I stopped publishing because of obvious constraints.
Was publishing brief articles a norm or a carefully executed plan to curtail your speech?
It needs resources. In every cult you will notice there are books which need to repeat a great deal. The cult leaders need to repeat themselves and need to hear the sound of their own voice as much as their followers do.
The younger student arrived first. He was making this noise with the cap of his ballpoint pen. It’s red colored. As soon as he sits he starts struggling to remove the label from it. I drink a glass of water and ask if he did his homework. He didn’t. As usual. Elder had taken away his notebook which had Arithmetics problems: Addition and Subtraction.
“My name isn’t on the pen label that’s why I am removing it.”
Red ink is reserved for evaluation by teachers. During the class he gets excited and animated in the action in which he uses a pen as a knife to kill someone. Whoa!
They’re violent.
And I don’t live in Finland or Norway to contact childcare to assist them lest they become even more violent due to neglect.
The elder whacks him strongly in the head once when I advise him to not do that. He had been making his signatures in a page for a long time. I asked him why he was behaving like an officer.
Now meaning starts pouring in:
The Blabbering Prophet whose name was similar to a monk and later similar to a popular leader but who was in the dire need of childcare:
Refers to the look alike of a growing in popularity leader who was found near the collector bungalow once.
I visited the ration store near the collector bungalow today.
Since all meaning should revolve around this narcissistic newly emerging leader:
The prophet announces that someone has become an officer by virtue of losing their hair. They might have been on their heads or on their chin.
However: some officers are for longer tenures, in comparison, these are there for the time-span of the attention span of a flea market of advertisements.
What it means: if your hair grew back you would no longer be an officer.
It’s very strange if you ask me.
A car driver for an officer is an officer.
The officer for a minister is a minister.
Minister is the minister and then the king or queen by extension.
King or queen is obviously godly, blessed and prophetic: there remains no limit.
Such prophetic brainwashing is a norm here. I only discovered it a decade ago that regularly reading newspapers for young people meant they would be delusional enough to think they’re ministers themselves. Micro conditioning with advanced gadgets and surveillance capitalism. As long as they don’t really test it.
Similarly:
Meaning emerges:
A decade long struggle with hair.
Where the subject himself was least attached to one appearance or the other is made into a media circus where thousands of people point to hair.
As if there’s some bet on whether the subject would keep hair or lose them.
And fake coughing contests win.
Removing hair on the head as well as the chin is against the norm. Done that. Even that’s costly on a regular basis. It’s not just the expense of a trimmer or visiting a saloon.
Keeping the hair on a regular basis is also costly. Before you know : many cults start spreading rumors against you. You don’t qualify for one or over qualify.
The prophet continues: I ask him the definition of an Upanyasa or Novel. It is in the assignment to the elder.
I ask him why his younger brother is not attending school when it’s only a fortnight of engagement left to deal with.
The prophet tells me a tale of two lions. And one lakh rupees. Machine snakes. In the jungle.
What if you need to extend your stories like you see on the TV. A novel is similar to that. A longer story.
He shows me the fake wound created by the red pen on his hand. He quickly removes the hand before I can examine it. I request him to let me closely examine it. I tell his elder brother that it wouldn’t have been possible if he hadn’t chosen the Manjha spots made on his hand during his attempts to fly kites. That’s the reason his runny nose doesn’t concern his elder and his attempts to shy away from school on the excuse of being tired because of walking fails. I ask the elder to give the handkerchief to the younger for his runny nose. He doesn’t. He was wiping the screen of his smartphone.
He has shown a high talent for being a prophet. An actor. Shapeshifting. Kite making and flying. It has been a fortnight since he lost all interest in studies. His calligraphy is going downhill.
He pulls out the Hindi book. Wants me to read “Reedh Ki Haddi” or Backbone again. I tell him that would be boring. That’s cancelled.
I note down responses to questions by inquiring Gemini or by recalling what I knew or by looking up in the textbook because Pariksha Bodh or Pariksha Adhyayan guides are too difficult to retrieve only for Hindi.
Meanwhile, the elder abstains from checking his Instagram feed. Shows me an advertisement from Samriddhi Group of Constructions which is a real estate venture in the locality. A name. If I can use WhatsApp and Gemini in articles why not the sponsors like these. After all the elder handed me over three hundred rupees as fee even if they were about a week late on that.
There was a man on a bulldozer machine in the advertisement. It’s supposed to relate to another popular trend. Infamous trends. Disputed territory. Controversial information.
This is why these students come. For five years. To popularise those who are already popular. To make those prosperous who are already prosperous.
Rich gets richer. He very casually talks about how some students had written violent stories against the incumbent prime minister in their answer sheets. They were slogans popularised by the leader of the opposition. I can’t confirm or deny whether this happened.
But he raised his voice to convey the information to nearby people. To namesakes. To politically interested and motivated. That’s the motivation.
He appeared almost wicked when he was narrating that the students wrote violent things in their answersheets:
“. “
He was grinning.
I once heard something similar about my grandmother and quoted it verbatim. Later I kept regretting if I should have kept an archive. These are the sponsored events during which you create such notes. They seem innocuous. But later popularised as something else. [ Hence I edited it out. ]
A government school. Students of class ninth write against the supreme leader. This must be democracy. Very lenient. I am taxed for thinking and raising my voice.
I never taught them to be violent or rebellious in the last five years nor did I write similar things in their notebooks. Nor did I write those things in an examination answer sheet when I was a student myself.
Why am I being rewarded with these students who play:
Prophets
Rowdy horseplay
Advertisement agencies
Instagram addicts
Bullies
And a lot more except students who can read and write.
There was a stain made by condiments or vegetables on his shirt. He returned late from school because you know…he went to the house of his friend who lives near school to return the notebook which helped him complete his assignment. I ask his full name. He doesn’t remember.
He shows me his sunglasses wearing friend on Instagram. Proudly. He might be associated with the real estate developers.
This is what I am here for.
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Dancing light of grace 