Bakeries as havens

We all have our special places where we find, or arrive at, a certain thing called peace of mind.

It's hard to define what "peace of mind" is, but one can at least identify a site, as it were, where it's experienced.

Delia Ephron, American bestselling author (and the screen writer of such perennial favorites like Sleepless in Seattle) names a bakery as her place of peace.

Peace of mind is a feeling where she says she has intimations of having had it all. In the process of writing of the American obsession with "having it all," Ephron takes a crack at its inadequacy:

Having it all seems to breed wanting more. And since we can’t have it all because it is statistically impossible, and since there is no such thing as more than all, the whole notion seems, I’m sorry to say, depressingly American.

In many countries, having it all is learning to read. Having it all is getting to choose whom you love. Having it all is walking to school without worrying that you might get raped on the way.

Having it all is like an "eclipse:

To me, having it all — if one wants to define it at all — is the magical time when what you want and what you have match up. Like an eclipse. A total eclipse is when the moon is at its perigee, the earth is at its greatest distance from the sun, and when the sun is observed near zenith. I have no idea what that means. I got the description off a science Web site, but one thing is clear: it’s rare. This eclipse never lasts more than seven minutes and 31 seconds.

Having it all is also a moment of peace:

Personally, I believe having it all can last longer than that. It might be a fleeting moment — drinking a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning when the light is especially bright. It might also be a few undisturbed hours with a novel I’m in love with, a three-hour lunch with my best friend, reading “Goodnight Moon” to a child, watching a Nadal-Federer match. Having it all definitely involves an ability to seize the moment, especially when it comes to sports. It can be eating in bed when you’re living on your own for the first time or the first weeks of a new job when everything is new, uncertain and a bit scary. It’s when all your senses are engaged. It’s when you feel at peace with someone you love. And that isn’t often. Loving someone and being at peace with him (or her) are two different things. Having it all are moments in life when you suspend judgment. It’s when I attain that elusive thing called peace of mind.

Not particularly American, unquantifiable, unidentifiable, different for everyone, but you know it when you have it.

Which is why I love bakeries. Peace descends the second I enter, the second I smell the intoxicating aroma of fresh bread, see apricot cookies with scalloped edges, chocolate dreams, cinnamon and raisin concoctions, flights of a baker’s imagination, and I know I am the luckiest person in the world. At that moment, in spite of statistical proof that this is not possible, I have it all. And not only that, I can have more.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist and thoughts on fundamentalism

Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist revisits the notion of fundamentalism in interesting ways.

First, I feel, it uncouples fundamentalism from terrorism and takes the former as a state of mind.

Fundamentalism is consequently yanked out of the geographical or religious demesne called the "Middle East" and "Islam" respectively, and given a somewhat universal connotation.

Anyone can be a fundamentalist in thought. A fundamentalist state of mind is one which has a single belief arrived at through a systematic rejection of possibilities, alternatives, the understanding that all "truths" are provisional or impermanent and prevails till the time an experience (or what we call "reality") comes and scuttles it.

A fundamentalist state of mind is not very inclusive; it tends to exclude everything that might be challenging the single truth in which the fundamentalist mind is secure.

Why should I even say, "belief"; in his Middle East travelogue, Beyond Belief, writer V.S. Naipaul puts the fundamentalist state of mind as being "beyond" the "reach" of "belief." Belief, in an ordinary sense of the term, is amenable to reason, but the culture of irrational fundamentalism that Naipaul encounters in his conversations with modern Iranians and Pakistanis, is not amenable to change, which is a byword for reason in the book.

The Muslim subjects in Beyond Belief fundamentally cling to their truth that the West is evil.

So, the fundamentalist state of mind, I could say, is beyond belief.

In Hamid's novel, the bearer of the most rigid state of mind, is not a person or a group of people, but an entity, called the transnational corporation. The corporation is not a person, as even a legal novice will tell you, but certainly its run by a group of persons. The persons at the helm of these corporations pursue a belief--in the supremacy of the freemarket economy, of the unhindered flow of capital across national borders and of the absolute necessity of profit at the cost of all other human or non-human concerns.

The transnational corporation in the novel embarks on a series of financial "conquests" in developing nations in the name of divesting and restructuring for the sake of maximizing profits. The corporation in question advises companies that have fallen sick on how to get back in shape. To put these companies back in shape, livelihoods of workers have to be sacrificed.

