Skip to main content

Being Fluid

Stumbled upon this essay about Rituparno Ghosh while looking for something else that was prompted by my reading of Want. The protagonist in the novel struggles against her desires in quiet desperation where I am in the book. She is the product of choices she made in part because she could not bring those needs and wants to fruition. 

I watched the fluid transformation of Rituparno Ghosh over the years and was struck by now natural his transition to feminine seemed. It was as if in the core of him there was this beautiful woman who had emerged like a butterfly from its chrysalis. He must have served as inspiration who felt the way he did but lacked his power of expression. The news of his death was saddening and made me wonder if what appeared so effortless was actually far more complex and heartbreaking for the person. His cinema mirrored his world-view: 

..his disbelief in absolutes, painful trappings of the body and need for inclusion of gender, sexuality and minority communities into the political and social mainstream...

While the reality of his own life may have been dark and lonesome, Ghosh was able to recreate it with magic and luminosity on screen. Reading the book and now this essay brings to mind The Left Hand of Darkness - one of my favorite sc-fi books. 

Le Guin’s use of her creative practice is courageous. She has referred to the novel as a “thought experiment,” writing, “I eliminated gender to find out what was left. What ever was left would be, presumably, simply human.”[2]  Imagination here is a radical, exploratory tool. Le Guin uses her writing to reach beyond the constructs of gender and race, looking for the “simply human.” At the same time, she projects an alternative configuration of how human societies might look. Le Guin uses her practice to write her way into another world.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...