That's so Gujarati, YA! (Derogatory)

“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.” ― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

There is obviously a huge difference in understanding a language and speaking it. You could speak a language fluently, but can you perform it with the same fluency that you speak it with? My friends and people around me have started to find me sociopathic, selfish, and angry at times, with no fault of theirs, but it matters what the fluency of this exchange is. I do not speak the language that my friends speak, nor do they speak the language that I do. Yet we do not need any translation. We understand these ways of life, or at least we try to. These are two different manifestos to live life. It would be very unfair to compare my friends to strangers; however, when you sit inside a theatre to watch a Gujarati film, the least expected thing one could hear is, “That’s so Gujarati, YA!” (derogatory). That is perhaps the most obvious thing that could be said at a Gujarati film being screened. Of course that is Gujarati, but why do these obvious things feel so out of place? My problem is not that a person might feel it is derogatory, since these are just assumptions. My problem is that the levels of fluency have changed. Youth is wasted in being part of something superficial. When did we start playing pretend on such a large scale that we have missed the point of it all.

The question then to be asked here is whether you are in the business of optics or substance. Are you in the business of being or trying? Are you in the business of understanding or explaining? Are you in the business of looking at it in black and white or not at all? Thoughts are not non-replenishable; the point does not subscribe to mere embellishment. There are layers to the way a person speaks. The usage of grammar is not a twinkle on the Christmas tree. Pronunciations are not facts of life; meanings are. Having the ability to know about your sad mother and do something about it is more important than knowing about the 45th king of Egypt. A life founded on the idea of “I know who the Emperor of Norton was” or “I know everything about the Voynich manuscript” is useless. I see people not even trying to get up, and that is why they have to think so much. I often feel that if I do not speak the buttered-up, polished, bougie version of my own language, then what exactly is so Gujarati about the masses, about me?

I have been starved of my language since I came to study in a new city. This is the first time I have been living away from my family. From the very beginning of going away from home, the only thing that I kept thinking about was how much I took the language I spoke for granted. A minute’s sight or sound of someone who might speak even a little Gujarati around me makes me happy. It makes me wonder about the power phonetics in general hold. The khaman-dhoklas and the theplas do not make me Gujarati. The garbas do not make me Gujarati. The air does not make me Gujarati. These are privileged elements and are secondary in the service of my being.

So when I went to Ahmedabad last month, my parents and I decided to watch a Gujarati film. Just behind me sat non-Gujarati people, and now that I live in an unknown city, I have a more sensible view of people who migrate to different cities and might not speak the language that I speak. I have nothing but respect for them. Yet again, these are just assumptions that one carries. So when I heard one of them say, “That’s so Gujarati, YA!” I did not understand how something so normal about anyone can represent being Gujarati, and even if it does, I cannot help but hate everything about people like these.

I have been telling everyone I meet to read this wonderful, brilliant, out-of-this-world, “I must read it again and again” novel by Italo Calvino called Invisible Cities. Anyone who has ever read my essays or heard me read them before would know that the one you are reading or listening to right now is definitely different. I used to be scared of showing and giving away thoughts as flatulently as now. But then why seed the same myth that I want to destroy in others? Many people live with such freedom. Although there are limitations to the life that they live, and it definitely goes beyond my decibel of sound, one cannot do anything but respect someone who lives so outrageously, who breathes with no worries, who is so present that even time stops. A single second starved of entertainment is equivalent to death, and to create these metaphors even in the head is nothing short of wonder. But then, life without embracing boredom is basic, dull, empty. Life spent on the ideas of living eternal pleasures will collapse like a forgotten language; its sound would be forgotten faster than light.

Sometimes cities carry, in their genes, discipline.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is Marco Polo’s description of the imagined cities that he saw, told to the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan. Memories are blended into poetry itself. When I write a poem, I blend memories and stories into language and words, and then create the upper layer of text that one must read, see, feel, and enjoy as poetry. But Italo Calvino ignores that upper layer entirely; he passes through it as if it does not matter. He blends his memories of metaphorical cities directly into the poetry.

These descriptions are the pathos of lived experience. This is what knowing and being able to do something about one’s sad mother or father is. If facts were able to give us dignity, then I would not know so many people who are stripped naked of it.

In the book, cities are nothing but memories; when people forget, they collapse. There is a perpetual threat in our lives right now: to convert every human experience into a single term of definition and then use it as a vessel to project “human-ness” onto unrelated scenarios from our lives. This novel ultimately made me realise how important it is to care about those near you, how important it becomes to give without thinking about the take. I wish for myself, at least, to not be selfish. To not hate so much. To be able to apologize wherever needed. To carry so much life within that even the thought of ending, loss and defeat tremble in the mere presence of mine.

Maybe that is what the person behind me found so Gujarati. They might have seen life on the screen, and maybe to them that felt Gujarati, because why not?

I think to forgive is to be Gujarati. I belong, and that makes me Gujarati. And this certainty of where to belong and where not to, whom to long for and whom not to, the cadence of getting up, the idea of doing it for the sake of doing it, for myself, to go beyond and above, to understand and still be stubborn, this makes me Gujarati. To cry like a dog when the heart wants, and to fight like one when the heart wants, that makes me Gujarati. Gujarati is many things. It is beyond a way of life. To enjoy and yet die a million deaths inside is Gujarati. To not give a damn and yet sit outside hospitals for nights and nights is Gujarati. To live under a million bombs and not complain is Gujarati. To win and make sure everyone knows about it is Gujarati. To enjoy is to be Gujarati; to be logical and to believe in magic all at once is Gujarati.