An Announcement

The Ironist of the Day award for March 19, 2005 goes to Charles Kennedy of the Liberal Democrats (UK) for this jibe against Labour (UK) : 'If Labour remains hung up on gay issues, people will think they are weird.' To which, however, the Transparent Ironist, as the official ironist of the Labouring masses, is forced to reply : 'If Charles Kennedy remains silent on gay issues, people will think he is neither a liberal nor a democrat.'

My Grandfather's Ring

A most remarkable set of events unfolded before me yesterday morning, events that reminded me of how deeply we are immersed in a flowing stream of time where the past is still remorselessly flowing past us. Three weeks ago, I had been to the sleepy little village of Mildred, twenty miles from Cambridge, to meet a college friend, and since my grandfather too had lived there most of his life, I decided to step into the local library to see if his name was mentioned in any of the council records there. I browsed through several dusty volumes until I came across a black and white photograph of him standing beside a woman wearing a hat in front of a local pub. The photograph heightened my curiosity and I sent an advertisement to The Mildred Herald for any information about it.

I returned to Cambridge the next evening, and forgot all about the advertisement. Yesterday morning, however, I received a brown package from the Royal Mail, and on opening it I found a small blue box with a beautiful silver ring inside it. I took it near the window, and in the morning sunlight I saw the following letters engraved on the rim : 'M.B. to E.D.' Since M.B. were my grandfather's initials, I was highly intrigued and decided to take the ring to my granduncle at the other end of town and ask him if he knew who E.D. was. On the way I crossed the Cam behind Trinity, and I saw a young woman sitting down under the winter-struck elms near the Backs. When she saw me approaching, she asked me if I could lend her a matchstick. I gave her one and as she lit a cigarette the sharp smell of burning tobacco filled the windy air.

'Why are you sitting down here? Isn't it a cold morning?', I asked her.

'Me? Oh, I am waiting. When you are waiting, there is nothing colder than the coldness of the wait.'

'What are you waiting for?'

'Oh, I don't know. Maybe for something. Maybe for nothing.'

'How long are you going to keep on waiting here?'

'I don't know. Maybe until my heart is shattered into pieces.'

I left her there under the leafless elms, and slowly walked down into the noisy traffic of Queen's road. I looked back once at her from the other side of the smoky road. A black raven was now quietly sitting beside her and giving her company with its eloquent muteness, and her white cigarette fumes were slowly rising into the sky. And in front of me, I could rows and rows of neatly-dressed people madly rushing to work, people who have become sleep-walkers in a heart-broken world.

If you don't want to be forgotten after you are dead, leave a smart one-liner for those who shall come after you. ---- Anonymous

What Is Irony?

I spent the whole afternoon yesterday skimming through several books of quotations in the library, trying to find some quotable quotes on the topic of Irony. Here is a collection of some of them. (For those of you who are interested in that discipline called 'History of Ideas', you may also like to note how the notion of Irony has taken different twists and turns since the Roman times to our own. You might even think of writing a semester paper on this matter.)

(A) 'It is the sacred duty of an ironist to keep the sense of wonder alive in his audience.' : Ammanius Licentius Marcellinus (13 - 67 A.D.), Roman orator

(B) 'The debauched Paris with his wiles of Irony

Entranced the unsuspecting Helen of Troy

Who blissfully unaware of his devious ploy

Never had mere words produced such misery!' : Vicentius Prudentius Tyrentius (345 - 421 A.D.), late Latin poet, this style is usually regarded by contemporary critics as cliched, sexist, forced, and degenerate

(C) 'If an ironist did not exist, I would die of boredom.' : God (eternal, but written in 500 A.D.)

(D) 'Irony is the most sinister enemy of Christianity.' : St Barnard of Bayreuth (c.9th century), Catholic saint

(E) 'Irony, c'est moi.' : Charles Romanov Battenberg-Gotha Dapsburg Hohenzollern (late 15th century), enlightened despot of the Holy Dacian Empire

(F) 'One drop of Pure Reason is enough to dispel the perfidious sophistries of a thousand ironists.' : Henri Louis Phillipe d'Alembert (1658-1724 A.D.), French rationalist who popularised Newton in France

(G) 'If an ironist did not exist, I would be forced to invent him.' : God (eternal, but written in 1835 A.D. as a reply to Voltaire)

(H) 'Oh noble Truth, where are the beauties

That scientists have seen in Thy microscope?

