A Transparent Life

For some time now the Transparent Ironist has been thinking of writing his autobiography A Transparent Life which will be somewhat unusual on two counts. Firstly, it will be written throughout not in the first-person but in the third so that instead of prosaic sentences such as 'I was born on a cold wintry morning when the sun was descending into the horizons' the reader will be greeted with lapidary statements of this sort 'The Ironist was born on February 11, 1976.' Secondly, the Ironist will pretend that he went through several phases during his life, and he shall invent a character for each of these phases so that the reader who wants to know who the real Ironist was will be thoroughly confused. In some parts of his autobiography, the Ironist will raise slogans very much like a Russian Communist, at others he will talk wildly in the manner of a Chicago capitalist; in some passages, the Ironist will sing paens to globalisation, and in other ones, he will think like a rural Italian peasant who grows his own food; in some chapters, he will pontificate as if he were a devout Roman Catholic, and in others he shall flaunt militantly atheistic views; in some sections, he will confess his nostalgia for the vanished glory of 13th century mediaeval Europe, and in others he will celebrate the thousand flowers that are blooming in the late 21st century; in some parts, he will admit how profoundly Euro-centric he was, and in others how strongly rooted in the Indian past he always remained; in some portions, he will dogmatise as if nobody other than Rabindranath Tagore ever composed music, and in others he will denounce in unequivocal terms all contemporary forms of music that were not composed by Ludwig van Beethoven.

Very few readers will get the point of all this meandering, though. The most common reaction to his autobiography will be that the Ironist was a person who revelled in confusing people; hence his devious mode of slipping through all conceptual categories which his readers might seek to impose on him. A few others might believe that the Ironist himself never knew who he was and was therefore forced to keep on running away from himself like a dog that tries to catch its own tail. Yet some more of his readers will conclude that the Ironist was the supreme Machiavellian who breezed through life outwitting others around him just as suited his fancy. Readers belonging to a fourth group will declare, on reading through the litany of oppositions in his autobiography, that the Ironist was a person of violent and painful contradictions, and was compelled to hide these by reinventing himself every morning, much in the manner of an actor who goes through life, picking up one mask and then throwing it away.

And yet, the Ironist is hopeful that there will be a handful of his readers who on patiently reading through his A Transparent Life will laugh out loudly at the end of it, and exclaim, 'Yes, now I have finally understood what that rascal was trying to tell us when he was alive! Oh my God, if only he had said it in so many words when he was with us!'. In that moment of delight, the Ironist will turn over in his grave and feel that his life was, after all, meaningful : he had succeeded in making at least a few human beings laugh and had helped them to forget, even if momentarily, the pervasive suffering in which they are all immersed in. Only these readers will realise that the Ironist's life was grounded on but one principle : let us first seek to remove one another's suffering, suffering that no irony can touch, alleviate or reduce, and whatever truth we aspire for will slowly emerge from this process.