This is Benjamin
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Beyond the boundaries of the possible
April 16th, 2009 | benjamin
We had been to Kolkata before, and knew better than to trudge around the shabby, faded exhibits in the museum at the Victoria memorial just to pass the time.
But April is a time when the heat begins to sear in Northern India and having no other engagements in the city except to perform the role of tourist, we needed to find somewhere away from the sizzling public world of the Kolkata outside that I love, for some pleasures in life are so intense that they can consume us like a flame.
Three years earlier my eyes had fascinated over the grand dome of the Birla planetarium, and we’d eagerly lined up for admission only to find that the next show was in Hindi, and the following in Bengali.
I had retained the knowledge that a show in English took place at 1330 hours and we arrived early after a sojourn past the street food vendors down Jawaharwal Nehru Road, taking in a plate of incongruous Tibetan momos along the way.
With our tickets purchased, we scrambled into a queue of sari and kurta-clad fellow astronomical fanatics and orderly we filed inside the building.
This small, replica model of the universe was refreshingly cool inside and of a deliciously vintage nature. I was most struck by the arcane device in the centre of the room that rose like a marauding tripod from H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds and from which the stars, planets and galaxies spilled out onto the curved walls above as the lights slowly dimmed.
The convener began the program in a stilted, monotonous English and for the first few minutes, and for the sake of tradition, Monique and I fooled around in the near total cloak of darkness.
After some time, these impulses were exhausted by a growing fascination with the representation of the universe spreading around us. The constellations were highlighted, distant galaxies were given names and all of a sudden I was returned to that fascination with the cosmos that so thrilled me as a child.
I speak of that emotion, a gut-wrenching thrill at flashes of conception when the immensity of the universe bears down upon us, and we become infinitesimally smaller than the all-powerful beings we imagine ourselves to be.
It is a dual-response, at once frightening and also, somehow, permeating a kind of optimism, for in this state of mind we are immersed in that which remains at the threshold of human endeavour.
These senses of god, new plains of experience, understandings that escape the mind petrified in a quotidian world comfort us not as realties, but as possibilities. Suddenly, the world at hand does not seem so much like an enclosure, but an interlocutor in a whole that we barely comprehend.
I feel in this flicker of inspiration, that the hopelessness and the void of living in an exhausted planet, of depleted resources and a wearied culture, is only a frame, one of an infinite number that echo across the entirety of the universe. I feel that if I keep my mind open then I might perceive a fragment of these frames of possibility.
These insights electrified my mind in this dark, cool building as wordless impressions, and they united me with the child I was fifteen or twenty years earlier who saw the world as potential and not as limit.
Back in the Kolkata outside I experienced the same kind of possibility in the city’s seething immensity and diversity that is, of course, present everywhere but to which my senses are dulled at home.
And I knew, and I know now, that this is why we travel, this is why we take ourselves to new locations, and this is why we stare up into the night sky. It is to ram ourselves against the boundaries of the possible, terrestrial, celestial and otherwise.
Tipping Point
April 13th, 2009 | benjamin
We all know the usual arguments about tipping, rewarding good service vs. patronising, classist etc.
Any I’m completely on the right hand side of that equation. But then there are just some times when there’s a couple of delightful rapscallions emptying your bin, buying you surreptitious beer, and you want to slip them a hundred rupees on the sly.
I know, this blog makes me sound like a pederast.
But, oh the dilemmas!