Better to dwell in the midst of Ironies

Than peer through a cold, cold telescope!' : William Spenser (1799 - 1878 A.D.), English Romantic poet, a vigorous critic of Charles Darwin and a close friend of Lord Tennyson

(I) 'We shall turn Irony on its head and show that it is but the reflex of humanity alienated from its socio-economic base.' : Arthur Luxembourg (1850 - 1921 A.D.), Austrian Marxist who was himself turned on his head when he became a Roman Catholic three years before his death
(J) 'If I were but an ironist, I would make man in my own image.' : God (eternal, but written in 1915 A.D. at the battle of the Somme)

(K) 'Man is not yet born, to come into being he must first overcome Woman. And this will be possible only by exercising his Will to Irony' : Friedrich Deutsche (1834 - 1920 A.D.), the first historical ironist to go on record
(L) 'The Unconscious is structured like an Irony' : Heinrich Joachim Klein (1884 - 1945 A.D.), Swiss psychoanalyst

(M) 'There are three sworn enemies of our sacred Motherland : Muslims, Communists, and Ironists' : Swadesh Chandra Mishra (1889 - 1946 A.D.), Indian freedom fighter

(N) 'Irony is the highest form of authenticity.' : Wilhelm Albert Sateer (1867 - 1958 A.D.), Algerian existentialist

(O) 'Irony is the last resort of a scoundrel.' : John Leslie Spencer (1878 - 1956 A.D.), English Prime Minister, Conservative

(P) 'An ironist is a man who is too scared to admit that he has nothing worthwhile to say. Irony is a shameful masculine conspiracy to keep the women playing the guessing game while the men are at it.' : Rosa Avila (1939 - 1994), Argentinian feminist

(Q) 'Irony is an evolutionary by-product which is utilised to dazzling effect by the male of the species to attract the female for optimising his reproductive success. Irony is nothing but a complex organisation of the genes. Give me a man's DNA, and I will tell you where his Irony is coming from in three minutes.' : Jonathan E. Wilson (1910 - ?), American sociobiologist, writer of the hugely popular The Selfish Ironist

(R) 'There are no facts in history, only ironies.' : Romain Lee-Strauss (1889 - 1978 A.D.), French poet

(S) 'If you cannot defeat them, do not think that you are stupid. You are still better than them. Yes, keep on repeating it to yourself : 'I am better than Thou'. You see, you always have the trump card : they may pulverise you, but you can still ironise them.' : Belinda Goodwoman (1920 - ?), Australian writer of self-help books

(T) 'Irony? You can't be serious? Was it something I said? Jesus Christ, you are freaking me out, you know? Did you catch the last plane to Tasmania? Oh, sorry, I forgot to recite my Om Mani Padme Om. Now isn't that ironic?' : geraldinE croakeR (1934 - ?), American postmodern critic, University of California at Irvine

(U) 'That's it! Anything I say now will be taken as irony.' : The Transparent Ironist (1976 - ?), post(-)colonial Indian in the UK

The Paradox Of Love

Now that parental control has become a thing of the past, a girl doesn't need to talk to her lover from the balcony any more. But if Juliet's speech to Romeo in the famous balcony scene is anything to go by, one might wonder if something more than the ladder has been thrown out in the process. Consider this snippet :

Juliet : My love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite.

The lover of paradoxes that I am, these lines, 'the more I give to thee, the more I have', have exercised my imagination since I first read this play when I was in high school. Strictly speaking, of course, a paradox cannot be 'explained'; sometimes, however, one can get a 'feel' for it by considering some counter-paradoxes to it. Here are four of them that would have made Juliet blush at our lovelessness :

(a) The more I eat, the more I feel hungry.

(b) The more I shop, the more I want to buy.

(c) The more I have, the more I feel a lack.

(d) The more I get, the more I want.

