The Mind Of The Ironist

A series of random (and perhaps disconnected) snapshots to give the reader of this blog an 'idea' of how the (restless) Mind of the Ironist 'works'.

Snapshot August 1, 2004 :

The Ironist is reading a book on Social Theory; Thesis 1 (T1) begins to develop.

Snapshot August 4, 2004 :

The Ironist is talking to a friend about the French Revolution; Anti-thesis 1 (AT1) is forming in his anarchic mind.

Snapshot August 11, 2004 :

The Ironist is thinking about his mother and the time he had spent with her feeding the ducks at the town park; Thesis 2 (T2) begins to develop.

Snapshot August 13, 2004 :

The Ironist is at a pub with a friend, discussing the caste-dynamics of Indian politics; Synthesis 1 (S1) of T1 and AT1 is born.

Snapshot August 15, 2004 :

The Ironist is reading an article in The Telegraph about globalisation; Anti-thesis 2 (AT2) begins to grow.

Snapshot August 18, 2004 :

The Ironist is watching The Pirates of the Caribbean; Anti-synthesis 1 (AS1) slithers into his mind.

Snapshot August 21, 2004 :

The Ironist is walking with a friend in the evening; an incidental remark that she makes about how 'intolerant' academics can be results in Thesis 3 (T3).

Snapshot August 22, 2004 :

The Ironist is talking to a duck about Brahman-realisation as taught by Advaita Vedanta; its Himalayan silence brings home to him Anti-thesis 3 (AT3).

Snapshot August 25, 2004 :

The Ironist meets an old friend who opines that this whole business of thesis-ing and anti-thesis-ing is a hopeless waste of time; and that he should simply burn all his books, go to an ashram in the Himalayas and meditate there on his 'inner Self'; this he carefully notes down as Thesis 4 (T4).

Snapshot August 28, 2004 :

The Ironist is watching a TV documentary on recent famines in the Sudan; he begins to formulate Anti-thesis 4 (AT4).

Snapshot September 2, 2004 :

The Ironist speaks to his brother on the phone about some family disputes in his village over the division of ancestral property; he hits upon Synthesis 3 (S3) of T3 and AT3.

Snapshot September 3, 2004 :

The Ironist meets a friend for dinner at the college Hall and talks about the movies of Federico Fellini, the paintings of Fra Angelico, the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, the plays of Eugene Ionesco, and the novels of Charlotte Bronte; he catches a glimmer of Anti-synthesis 3 (AS3) and also another aspect of AT3 which had earlier eluded him.

Snapshot September 9, 2004 :

The Ironist is reading two books, one by Georg Lukacs and the other by Antonio Gramsci, and a passing remark that Gramsci makes in his book leads him to rewatch Bicycle Thieves; he forms a complex Synthesis 4 (S4) out of T1 and AT3.

Snapshot September 21, 2004 :

The Ironist is reading four books, one on feminist epistemology, one on Iranian Sufism, one on evolutionary biology, and a fourth on some recent advances in cosmological theory; he unweaves S3 to form T'3 and AT'3 which he now stacks away somewhere in his mind.

Snapshot September 28, 2004 :

The Ironist is talking to his psychoanalyst friend who cautions him that it is precisely people like him who have carried the habit of self-introspection to such an extreme limit who can become schizoid at any time; the Ironist notes this down as Thesis 5 (T5).

Snapshot October 3, 2004 :

The Ironist is watching a fragment of a Hindi movie called Main Hoon Na; this time he forms Synthesis 4 (S4) out of AT3 and T5.

Snapshot October 9, 2004 :

The Ironist meets a friend who tells him that his monomaniacal dabbling in self-analysis is a typical 'male disease'; that he should learn how to 'loosen up' a bit, to 'chill out', to ' take it easy', to go out into the garden, and to enjoy the sun; the Ironist ponders on this suggestion which becomes Thesis 6 (T6), and which returns to haunt him in the middle of the night.

Snapshot October 20, 2004 :

The Ironist buys a 1,5 cl bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from Sainsbury's; he feels disheartened with the thought that he will die very soon with so many books unread in the University's library; he tries to overcome his despair with the white wine; but even as he does so, he already begins to see the faint outlines of Anti-thesis 6 (AT6).

Snapshot October 22, 2004 :

The Ironist is listening to the opening movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony no 5; as the music rises to a crescendo, he realises that he had been such a fool all along not to have seen Synthesis 5 (S5) developing out of S1 and S4.

Snapshot October 25, 2004 :

The Ironist sees a young woman in the market square quarrelling with another woman whom he takes to be the former's mother; what an aunt of his had once told him about how women never really move away from their mothers (while men can, and frequently do) springs into his mind from the caverns of his memory and becomes Thesis 7 (T7).

Snapshot October 26, 2004 :

The Ironist is rereading The Speckled Band, a Sherlock Holmes story; and Asterix in Corsica, a title in a series of comics that first taught him how to make puns in English. He can already sense some theses and anti-theses knocking at the doors of his mind, trying to force their way into it; but today he gently pushes them away, and goes for a long walk along the river Cam. He remembers the last few hours of his mother's death-bed agony.

Snapshot October 27, 2004 :

The Ironist finally manages to hunt down (if the expression be allowed) a female friend who is interested in such gender-issues and places T 7 before her; she makes some astute remarks which he gratefully notes as Anti-thesis 7 (AT7).

Snapshot October 31, 2004 :

The Ironist sees a beautiful yellow dog as he is walking down the road; the dog brings back memories of various times, places, animals, and people flooding into his mind; and as he sits down on a brown chair, staring at a grey stone Cross pointing towards an equally grey Cambridge sky and pondering the various thoughts that are swimming around in his anarchic mind, Anti-synthesis 3 (AS3) grows larger and larger.

Snapshot November 1, 2004 :

The Ironist is reading some pages from a short story by F. Kafka and listening to a Rabindra Sangeet Tai tomar anondo amar' por. For once, there are no theses, no antitheses and no syntheses to bother his exhausted mind. For once, he is 'living in the moment.' He looks out of the window at the brilliantly blue sky. The peaceful sky floats on, and carries him along with it to some distant idyllic village in rural Bengal where a silver-bearded wandering minstrel sits down under the cool shade of a banyan tree on the banks of the river Padma and sings Kothay khuje pabo ami amar moner manush? : Where shall I find, O' where indeed shall I find, that infinite treasure, that one true Man of my heart?

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