I wonder if it's a natural thing to get depressed after every encounter with art. Of course, the level of depression being a function of the strength of the art-piece and its connectability with your own life.
Its probably ok to feel sad when you are sitting on a rock looking down at an Ellora ruin. Or may be listening to an old song from a dead composer and knowing that nobody will ever make this kind of music again. You know, lost-past-glory and all that romantic blah blah.
But who the hell gets sad after seeing A Beautiful Mind, or seeing a colourful, crafted mirror-handbag from a hippie Gokarna, or worse- after reading a Wodehouse? You will definitely classify me as a psycho if I start listing out all the things that contribute to a rapid decay in humour.
I have absolutely no personal memories attached to any of these. For example, the hippie bag wasn't gifted to me by an ex who is infesting the US in pretext of a post graduation. No. that isn't even my bag. But I just look at it and wonder where it came from and who weaved it and how much they sold it for and what it cost them and if their children go to school and if they have a clean house and if the husband is a drunkard and if they have ANY clue whatsoever of Foriegn Direct Investment which the sentimental leftists argue will kill them all.
And you know how it is. You already have this small little brain that is being driven beyond tolerance. You are anyway not absorbing 80% of what is expected out of your absorption capability. To top everything off nicely, you have a mind that has a tendency to connect things one from another then to another and so on. Although some chariable people might cal me a lil 'neurotic'; I know that I am, well, Mind-Fucked.
I wonder then, if it is just how an individual's mind works or is it your father's cynicism rubbing off on you. When I see a movie on how John Nash (played by Crowe) made his way through Game Theory with that blonde incident in the bar- (My Professor, who watched it with us, commented that Nash had probably had too many beers)- I am filled with a sense of worthlessness. The helplessness that engulfs you when you know you would have no way connected a Blonde in the Bar with Nash Equilibrium.
You read Wodehouse and you know for sure your life is never going to be like Bertie Wooster's. Not in the sense of being all-rich and all-English. In the sense of being mindlessly happy. In the sense of having a Jeeves who will shoulder all the responsibility of thinking your brain has. In the sense of unsuspectingly walking into trouble and then trying to get out of it. Then being back to your old unsuspicious self.
I belong to a generation of children raised up by educated, not-too-religious middle class Indian parents. I was thrown too much information and examples at me to be blissful. I was told I will not survive in the reckless world if I was not alert always.
I was fed too much ambition, by parents who want an IAS officer in the family, by aunts whose sons went to IITs, by neighbors whose daughters graduated from IIMs, by classmates who are studying Advanced Thermodynamics in MIT. Forget about the 'conventional' achievements, I know it wihin that I am not going to be a part of any environment-saving campaign. I will never walk among people of an epidemic-hit village and nurse them. I was fed so much ambition, it frustrates me that I am not born brilliant. I am filled with laughable jealousy at people who are.
No, I dont have the simple luxury of either being happily ignorant or the blessing of being a achiever.
And you'll wonder how one person could possibly concieve such profound frustration after watching a simple movie.
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