How I Was Saved By A Nun

Now that the intense pain associated with the memories of May 2004 is gradually beginning to subside, I can finally bring myself to write about how I first met Sister Mathilde. It was on a bright sunny morning last year, May 3, that I received an email saying that my girl-friend of nine years had been killed in a car-crash in Tampa, Florida. I felt that a giant abyss of nothingness had suddenly yawned up beneath my feet and I had been sent plunging into its cold and fathomless depths. For weeks, I tried in vain to find something solid to hold on to, some temporary stopping-place on my downward descent into myself. I found it impossible to sleep properly at nights and also to keep up with my work during the day in the university library. I finally went to my doctor who after several visits put me on prozac and some other sedatives. That helped to some extent but very soon I began to experience sudden attacks of panic during which I would feel that the solid ground on which I was walking would open up with no warning at all.

My doctor asked me to visit a specialist consultant at St Thomas' in London, and it was to St Thomas' that I went on a July afternoon. On the way, however, I came across a small school called St Hilda's For Girls with beautiful red-bricks and shining green roofs. Having spent twelve years in a Roman Catholic school in a small town in the northeastern-most part of India, I have always experienced a strange peace in the atmosphere that suffuses Catholic schools, and I decided to spend some time sitting down under an elm tree within its campus. After some time, I saw four nuns, dressed in their spotless white habits, moving towards the black iron gate. When they reached the gate, however, one of them saw me and came up to me.

'Hello, my dear. Are you all right?'

'Yes', I replied brusquely. (Though I really wanted to scream at her : 'Just leave me alone and go to hell, will you? I don't want any of your bossy preaching right now.')

'Ah, you are not all right then, my dear.'

'What makes you think so?'

'Oh, you know how it is with you men. My dear, you people are so predictable. When you say Yes, you usually mean No.'

'And how on earth would you know such a thing?', I asked, unable to hide my rising irritation.

'Oh my dear. You think that I would know nothing of men just because I am a nun? You don't know how I spend the whole day, the whole night, and the whole year talking to my Man on the Cross? You see, He is very much like you men, if I may dare to say so. But hush! Don't go telling the others out there that I have been speaking to you about all this. My dear, every morning, when I pray to Him, He seems to say Yes to me, but in the evening, I know that He had actually meant No. How typical of Him to do that! Why does He not say No to me in unequivocal terms straightaway at matins?'

There was something about her reply that made me stand up. I had always carried with me this mental image of nuns as stuffy, outdated, and imperious martinets who were completely unaware of what was going on outside the cloistered haven of their cosy convents, but here was a nun, if I may say so, with a difference. As I frantically tried to find words to frame some sort of a reply, she called out to the three other sisters standing at the gate to come closer to us. And that is how on the afternoon of July 4, 2004, I met Sister Mathilde for the first time. Five days later, I went down to Yarmouth Abbey, seven miles outside the picturesque town of Canterbury, at the invitation of Sister Mathilde to see how the nuns of the Franciscan Order live, work, and pray in their convent. That evening, after she had shown me around the place, Sister Mathilde asked me to go with her to the chapel after vespers.

'But I am not religious', I protested.

'My dear, do you think that I am religious? If I were to tell God, "O God, just look at me. Just see how religious I, Sister Mathilde, am", God will laugh me to scorn! My dear, just come with me and sit down beside me for a while.'

And so Sister Mathilde knelt down before her God, and I sat down on one of the brightly polished benches, silently gazing at the wooden Cross. I began to wonder what I was doing there, for I knew only too well that it would not be God but my friends who would surely laugh me to utter scorn if they were to find out that I had been running away to a convent. Sister Mathilde spoke nothing for half an hour, but her face was aglow with a wonderfully warm radiance that seemed to emanate from her, flow outwards into all directions, and envelope me in its loving embrace.

I started going to Yarmouth every weekend, and slowly and slowly, I began to feel healed in the presence of Sister Mathilde, to feel that some of the deep fissures that had suddenly opened up within me were being knitted together with masterful care, love, and patience. Sister Mathilde, however, would never talk to me about God, and puzzled about this omission I once questioned her : 'Are you trying to make a Christian out of me?'

