Sorry about the noise through the video..but there's great purpose!
There's always a desire to be someone else to fulfill our aspirations
For example, there might be someone who does construction work.
He might possess the desire to be a contractor.
The contractor might wish to build something of his own design....
Or how it would feel to be an engineer
Very few of us are satisfied with who we are
That is why the saints have always said that "Be content with who you are"
But man has never been happy with who he is
He always has the desire to become someone else
He is richer than I. He is more intelligent than I. He writes better poetry than I.
I want to write better poetry than he.
such kind of desires always present
We may not be able to fulfil such desires in life,
But, in literature we can
In a novel, a journalist like me
can become a millionaire like Narayana Murthy
if there's a character of a millionaire in the novel.
That is, this might be a daydream in the novel
But, at that particular moment
when we are indulging in the activity of reading a novel
we become this corporate giant,
we are able to live as this man
and make his experiences, our own.
Literature addresses our dissatisfactions..
...only temporarily and not completely
That one moment of literary illusion
lifts us and transports us beyond history
Just for that one moment..
If there's a novel about poverty
we experience poverty until we finish the novel
But, that one moment of experinece has the ability
to etch itself into our unconscious and
take us outside the realms of history
We become the citizens of a timeless nation
We will free oursleves from the mundanity of the everyday...,
...we become deep and rich...
and get ourselves caught in the messiness of it all..
and also become happier.
There might be many problems in a work of literature
we too join in solving the said problems
through the process of reading
We get caught in all that and more.
After we close the book
and let go off of that literary work
and return to our original existence,
we compare our real lives with that of the dreamworld we experienced.
After we close the book, we come back to our lives
After we come back, we are sure to compare the life we lead
and the life we experienced in the book, through the process of reading.
Yes, we do compare.
This comparison leads to dissatisfaction about the things
that we do not have here in our real lives.
In those literary works I had everything I wanted
I was content there..
But, here it is the same old hassles
The same traffic that is killing me
There's no water
The heat is unbearable
There's too many murders happening in the city
I was strolling in a world that was opposite and free of all these things
How different is that world from this!
KS Narasimhaswamy once said,
"How unlike is it, Oh poet, the dream you see from the life you lead?"
Dream is different, it realizes itself as a literary work
but, life is different
That's why-- if we are sensitive enough-- we compare both
Or else If we read something just for the sake of passing time...
...we feel nothing.
But, if we read a literary work, closely and critically
we begin questionning our real lives
and the things they lack.
An astute reader always keeps compa ing the life in literature with that of the life we lead
Through such comparsion he decides to stand against the world he inhabits
Such a stand may not be really successful
But, an attitude of resistance is born as a result
of his response to the dissatisfactions that he finds around himself.
That response is like a desire to fulfill a lack.
Something isn't there, hence the desire.
such kind of a response
For example,
if you look at a work like the Mahabharatha
where Kauravas and Pandavas fight with each other for years,
go to war with each other, both claiming themselves as rightful owners of the land
a war that spans for many many many days....
What happened in the end?
Everyone died except Dharmaraya.
Eventually, he too died
Didn't he?
In Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Colonel Aureliano Buendio, is always at war.
But, how much ever he fights,
he knows beforehand that he is not going to win this war
But, still he never stops fighting
Probably it is true in life too.
Had everything we tried would be a success,
the world wouldn't be like this.
But, we need to try
we need to change the world we live in
And the reason for the necessity of such a change
is provided by literature
That we need to try our best to change the world.
As seen in literary works like "One Hundred years of Solitude",
maybe life is like this..
there are more instances of failures than successes.
But still, despite life being full of failures, one needs to try
But if there were no chances of success at all, man would have remained as a proto-human.
What we call, individiual freedom and autonomy would not have existed.
Science and technology would not have developed so much.
How many we must have failed! How many times we must have experimented!
At last we must have got some success, no?
We did not used to acknowledge human rights
During the times of (Karl) Marx,
children used to work for 16 hours a day in England
Today...,
even adults don't work beyond 8 hours per day.
