Rage

Sometimes I feel we have forgotten to be angry. We have forgotten what it is to seethe in uncontrollable rage. We accept and move on. We let it be, for we fear retribution. The only time we allow our anger to come out is when we are in a crowd. The anonymity gives us courage. Our true animal instinct from our hunter gatherer days comes to the fore and we often engage in mindless violence as the anger bubbling beneath our calm visage comes forth.

I for one have never shied away from smiling even when I wanted to shout the heavens down. Anger never solved problems, I kept telling myself. Yet there are days when I want to be angry. I want to feel the burst of adrenalin that rushes forth as anger is released. But all I feel is cold fury; somewhere deep deep down.

That’s when I wonder if others have felt this rage. And I find my answer in art. I find it in Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, in Marln Brando when he walks ‘On the Waterfront’, in the Bengali literature of the tumultuous seventies. I find it in my peace loving elder colleague’s quiet admiration of Amitabh Bachhan of the early Eighties. I find it in Caravaggio’s angry strokes. Every time a society is angry, art creates an outlet for its rage.

I turned to Bollywood late into the night, angry with nothing in particular and I found my old DVD of Ghatak. Rage has never been so well depicted in Hindi Cinema. The movie is the depiction of a society bursting at its seams, frothing in its mouth and waiting for the change it desperately wants.

Since then, India prospered, moved forward and our movies changed, some say evolved. And raw anger was no longer what you wanted to see in your movies.

And slowly, as I said, I realized that we have forgotten to be angry anymore.

The Acts of Kindness

Every day as we go about in our daily lives, often wondering about the choices that we make, nothing cheers us up more than the sudden acts of kindness that strangers show our way. Over the last few weeks I have suddenly become aware of them and remain eternally thankful.

A lady slowing down her car so that I may cross the road, the unknown colleague holding the door open for me as I balance my laptop, my coffee mug, my phone and my notepad, someone offering to take my box of trash while I wonder where have all the dustbins gone, the auto driver sympathizing with me over my long hours at work.

Somehow we miss acknowledging these gestures, often taking them as nonchalantly as we would accept a rightful heirloom. In our rush to meet deadlines, the faces that held the door opened for us flashes past in a blur. People who do not matter seem and feel invisible and slowly our lives start becoming a lot more inhuman.

The other night I was in an auto somewhere in Andheri. Suddenly at a signal, a guy came running, “Can you drop me ahead?” There was no sense of request, the word please did not seem to be known to him and there was no waiting for an acknowledgment from my side. To be honest it was a bit scary, but then I still trust Bombay.

As the kid spoke, his story seemed interesting; he had planned to get off from a BEST bus without paying for the ride, was caught and was fined. He got off again, without a word of thanks but I guess that’s fine. In a world where an abuse and expletive laden show takes the internet by storm and defended under the garb of free speech, courtesy is often the easy prey.

But it showed me one thing. Not just we are forgetting to be kind, we often are afraid to be so. And that does not bode well for a world torn with strife.