'My dear, what amazing thoughts you have! Do you really think that I am capable of such a feat, a poor old nun like me?'

'So why are you doing all this to me?'

'Do you feel that I am helping you in some way?'

'Yes, you are.'

'Do I need a reason to help someone?

I remained silent.

I saw Sister Mathilde for the last time on December 28, 2004 when I went down to Yarmouth with some fruit that I had bought for her from a Sunday market near Cambridge. There was something different about her on that day, about the light on her face and the tone in her voice, as if she somehow knew that her time had come. She took me again into the chapel in the falling dusk, and she knelt down and remained silent for a few minutes. Then she turned towards me and spoke to me with a soft whispering voice.

'Do you feel the love that is pouring out from the wounds on His crucified hands? Someday perhaps, my dear, you shall experience that love gently flowing into you and transforming you from within. Then, my dear, you shall also feel that everything else in this world is but a fleeting shadow, a sign of times when all suffering shall be removed.'

On January 5, I went to see her grave with a bundle of her favourite red geraniums. On her epitaph was written : 'Sister Mathilde / Anyone who does not love her brother whom she has seen cannot love God whom she has not seen.' For a long time after her death, I felt her gnawing absence in my life acutely and could not bear to go to Yarmouth for fear that the familiar sights, sounds, and smells there would only remind me of her. Gradually, however, I was able to accept the bitter truth that Sister Mathilde is not with me, that she is not here, not there, and will never be anywhere around me. And yet in some sense I know that she is everywhere, that she has become as omnipresent to me as the expansiveness of the blue sky over my head.

Today, of course, I also know that outside her Order nobody will remember Sister Mathilde in a few years. She will never make it to any of the headlines of the national papers; nobody will give her a Noble Prize, not even one for Peace; and many will, in fact, continue to believe, as I myself had done once, that nuns like her are self-absorbed aliens isolated from humanity, a drain on the country's gross national income. Not that any of this bothered Sister Mathilde in the least when I had pointed them out to her one autumn evening as the tired evening was settling into Yarmouth. She had said : 'My dear, do you really believe that I am living in this world to earn votes on a television opinion poll? Everyone, my dear, keeps on saying that all we need is love. If only, my dear, we knew how difficult it is to hold on to it even when it is all around us.'

The Essential Difference

The following is the essential difference between an Illusionist and an Ironist. The skill of an Illusionist lies in deceiving the eye. The art of an Ironist lies in disorienting the mind.

The Presence Of The Past

I met Renita, one of my American cousins, after many years in London yesterday, and her amazing knowledge of certain aspects of European art history struck a deep chord in me. These words are for her :

To capture the shimmer of your gaze

With three swift brush-strokes

There yet remains something unspoken

Within the pair of your eloquent eyes

Perhaps the joy of a gentle radiance

Like the warmth of the orange sun

That slowly rises every dawn

Unfettered, untired, and unblemished

High above the tangled mess
Of our world of unresolved contradictions.

The Anarchy Of The Memsahib

An extract from an appeal issued by a Bengali woman in the 1880s : 'If you have acquired real knowledge, give no place in your heart to the memsahib like behaviour of neglecting your husband. That is not proper behaviour for a Bengali housewife ... And see if God had not appointed us to this place in the home, how unhappy a place this world would be.'

Regarding the function of women in nation-building, the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas puts the matter with breath-taking sincerity : 'In the resistance, the role of the woman is equal to the man's. She is a factory to produce men, and she has a great role in raising and educating the generations.'

The Autobiography Of The Transparent Ironist : Chapter 3

(This is Chapter 3 of my autobiography My Experiments With Irony : I return here to my favourite theme of my Gothic fascination with the forgotten age of the British Empire in India.)

I arrived in Calcutta by the coal-steamer from Southampton in the midst of the sultry Bengal summer of 1826, and was immediately sent to Barrackpore to join the expedition of Sir Thomas Crawley Everest who was then setting out on a journey to the unexplored Himalayas. We moved out in the first week of July as the torrential monsoon showers began to pour down upon us from the deep heavens : an enormously long chain of mules, pack-horses, natives, guides, and British officers. We had been travelling for two months when we finally reached the silent unspoilt plateau of Sikkim in early September. It was my first time in the Himalayas, and I was exhilarated by the sight of the golden peaks in the distance.

