Self-Indulgence and Self-Correction

Adrift in alien and, at times, inhospitable waters, one may naturally seek the familiar to restore his orientation—the star, common to all skies, that may guide him. Or, conversely, he may abandon his craft and plunge into the sea roiling around him and hope that he will learn the quality of this strange water quickly enough to establish a new orientation. Or, perhaps, if he is the timid sort, he will cling to the mast, shut his eyes, and set his will against the sea, waiting for the tide to bring him to shore. In India, I have attempted, at one time or another, all three courses. The first, I should say, has been the most common; the last has been employed more than I care to admit, however (it seems a default response to inevitable misunderstanding and frustration). For example, Sunday night I played solitaire and pinball on my laptop, a mindlessness I never plumb at home. The second course is the least natural for me, and perhaps the most rewarding, as well as the most dangerous. Some seek to find themselves in foreign places; others expect to lose themselves there. I, for my part, hope to retain myself. Should I return wearing a dhoti and singing Bollywood treacle, I expect a good boxing of the ears.


I don’t mean to suggest that I hope to remain unaltered by my time here—far from it, in fact—only that I hope to conserve what I find at my center, that it will not be overthrown by this experience. This may be presumptuous (that there be something worth retaining), and it is certainly a conservative attitude (I have even used the world “conserve” above). Some would say: “But you must open yourself to the fullness of this new world! Allow everything you know to be challenged! Allow yourself to be transformed!” Forgive me for rolling my eyes at this (proof twenty-eight has found me already a grumpy old man!). This is what I felt at twenty-two. I believe I now know a little of what, at its essence, I love, a little of what, at its essence, I value, and I expect that will change with age, but I don’t think I should throw it off so easily. In India, I would hope to learn to love and value more widely, perhaps even more deeply, but that it not be at the expense of what my heart already cherishes.

In one of life’s many ironies, I face, perhaps, the same challenge that Indians and so many other peoples of the developing world have confronted for years. To wit: the true challenge of the post-colonial peoples was not something so nebulous as realizing democracy, or something so narrow as achieving economic prosperity, but rather it was taking the good (of which there was some) and throwing out the bad (of which there was more) of the colonial experience, while retaining what was best and unique and abandoning what was mean and limiting about their own cultures. This dialectic lives on in the age of globalization, and even as the post-colonial battles continue to be waged, they intermingle with the skirmishes of globalization—the two are often indistinguishable. So too must I confront difference and decide what is good and bad in it, and also to hold it alongside myself, to see, in the comparison, what of myself may be sloughed off.

Granted the crucible of a year in India or any foreign culture does not approximate that of centuries of forced cultural interchange, but I still think that the analogy may be made. Much is confronted here that one cannot be neutral about. We are always adding to and subtracting from ourselves, and the experience of a foreign culture is less solving a single abstruse mathematical problem than a rapid and constant calculation of simple sums and differences. Only the grading of our efforts is never so simple.

I’d like to pause here a moment and confess that I never intended this blog to assume the character it has of late, by which I mean the gratuitous theorizing and philosophizing dressed up as fact with declarative sentences; when I originally consented to do this, it was to obviate the need for mass e-mails. I was reluctant to take on a blog because of my fundamental dislike of the medium. I fear it gives voice to the dilettante, the armchair philosopher, the shrill contrarian, the fatuous blowhard (so close to home!); in other words, voice to those who don’t deserve a forum. And now have I not become what I’ve despised?

As many before me have pointed out, ours is an age of, among other things, the democratization of art and commentary. This has occurred primarily as a result of technological advance (digital film, desktop publishing, music production software), although shifting aesthetics (the visual arts now favoring big ideas at the expense of technical virtuosity), and expanding markets (art and criticism being information in an information-ravenous age) have certainly played their part. In general, I view this as an auspicious development, but it harbors a grave danger for the masses: deluged with all manner of expression, we are even less able than normal to distinguish the worthy from the unworthy. This is not so dangerous, though lamentable, where art is concerned, but it is positively perilous in regards to commentary: where art may have long ago lost its power to shape the values of nations (which is really a subject for another post and another blog), cultural and political commentary has entered a Golden Age of influence. No longer can journalists, the clergy, or statesmen claim to be supreme arbiters of national opinion, as they might have at one point in the history of the United States: this mantle is now reserved for the talking head and its invisible brethren on the radio airwaves and, yes, in the so-called blogosphere. Sound and fury is perhaps even less restrained in the blogosphere; therefore, were it possible to signify less than nothing, bloggers might very well do it. I’ve lain down with dogs.

I’m afraid I’ve been carried away—by the power that an audience confers, I mean. Forgive me: I’ve never had one before. Also, I assumed that only a few true souls would bother to regularly read the blog, while some number more would check in when it happened to be a slow day at work and the Times online was uncharacteristically slight. But this is a half-excuse if it is any excuse at all. One must always write with the audience in mind, and you are not reading this blog because you crave my half-baked wisdom. I apologize for betraying your trust…and of course I beg your pardon only so that I may continue in the same vein (didn’t the preceding paragraph prepare you for that double-cross?). It is all for the sake of courtesy. The truth: I enjoy the pontificating too much to stop entirely. And yet, there hasn’t been a single bit of retelling in this post, a standard all others have adhered to. Although it may be rooted in my emotional and mental experience of India, it is removed from my physical experience, and this cannot stand. I promise that not only will all future posts be inspired by my Indian odyssey, but they will also include some actual accounting of my experience here. I obey you letter, though the spirit be weak. I hope a couple of photos of the Aravallis will tide you over until the next post, which should be soon.