So the corporation, in the grip of a fundamentalist state of mind sacrifices others' interests for the sake of profit.

An analogy in the world of persons, would be the ambitious and driven person. The ambitious and driven person, perhaps out of necessity, enters into a fundamentalist state of mind: She/he has a single truth to believe in, which is that self-progress at the material level has to be achieved at any cost, and whatever stands in the way of that progress has to be ignored or turned a blind eye to.

Ambition, As Ernest Hemingway once said, is a horrific bitch (he was alluding to the famous actress and his interlocutor in the sphere of belletre-ism). A bitch it is, but it is also a place holder for the fundamentalist state of mind.

At a more benign level, the robot is by function a fundamentalist, it will do and "think" as it is programmed to do and "think". To change it's single way of doing and thinking the entire robot has to be reprogrammed, and then the vicious cycle of fundamentalism will set in. Only when a robot is invested with "muscles of simultaneity" (author Junot Diaz's description of a complex mind), will it be able to move beyond a fundamentalist state of mind.

Where have the Raj Bohemians gone?

I just noticed, that I had posted the following on September 9, 2011, on my tumblr.

Yesterday, I was on a Manhattan-bound train. At Prince Street, Soho, two girls board the train. Both look overtly made up. There’s a young black girl, her face awash in blusher, and her companion is a Chinese-American teen.

No sooner than they sit, than the latter opens her purse and whips out a lipstick and waves it like a dandelion as she begins to descant on the virtues of the brand of lipstick she was brandishing.

Here lies the crux of my interest: It’s an Estee Lauder lipstick, in a shade of red. The girl talks and talks about how she adores all things of an Estee Lauderly order. The word “Estee Lauder” perforates the air surrounding her, as though she was making a sales pitch on behalf of Estee Lauder.

I thought much about the girl’s touting of a brand and was reminded of Hari Kunzru’s short story Raj Boheminan (The New Yorker, March, 2008).

Narrated from the perspective of a nameless New Yorker, Kunzru’s story is about a consumerism-driven, shallow social order, where people are less like people and more like Buzz Agents who “monetize their social networks” because they are “early adopters” of trends, and spout buzz lines to their equally trendy friends whenever they can, especially at gatherings inside fashionably dilapidated warehouses in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The protagonist wants to rebel against such “zombie-ization” of the multitude:

I started to notice something odd. Every time I met a friend, he or she would immediately make a recommendation, urge me to try something new. Lucas had been to a club on the other side of town and insisted that it was the best night out he’d had in ages. Janine almost forced me to take home a bottle of her “new favorite nutritional supplement.” At first, I shrugged it off. But, deep down, I knew that it had something to do with Raj and his vodka. Every night, I’d turn the incident over in my mind. I swallowed Ativan and Valium and Paxil (I had a compliant doctor), hoping that my anxiety would pass. It didn’t. There was Joe and his new running shoes. Razia’s bike. All my friends seemed to be dropping snippets of advertising copy into their conversation, short messages from their sponsors. They were constantly stating preferences for particular brands, dishing out free samples.

Whether the girl on the train was a brand-zombie or not I can’t tell, but the possibility is immense.

Writing

Verlyn Kilnkenborg addresses some misconceptions about the "source" of the perfect sentence and about writing in general:

There’s no magic here. Practice these things, and you’ll stop fearing what happens when it’s time to make sentences worth inscribing. You’ll no longer feel as though a sentence is a glandular secretion from some cranial inkwell that’s always on the verge of drying up. You won’t be able to say precisely where sentences come from — there is no where there — but you’ll know how to wait patiently as they emerge and untangle themselves. You’ll discover the most important thing your education left out: how to trust and value your own thinking. And you’ll also discover one of things writing is for: pleasure.

Character

Recently I read somewhere that "personality" triumphs over "character" today.

"We’ve moved from a culture of character to a culture of personality. The etymology of the word character is that it’s deeply etched, not changeable in all sorts of circumstances", says James Davison Hunter, in The Death of Character.


I'm not sure what "personality" is, but my guess is that it is something more fickle than "character". It gives us the power to personalize our ideals and put it in words to suit a variety of contexts.

It is no wonder then that I'm unable to write a "bio" of myself when asked to. "Bios" of today are about personalities and not character.

I have a character which I act out everyday, but it can't be form-fitted into a "bio".