One morning as we were rising higher into the mountains, we came across a band of natives who were singing and dancing around a wildly-dressed woman. She was wearing a necklace of what looked like bleached human finger-bones, her hair was smooth, long, and black, and she was whirling round and round in a delirious frenzy. Sir Everest ordered me to go ahead and clear the way for our company, and I took two of my men and began to move towards her. When I was very close to the natives, I got down from my horse and stood beside it, silently watching her mesmerising movements. She suddenly stopped in the middle of her terrible dance, and saw me mutely staring at her. She came closer to me, looked into my eyes, and gave out a most horrible laugh that echoed and reechoed through the placid mountains. She unfolded her hands, and I saw some sweet-smelling white powder on her black palms.

She came closer to me, and said in the broken Hindusthani that I had been struggling to learn at the London School of Oriental Languages : 'Eat this, you white man, and taste the bliss that you have never known in your distant island. This is the holy food of the sacred Mother. Eat it, and she shall become yours, and you shall become hers!' And she spread out the sugar evenly on her right palm, and held it up to my nose. I inhaled the sweet fumes, and began to feel that the primordial mountains were revolving around me in a cosmic dance. The shaky ground beneath my tired feet was slowly slipping away from me, and I felt myself slowly dissolving into the ancient womb of creation. I wildly threw out my hands but I could not find anything solid to hold on to.

At that moment, I heard the frantic galloping of a horse behind me, and I was rudely shaken out of my gentle descent into sweet oblivion. I turned round and saw Sir Everest charging at the native woman, his white sabre flashing in his right hand. He sliced the cold air with it and struck her on her right shoulder, and immediately a stream of thick red blood poured out from her. There was a sudden uproar from the natives who had been silently watching me, and they now rushed towards the woman who had fallen to the ground in a pool of shining blood. I could see that she was in great agony, and yet she screamed at Sir Everest : 'You white man, you shall see the Horror! Yes, the Horror of the sacred Mother shall forever haunt you!'

The days passed, and we ascended yet higher into the rarified reaches of the Himalayas where no European had ever journeyed to. The geographers in our company were busy charting the rugged terrain, and the engineers from the Royal Corps were already planning to build roads through the mountains to Tibet. Sir Everest's behaviour, however, became more and more whimsical, he was now easily irritated with his juniour officers, and he would sometimes ramble off into the wrong direction muttering something to himself. One morning, he shocked us by declaring that he would go alone into the Himalayas leaving us behind at that point, and though we protested vigorously with him he would not listen to any of us. So he left us that misty morning on his horse in his shining red uniform, his black revolvers sticking out from the sides, and his green cap turned round the wrong way. We waited for him for two weeks at that spot hoping that he would return soon, but that was the last I ever saw of Sir Thomas Crawley Everest.

Or, at least, that was what I believed for the next twenty years of my life. I came back with the failed expedition to Calcutta Presidency within a month and was promoted after five years in the army to become Lieutenant Thomas Manley Hopkinson. I returned to England after an honourable ten years' service in India, got married to my childhood sweetheart, and settled down in the picturesque countryside of Dorset.

In 1846 I had to travel to London to meet an old friend who was a doctor with the Admiralty, and when we were having lunch I was casually asked by him if I had ever heard of someone called Sir Thomas Crawley Everest. Seeing how shocked I was on hearing that name, he surmised that I had somehow come into contact with Sir Everest in Bengal, and he took me to the newly built hospital in St George's Fields beside the Thames. There on the second floor was a wizened old man, his crisp hair whitened with age, his dry skin wrinkled with time, and his bushy eyebrow weighed down with approaching death. When I introduced myself to him, he remained still for a moment on his brown chair. Then he slowly rose to his feet, turned towards me and started walking even as spasms of pain shook his frail body. When he was close to me, his withered face underwent a most horrendous contortion, and he screamed out in violent agony : 'The Horror! the Horror!'