Images

Today I was talking with my husband and were mutually laughing over how our parents and bengali parents in general, go or rather used to go paranoid over "nijer paa er darano" (which not literally, but substantially translates as being involved in a respectable career) and did enormous levels of policing (in Supratim's case) and complaining (in my case) on studying times. The conversation then moved to how ....being up in night (raat jege pora) usually never bought us respite. Making up for daytime sins was how night time studuing was seen....as yet another mode of alleged detour from studies, notwithstanding how my dear husband never really studied at night. Night time activity would always comprise of different stuff for any urban middle class guy growing up in Calcutta in early 90-s...in that embryonic cable TV stage...and ahem...I need not say more.

And then I was telling him how our respective neighbourhoods would actually feel like very late at night even at 11:30 or 12:00, inducing our parents to "shun the sham" and go to bed. So much contrasted when I fast forward the images to our present grad student lives in a foreign land, when almost all of us would have done stuff like frying fish or making an omlette at 2 am in the night (i.e. catching up with cooking) and the night is still young (with work and play). Even though the noise pollution is much less in our foreign land neighbourhoods, night life here never feels so quiet and night-like sans the close and distant baying of the street dogs, wall clocks ticking away and ceiling fans humming lullaby-s back home. The mere nostalgic drop of those images are sleep-inducing to me.... but then the deafening silence in here, breaks through the comfort.

In fact, when in our day-to-day activities and thought processes, we make those little trips back and forth... and engage upon verifying the right images of things while picking up the compromised versions, the images are as much based on sound and feeling as they are on visuals. Although this is plain common sense herein as I'm saying this.....as we know and accept Cooley's looking glass concept......and accept the fact of our embeddedness in images, the power of images are perhaps more determining than we can expect and consume.


This entry is not supposed to be a treatise of how and where images are overpowering and staggeringly so...but a pondering piece on what could we do and they do. Images stare back at us, and then stay in our heads. They do not talk back but yet, do the talking. Think of particular words, certain photographs and even the sonorous shapes of words heard aeons back, the traces of which refuse to leave our head spaces and instead creep into every later images formed, including those that were formed to drive the formed ones off, as well as those that were formed to complement them. Social Construction of reality? I can almost hear one my dear friends (a sporadic reader of this blog too..) come with Berger and Luckmann and probably wondering what's the motivation of questioning a basic cornerstone after 10 years of indoctrination in the camp. My confusion stems not from refusing to accept that basic cornerstone, of the construction part of reality, but making sense of the fragmented pieces that are left in the multilayered tensions of being there in everyday life.

And then, there are a few choices, making the task a lot easier (less choice always equals easy, in my opinion)

1. Being a passive receptor of images
2. Being a passive maker of images (passive--> not active, and probably subconscious)
3. Being an active receptor
4. Being an active maker of images and actions

Of course, these are not mutually exclusive categories and intertwining formations could very well occur, complete with qualifying adjectives. Even with the knowledge of all possible permutations and combinations of the above, the confusion wouldn't leave. There is no problem in reckoning passivity but there is a problem in being passive. It does hurt our images of the self and our consciousness of our active agency, and sometimes urges to change the fluidity of it all.

No, this is not about control and externality of situations or their determining influence. But being able to know oneself, of finding the receptors that act differently with similar and even same images, transport us into different worlds and make different selves of ours. Yes, this is a lifelong journey, or even transcendental of lifetimes, so to speak, ....but where, when and how do we know to stop, to move, to perceive or at least, to make an attempt? Now, the question could be: is it essential to know in lieu of a "right" answer, but if we have a vague sense (in fact, very vague...would be good enough) of the maps (to be encountered), based on the past paths taken, probably the ensuing pain and confusion would considerably lessen?


Is it possible to consciously solve these puzzles? In the attempt, do we merge our selves and form a coherent distribution where overlapping areas attract the process of knowing our reception, perception and reaction to images?

If it is possible, one good thing will happen for sure. I will be deemed as less angry and more cool. Cool as in both bangla and English slang connotations.

So much for my image!