A Srinivas Rao 26th September 2016
He would have been 54 today and would
have been as cheerful as always, for neither misfortune nor tempest would dampen
his optimism. “A person must have a cheerful disposition by nature or a
disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge” remarked Nietzsche and Sriram
was doubly so. Yet rather than listening to the gurgling brook of his voice
over the phone, I am met with silence, four months since his untimely demise. I
haven’t deleted his number though, not that he might call, but that I might
wake up. I miss his infectious and disarming smile that would put even Medusa lower
her guard. This is a reminiscence of a person who was close to me and was my
best friend. I have wondered what if any we had in common, I believe it wasn’t
much, yet we liked each other’s company and it has intrigued me as much as
onlookers. I can’t describe him in eulogistic terms; though he had much that
was worthy of applause. Probably what fascinated me were the contradictions
which we ever so unconsciously gloss over as we make much of a false sense of
consistency as a virtue. Most of us if
not all are inconsistent creatures, inconstant and shifting in our motivations,
fears, desires and aspirations, it is ‘human all too human’. Consistency I
think is a narrative strategy of the mind that possibly highlights, represses,
and interpolates in retrospect, creating a convenient fiction of the self. At a
distance from one’s own self one might see the range of protean characteristics
that really animates each of us; though we crave for that indubitable,
mysterious, unchanging essence which might well be a figment of imagination.
