Of Beauty And Ugliness: A Journalist’s Journey
Her fingers were stout and slender at the same time. One can hardly fathom how these two could fit together. She had bulgy fingers which were short. They were slender in themselves but stubby when compared to her skeletal frame. Her fingers were ugly, she thought. The one part of her body which did not quite fit. The index finger of her left palm was crooked, owing to the physical abuse that she endured when she was sixteen.
She sat still, a cigarette in one hand and a brownish cup in another, while she saw the abstract patterns of the smoke which swirled around her. The smoke from the cigarette and the hot tea seemed to have united in a way that it was impossible to differentiate them. She stared blankly at the smoke and began thinking. The strangest thing about abstraction was anything, almost everything, could be categorized under it. Almost immediately, her thoughts arranged themselves, formed a pattern and she helplessly stared at the laptop screen that was set aside a few minutes ago. An article was due and the clock was ticking. She wondered why people were so obsessed with deadlines. What about it was so ‘deadly’? Why was routine so important? The clockwork, the mechanization of almost everything that surrounds us, was of utmost importance to her. She wanted to uncover the truth behind such carefully crafted rules of the universe which rejuvenated with every new generation, with every new wave, with every new voice, and ideology. But, she had no time to decipher the truth behind time.
She jerked herself off the reverie. Why does the mind go off to places of no importance to the world? She began thinking about the article that was due. Only two days ago, her boss had entrusted her with the responsibility. Her boss, a feeble yet frivolous man of thirty, told her, “26th January is just around the corner. For Republic Day, we will be publishing a series of articles about the prosperity of our country. I want you to contribute, Arundhati. Make sure you make it beautiful!” He gleamed when he said that as Arundhati stared at him with kohl-covered eyes that evidently lacked sleep. A monstrous urge took over her. She wanted to scream, “Beautiful! Really? What is so beautiful about our existence? It’s as ugly as my fingers.” But, she kept quiet and nodded approvingly.
From her 18th-floor apartment window in Mumbai, she looked down at the shanties that littered the pavements. Dozens of people slept on these pavements as luxury cars passed them on the adjacent road. Two different worlds, existing at the same time, along the road that was visible from the window. Like two parallel lines, vowing never to meet each other. Suddenly, Arundhati felt she belonged to another world. A third kind of world that looks down from the multitudinous windows. She was perturbed by the idea of beauty. She knew for sure what was not beautiful but never understood what beautiful meant. It’s strange how some words make sense only in their negation, their true meaning hidden from the world which claims to know much more than they could ever grasp. She shuddered at the thought of making the article beautiful. For a moment, she thought that she would write a string of curses and throw it at her boss’ face. Then, she reorganized herself, drew the laptop closer, placed it on her lap, and sighed.
“75 years of independence,” she typed and then paused. She changed the font to bold and increased the font size to 16. She underlined it and then waited. Her thoughts began to wander again. Journalists are forced to feed such blatant lies to the masses. They are meticulously trained to a grammar that in itself oppresses the mind, she thought. “It’s like a military regime: you go out, identify an event, then analyze its potential to become a worthy story, talk to a few people who are involved in the event, and present a picture that would suit the reader’s mind. When you write, you need to make sure that one wants to read beyond the first paragraph. In other words, you lure somebody’s mind and force him/her to take an interest in a story that doesn’t directly affect him/her. You have to be careful that you do not exceed the required amount of enthusiasm expected from a reader. If the story infuriates the reader and invokes a sense of rebellion, you have failed as a journalist. You need to cook up a meal with equal portions of tickling excitement and generic apathy. You have to repeat lies, successfully, each time giving it a new shape and form so as to make it believable and beautiful.” She had been mumbling the last few sentences aloud. She was immediately conscious and checked if anyone caught her in the act. For insanity is often underrated in society. It’s one of those negatives that define a positive. Insanity is determinable, but nobody knows what sanity means. Self-muttering is not sane, she was aware of that. She became a little prudent.
“There is nothing beautiful about Republic Day. It’s as ugly as my stubby fingers,” she typed instinctively. Almost immediately, she deleted it and sighed in exasperation. Five cups of tea and an entire pack of cigarettes could not produce anything beautiful from her. The more she tried to think about beauty, the more she was drawn towards ugliness. The more she tried to follow patterns of sanity, a strange force asked her to flout all the rules and prance about in the realm of insanity.
She began thinking why she wanted to be a journalist, in the first place. What drew her towards the profession? An irresistible urge to transcend the self was all she could gather as a reason. She knew that she was not sane but in order to make things sane, in order to make it beautiful, she had to contribute to the beauty. She thought journalism was the easiest option. She could make herself ‘useful’ for the ‘greater good’. Until one day, she realized that there existed no such thing as a ‘greater good’. It was a myth, a fallacy, a blotch that carefully fitted into the puzzle of life. Everything that was beautiful was merely not ugly. For how could one admire the bright colours of a butterfly, the lush green of the meadow, and the sweet smell of spring when one is aware that the world reeks of violence, that there are multiple wars in pockets of the country that has been labelled as ‘independent’ for 75 years now?
“What can we, as a nation, boast about when millions live in fear and agony in Kashmir? What development are we proud of when thousands go hungry every day? What is so great about independence when most of us are slaves of the society?” she typed it all. She began thinking about the innumerable copies of rape stories that are supplied to a standard newsroom in India. Her role as a copyeditor is to analyze these stories and determine which rape was heinous enough to capture a space in the next day’s edition. All the others are blurred in the unrecorded memory, the unconscious of the society we live in, and become merely a number or a statistical representation. She thought about the various ways that a number could be expressed. It could be, “Four rapes every day on an average in 2022,” or it could be, “One rape less every day as compared to 2021!” How do you determine which of the above two paints a picture of glory and beauty? Although, the second one seems to have a positive tone to it, is it really a beautiful fact? What about the screams and the pain of the one being raped? How do you put that into words? The truth is, you can’t! Because language is incapacitated to express most of the nuances that lie within the mind, numbers are our only refuge. Anything in bulk or represented through numbers can be given the characteristic of being ‘normal’ and germinate collective apathy.
Arundhati deleted the whole paragraph she had typed earlier. The screen only had, “75 years of independence,” written in big and bold letters. It was 3 am in the night and there was a negligible number of cars on the road outside.
“Beautiful is a bubble which refuses to burst. Every human is surrounded by that bubble and thinks that anything external is ugly,” she wrote after a long pause. She had given up. She knew she couldn’t write anything beautiful.
She snapped the laptop shut. She lit another cigarette and looked down from the window. “I don’t deserve a byline in the special edition of Republic Day for I do not believe in independence. I do not believe in beauty. It is a sheer abstraction. And abstraction is truth,” she would tell her boss tomorrow.
