The selfie-smeared Facebook crowd with an uncanny knack of hearting harmless humbug comprises the millions of consumers of feel-good products churned out by the economy supposed to lift the heart and spirits. Even occasional talks of phenomenal ‘growth’ are meant to boost blood flow into the nation’s heart. Poverty, unemployment and deprivation, however, still are the nigger in the stockpile. Ruthless reality douses the leaping flames of complacency in the heart, writes NIRMALYA DEB
All the heart-to-heart advice loaded on our ears on World Heart Day about the deadly antagonist cholesterol and its lethal potential of damaging the vital organ must have made a million hearts skip a beat or two. The collective heart sinks at the thought of existence coming to a standstill and the deplorable lot who smoke – wretched in terms of puritan morality – are sought to be driven crazy with fear by adverts carrying gory images on cigarette shells. They are implored, the mulish ones castigated, by family and friends and the stern message from the doc gives the belly a sudden, nauseating churn.
However, there is a defiant sect within smokers – the radical lot, one might say – who choose to wear their heart on their sleeves. Their puckered lips are like ever-busy chimneys of industrial units and saintly advice falls on deaf ears, rather crashes against a stubborn, nay suicidal, self-indulgence. Life is short, but the heart is wild; let it aflutter, let it gallop through the hills and vales of intoxication until it hits the rock bottom of reality and the howling winds blow out the lamp. Obstinate smokers, especially the unrepentant ones, are in grip of this papa-knows-all philosophy.
Nevertheless, you can still take heart from their last-ditch efforts to squeeze life out of the cigarette butt. Pray, lower your eyebrows a little if they happened to have jerked upwards of their original setting. After all freedom, warts and all, is the rallying cry. How much austerity (certainly not the kind prescribed by the German Chancellor to bankrupt Greece) and stoic rectitude can the heart drunk on (maybe self-consuming) freedom possibly bear? Talk of heart health in a planet ripped asunder by heartlessness could also appear oxymoronic to some. The god-fearing, doc-fearing, wife-fearing meek middle-class gentleman who makes sure he isn’t served greasy stuff for dinner would most likely confess after downing a couple of pick-me-ups that his heart sobs in confinement yearning for lush Mediterranean sunlight in a gloomy cell.
Those whose heartstrings are tied to their pursestrings, and there are quite a few, apparently are an uninhibited lot but, then, stock market swings can either send their precious hearts soaring through the clouds or tumbling out of their shirt pockets. One’s heart is never safe in the topsy-turvy terrain of wild financial adventures. Thousands of aspirational souls with their gaze fixed on Dalal Street have confessed to involuntarily placing their hands on their hearts innumerable times a day with the monitors blinking in front.
Place this picture right beside one of a porter in Bhubaneswar station with his chin touching the ground under a Himalayan load and his heart staring out of his eye sockets and you’d instantly glimpse the radiant truth of essential human sameness in matters of the heart streaking out of the endless tunnel of experience. But let not lofty thoughts take our heart away. As the poet mused eons ago, hearts that beat in the scrapheap or on a lonely highway in the dead of night or inside a crooked hut under a benign banyan, famished, fatigued and forlorn hearts, don’t enjoy the liberty of gazing at the stars or complacently chewing the remnants of the philosopher’s brain. That happens to be the forte of the bespectacled professorial class some of the glittering representatives of which are notorious for their willful indifference to the hearty things of life that are sneered at for being a mite trivial.
The other end of the spectrum is occupied by the hearty-smarty, selfie-smeared Facebook crowd with the uncanny knack of hearting harmless humbug. These light-hearted souls comprise the millions of consumers of feel-good products churned out by the economy supposed to lift the heart and spirits; even occasional talks of phenomenal ‘growth’ are meant to boost blood flow into the nation’s heart. Poverty, unemployment and deprivation, however, still are the nigger in the stockpile. Ruthless reality douses the leaping flames of complacency in the heart.
One way of escaping from ruthless reality is to let the heart out to dry in the sunshine or shiver in the mist like the poet’s. Another way is to tie it up in chains of curvaceous contemplation like the philosopher’s. And however much the philosopher seeks he can never separate matters of the heart from those of the mind. Still others – the saints and sages – choose the solitary solace of snow-covered peaks and caves, intent on reigning in passions and lusts. Throughout the course of history the willful libertine lot has ridiculed religion because of the veiled tyranny its practice involved, binding the natural course of emotional sustenance flowing from the heart and merging in a social sea of souls.
Hearts of unbelievers, nevertheless, keep digging a lonely furrow in vain. “If God doesn’t, it is necessary to invent Him” wrote Bernard Shaw. The heart needs nourishment, it needs succour. It needs love and fulfillment. The savage pursuit of heedless science has lead to deadly wars, large-scale deprivation and impoverishment worldwide. The heart lies mute and powerless on the bosom even as the deadly devastation wrought by religious obscurantism and communal violence is right in front of level-headed citizens of this great republic to stare helplessly at. It bleeds when lush magazine covers flash photos of naked newborns lying abandoned beside municipal gutters. It bleeds at the sight of ribs staring out of the chests of a trillion wretched of the earth. It bleeds at the pitiable prospect of a hapless mother clutching her child and begging for food in some godforsaken corner of a sexed-up metropolis. It is the heart, after all.
Still, you must have noticed, that after one has one’s heart out loathing and cursing the mad, bad world, the “natural flow of sympathy” that William Wordsworth observed was the crux of human creative effort impedes the heart from embracing defeat. When we see sunbeams twinkling in the eyes of our children and the serene meandering of the Mahanadi at dusk, we somehow find heart and strive to erase the blemishes of history – centuries of invasion, aggression and exploitation melt in the hope of new survival, of a new society, perhaps, its heart forever immersed in love and sublimity.
That’s a dream that seeps out from the secret recesses of the heart.