All this progress happened because
writers like (Charles) Dickens, (William Makepeace) Thackeray spoke of workers' rights as a narrative in their novels...,
which influenced a whole generation of readers who read their stories and novels.
Since at least few of them decided to do something about the injustices of the world they witnessed and tried to change it,
the world has been getting better and better.
Failure is important.
It makes way for success.
Precisely, that's what literature says.
What would happen if we imagine a world where there is no literature
No literature at all
"We won't read literature"
"I have nothing to do with literature"
"we don't want it."
If there were such a world...,
... that particular world wouldn't have some specific and significant adjectives.
What are these adjectives?
Adiga-ness, Kafkaesque, Borgesian, Quixotic--
all these adjectives were born through literary works.
Adiga-ness, Chittaala-ness, Orwellian...
all these adjectives were not born as adjectives.
Each one of them are unique
An unique experience of an epoch was captured as metaphors by these authors.
Therefore, the names of these authors became symbols of each of those experiences,
which ultimately become adjectives.
Take Kafkaesque...
We could understand the 20th century bureaucracy--a faceless bureaucracy--only because of Kafka
If you go to Vidhana Soudha, to meet someone, to get some papers signed-- it is like a labyrinth.
You can meet anyone, you might lose anyone.
It camouflages under the guise of showing you respect, propriety.
Yet, it makes you feel like you are in hell!
Every single moment.
We needed a metaphor for this.
We understand immediately, this is what bureaucracy is. We came to know about it because of Kafka.
Until then, we thought bureacracy was an important but inevitable part of life, of our system.
It became part of our experience because of Kafka.
Even Chittalaness...
... it talks about about the world inside a man
He might be one man, but within him, in his mind, there are thousands of worlds.
And all these thousands of worlds are functioning at once
This interior world is very complex, and because of this interior world men act in a certain way, is what Chittala presents in his stories.
This is what we call Chittala-ness.
The give and take relationship between Individualism and Social Commitment,
and how they differ from each other is shown by the poetry of (Gopalakrishna) Adiga.
The love for liberty, the meaning of democracy, freedom, individual liberty,
how the society must accomodate the individual
and how it harms the individual, under what conditions...
all this is contained in one single word: Adiga-ness.
That means, literature takes certain experiences from particular epochs of time...,
the problems created by the norms of the time...,
... and metamorphoses into an complete experience and gives it back to us.
By doing that, we can perceive our own time or the time that has passed, in a whole new way.
Consider one of the important literary forms, the novel.
If you wish to understand the condition of our peasentry and farming societies
of last 40-50 years, you need to look at our novels.
You won't be able to see that anywhere else.
And how that peasant societies have changed over the years can also be known through literature.
The critique of this change, whether it is good or bad is also given by literature.
Today, some of the new authors are writing about the IT industry.
Generally, it is thought be one of the industries that has provided a lot of money for the people from middle class.
At least, that's what the families usually believe.
But, how inhuman the relationships in such an environment can be
and how it is hindering a human being's ability to create
is shown by stories of writers who themsleves are part of such a industry.
Hence, literature reflects the issues of the time through a way of its own.
The reader gains the sensitivity to respond to it
So, how does literature create experiences?
For example, consider "blood"
We all know what "blood" actually is.
What is "blood"? What color is it? What gives the "blood" its color?
How the food we eat gets converted into "blood"?
What types of cells does "blood" contain?
To answer these questions we can read hundreds of pages of a book.
There are thousands of books written on the subject.
All the people who practice in the field of medicine would have studied such books.
If you read these books, you get a certain type of knowledge about "blood".
But, in literature you do not get that kind of information.
What you get in literature is completely different.
You might have read the Chittala's short story, "The Girl who became a Story",
In that, when he says "Janaki, a 13-year-old girl succumbs to cancer",
You get a new definition that is very different
from the one you would get from hundreds of pages of a medical textbook.
But this new definition provided by litertaure would be socially relevant,
socially committed and significant to a human being.
Hence, we need literature to understand ourselves
To undestand each other.
To critique the systems and the society constructed by men
Finally, Literature is important to lead towards a direction where change to such a society can be brought about.
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