Musings of a Lazy Author

Sabarna Roy is Senior Vice President [Business Development] at Electrosteel Castings Limited, an author of eight Literary and three Technical bestselling books, TEDx Speaker, Champions of Change Award 2020 Winner, Times Excellence Award 2021 Winner in Indian Literature, and Golden Glory Award Winner for Critically Acclaimed Bestselling Author of the Year 2021. The luminary has been awarded the Right Choice Award for Author of Eminence of 2022. Also, he has been selected among the India Today Group: Icons of India. Presently, he is writing his ninth Literary work: an epistolary novel, that is likely to be published in the winter of 2022/23. Since the age of fourteen, Sabarna Roy has been maintaining a daily journal containing the minutest details of his life. Some of the journal entries are reproduced in this column for the benefit of the readers.

1. There is no denying the fact that the birth, and evolution of capitalism has been a work-in-progress of human imagination, and an excellent economic art fueled by greed, and super-greed. Artificial Intelligence will elevate capitalism onto a very new platform – creating challenges for itself, which it will solve. There is a school of thought that Artificial Intelligence will weaken the backbone of capitalism. I do not agree to this school of thought. This was thought of Internet as well at one point in time. Capitalism has destroyed civilizational aspects of human life, and the planet to a point of no return.

Karl Marx understood the construction of capitalism like no other economist did.Yet, his prediction of communism was not built-up on sound economics. Rather, when Karl Marx worked – he worked till his last weeks including his experimentation with labor economic movements – the genetic understanding of human consciousness was very weak because of which the idea of proletariat revolution ushering human life into socialism, and thereafter into communism was more of a wishful construct, which were later fomented, and fermented by the political practitioners of the idea of Marxian thought.

No practicing politician survives human validity without projecting an idea of revolutionary change. Capitalism in its post-modern form has vanquished the romanticism of socialist revolutions and replaced it with the primitive instinct to survive against the furor of nature, that has been ravaged by the progress of capitalism. Yes, it is true that there will be no revolution; the human civilization will possibly die by the end of the 21st century.

2. Something that I wrote on June 22, 2010:
Last year I lost my mother. For a few moments her corpse had reclined on a steel stretcher on the portico of a modern hospital before it was loaded on to a flower decked hearse. She was surrounded by family, friends and relatives all crying hysterically. I had not cried until then. As I took a last look at her – she almost resembled a happily-sleeping fluffy doll – drowned under a white ocean of flowers and garlands; tears welled up from nowhere blinding and diffusing my sight with the thunder of another thought and later replaced by a strange succession of images.

Was she able to look through my flesh and blood, now that she was dead and could defy the universe of mechanics and quantum theories, to that vortex of nothingness and darkness that was essentially me?What happens when mothers realize that their sons are very different from the shadows they beam in social life? And then, all of a sudden, I saw my corpse illumined and stretched on a marble tiled floor looking into the soul of my son against an azure sky.

He was looking at my swollen cold face with emotion and as the clouds emanating from my decaying stagnant body floated through the chill of air and entered his skull diving past his large beautiful eyes I could hear the complex tunes floating on the waves of a lonely sea: a sea that was eager to last a lifetime and show brilliant paths inside the cosmos to its earnest navigators. Was he relieved that I was no more there to pile on him with what I thought was right and wrong? Did he move away from me long back: in his adolescent years? Was he tired of and suffocated by me?

Did he repent about following to tee what I asked of him to do in life and most of it that he did so wonderfully? Did he feel wasted and pent up in life that I felt many a time during my own lifetime? Did he sometimes wish to hit me or kill me or just that I was dead? Did he feel lonelier, after I was declared dead, like a sea with its lighthouse vanquished by its majestic shore

3. Two images terrify me constantly. I will share with you these images: a half-slice of a crimson moon staring at you through the grey veil of a swimming monsoon cloud suddenly sighted from a dilapidated terrace window (it takes my breath away making me feel somebody

The Surgeon of all Surgeons – is drilling through me and dissecting me inside out) and the view of the Bombay city from a distance on a monsoon night as your flight takes off westwards flying atop the Arabian Sea and then taking a swerve north eastwards towards the city and the lights of emeralds, diamonds, pearls and neon blazing and some of them forming trajectories of sparkling photons visible through the flock of low flying dark clouds giving me an impression that the city is on the verge of a terrible exothermic explosion and the world will come to its end just in front of my eyes.

4. Ma
On my third brthday in 1970, Baba’s boss, Mr C S Mohan, from a Telegu Brahmin farmer stock and a brilliant metallurgist from the erstwhile Banaras Hindu University, gifted me a synthetic red-and-black striped short-pant, which if I remember correctly was very close to hot-pants my daughter wears nowadays [the only difference being the hot-pants are made up of primarily cotton fabric], and a synthetic similarly striped T-shirt with collars. This dress, I was very fond of, and would crave off Ma every afternoon to wear when I went out to play with my friends. She would continuously resist.

This was before the blackouts began during the Bangladesh war in 1971. On chosen days, she would allow me to wear this dress with kohl-lined-eyes and kohl dots below my feet and on my left cheek [I resisted and revolted but she would not listen].

One day when my revolt out-broke almost into a full-fledged war, she suddenly clasped me into her bosom and hissed into my ears: ‘’I have watched those beautiful young maids with dirty minds of our neighbourhood fondling you and holding you close to their bosom whenever you wear this dress; you do not belong anywhere except my bosom.’’ While I calmed down, strangely I realized an eerie current of electricity passing through my body, and I felt so secure in Ma’s lap, and thought I was with the most beautiful woman in the world.

Source: businessconnectindia.in