ABOUT THE WEBSITE
While the previous page gave a short biographical account about my bookish interests, the more interesting question as I thought about it a little deeper was "What is the point of reading books?" and "What's the point of sharing your insights with people on a website like this?".
Most people are interested in understanding the social world that they live. People read newspapers, gossip with their friends and relatives, listen to television talk shows and form a social/political opinion about the world that they live in. But it is much more rarer for people to be curious in an all consuming fashion about the social and cultural world that they inhabit. For those of us who are, this is not a conscious decision but it is about inner urges that we might never be able to even understand. One of the academics in "Stoner", a book by John Williams, remarks to his friends about University, "It is an asylum for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent. Look at the three of us – we are the University". In many ways this is a true and accurate description of a certain disposition that get attracted towards what is remarked as "life of the mind".
It is in some ways like the "literary aesthetic". One of the most vivid memories from my school years, when I lived with my grandmother (then in her seventies), is her recounting the words spoken by Lady Macbeth before her death. ​​Her voice would fill with emotion, remembering the actor from a traveling Shakespearean drama company who had spoken the lines when she was a young college student in her twenties at Maharani's College in Thiruvananthapuram. She would recite them word for word: "What, will these hands ne'er be clean?". "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!". Did she memorize these words so that she could tell it to her grandson fifty years down the line?. No, it is an "aesthetic" that somehow touched her deeply.
Returning to the second question about the purpose of a website like this, the fundamental motivations, as with most human endeavors, are the desire for attention, the sense of generosity that comes from sharing one’s thoughts, the wish to leave a meaningful legacy for posterity, and the drive to foster greater social awareness. But what can the general reader get from this website?. It is a commonly referred quote almost repeated ad-nauseum "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" . This sort of view translates in common imagination into giving an exaggerated importance for writers, thinkers, social historians and other assorted "intellectuals" as interpreter of maladies and moral guides to the right path. But do they really have such social influence as it is attributed to them. A very moving example of a writer driven by social purpose would be Tamizhini ( Sivakami Subramaniam, the Political Wing leader of LTTE). Faced with terminal cancer and in a race against time, she wrote her biography "In the Shadow of the Sword : The Memoir of a Woman leader in LTTE" . She explained her reason for writing the book in these words, "I asked myself why I should write this book many times. I had only one answer. I need to tell certain truths to the Tamil people whom I love like my life.... so that they do not repeat the mistakes that we did.". According to her husband, when he tried publishing the book posthumously, most of the Tamil publishing houses refused to do so. While this might be attributed to a fear created by an extremist fringe of LTTE supporters, the total indifference and apathy with which wider Tamil society has treated a book that deals with an era-defining tragedy that should have sparked deeper introspection is deeply disheartening. Tamizhini mentions about the groundwork for armed political violence laid by superfluous politicians in the 1960's using irresponsible and provocative statements long before physical violence broke out. But in 21'st century Tamilnadu and even amongst Srilankan Tamils, political statements glorifying violence and martyrdom by the Tigers, as well as calling anybody who has a differing viewpoint a "traitor" is very commonplace. In my state of Tamilnadu I can't think of any mainstream Tamil politician seriously critiquing LTTE or Prabhakaran in spite of the hoary assassination of a former Prime Minister in it's soil.
In a deeply cynical society like ours, the path that is followed is one of least resistance. Even seemingly radical changes in the present often prove to be mere continuations of the past, dressed in different garb. Rather than framing it in terms of failure or success, writing like Tamizhini's is an expression of a particular spectrum of the human experience. It is that particular facet of human condition that I would like to share with fellow readers in this website. Welcome.
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