Violent streaks

I suppose it is only natural, given my persona and nature, that I have been dwelling on violence since the 'incident' on Saturday night. I have been thinking on many tangents and some of them are the violence I have inflicted; the violence that has been inflicted on me; peoples' take on violence; pacifism; and random violent aggressive behaviour. And I am not talking about violence aimed at the system (where the individual is an 'incidental casualty') but rather about violence directed specifically at the individual.

I have never been a fan of mindless violence, but that by no means implies that I think violence is categorically wrong. I have indulged in violence on occasion, and the last one was just a little over two years ago, where I was trying to strangle an auto-rickshaw driver in Delhi. And that incident came after a five year gap. Oh well, I have the dubious distinction of having been charged with attempt to murder when I was 17 and still in school. Even though the charge was ridiculously far-fetched and completely made up, it had been a particularly violent night. I have even been violent towards women, a fact that I am not proud of, but not something I am ashamed of either (there are exceptions though, of which I am ashamed, but not as much any more as I used to be). And just so you know, I have even been hit by women, and I haven't always responded, despite my whole-hearted support of vengeance.

I do not think that violence is always caused by a break-down of rationality, as I have sometimes been told. I do not think that violence should never even be the last resort. There are often many ways of dealing with a given situation, and I tend to remember that violence is one of them. I have indulged in what I term 'unjust' violence once in my life, and I am not proud of it. But if someone tells me all violence is unjust, I disagree strongly. Violence is a part of nature, it is all around. Animals of prey live off it, many others use it to guard their homes and still others indulge in it even for play. Just because we humans have tended towards keeping it out of the public eye doesn't mean that it is unnatural. Of course, just because it is natural does not mean that we have to indulge in it, and I am not advocating any such thing. I am just saying that it is not necessarily wrong; that social or rational or human or whatever else is not the nemesis of violence.

Violence does not necessarily sour relations between parents and their children. Violence is different from abuse of violence, it is not abusive by definition. I would perhaps be a more truant kid if I hadn't got the occasional thwack from my dad, it even got pretty bad sometimes as I recall, and I bear him no grudge for them. If anything, he is the only person I look up to. And trust me, I know a LOT about abuse of violence. I had to put up with a shit load of it later in life. I have been beaten up more than most of you would like to believe, or even hear about. Of course, that still hasn't made a disturbed person (though I am sure some of you would argue that I am pretty disturbed anyway. Well, in all humility, and I say this with my warmest smile, fuck off). I know at least one person (you know who you are) who insists that my abuse has affected me greatly and that I am in denial. Well, people really need to start thinking lesser for others. Anyway, the place where I was subjected to that mindless violence on a more or less regular basis for about two years, I spent a total of seven years in that school, and they are among the best years of my life. If I could live them again, I probably would.

I have discussed violence with others a few times, and as if bringing up the topic wasn't bad enough already, I have been met with derision when I have tried to say things in its favour. That does not necessarily mean that those people are pacifists, but I know a few, and it is not a word I use easily. A pacifist is how I would describe a Bengali if I wanted to be racist. After all, they are the only state in India that does not have a regiment of its own in the Army. (Of course, that is hilarious given the fact that the Indian National Army was founded by Subhash Chandra Bose, himself a Bengali.) In the same way people talk down violence, I like to talk down pacifism. Pacifism is at the other extreme from abuse of violence. Anyone indulging in either is being as ridiculous, in my point of view, since they are both extreme stances.

Random violent aggression, or abuse of violence, should be matched with violence. A rapist should have his dick chopped off and be made to eat it while getting an anal probe with a hot iron. I am all for the death penalty, in spite of the complications that errors in human judgement might produce. I even support "mob justice" to quite an extent, where I think the margin for error is usually the same as that in a court room. I find it amusing the way retaliatory violence is often referred to as 'taking the law in your own hands'. If the law cannot protect me against it in the first place, it has already come within my personal domain. So I might as well use my own hands.

Anyway, hunger beckons. So I go and prepare some dinner. But before I leave, I recall just the poem for this post. I wrote it one morning when I woke up, wrote this down and went back to sleep, in less than five minutes. Its called 'Cold Rage'.

Everything turns to red
The fingers clench
Knuckles turn pale white
Muscles tighten instinctively
Adrenaline flow begins
Steam on the brow
Black curtain descending
The brain goes numb
Remorselessness sets in
The smell of revenge, sweet, ain't it sweet
Anything goes
Everything is fair
Swift movements
High accuracy rate
Surveying the destruction
The stone in those eyes
Cold Rage

Something to write home about

This weekend that is going by has been rather strange, and has left me with a feeling that makes me want to believe a little more in the role that positions of stars in the sky play in my life. Actually, I am not too sure what I feel. So here is what happened.

Memory losses are not cool. After my adventure a couple of months ago where I spent 5 hours traveling in the London underground network, I did a sort of repeat performance. Only, this one was a bit worse. We were at this party on Friday night, and I remember having a pretty good time till about 4:00am. After that, I am not quite sure about what kind of a time I had, because I don't remember any of it. My good friend who was by my side all this time tells me that at about 4:30am, I had called a cab for a couple of girls, helped another drunk girl leave, and taken 20 minutes to roll a huge joint, and just given it to him to smoke while I vanished somewhere. So he and me left at 5:30 or so, and after walking around for another half hour, he got a a call on his phone, and when he hung up 2 minutes later, I had vanished. I had "done a Batman", as he calls it. He called me, and I told him he had been walking in the wrong direction, and that I had no idea where I myself was at the moment, and that I will figure it out later.

So he went his way, I went somewhere, I have no idea where. This is close to 6:00am. At 10:16am, I awoke on the DLR, the only tube line that runs to my stop. But of course, I was on a station completely outside my route. Everything was looking so damn hazy, and then I realised at some point that my glasses were absent from their usual place on my face. There is also a memory somewhere of a stumble climbing up a flight of steps, which later revealed itself in the form of a nasty bruise on my left knee, and a less nasty but infinitely more visible one just above my left eyebrow. But there isn't much more I recall, other than finally crawling into bed around 11:30am.

So I hurt myself and lost my glasses and a few hours worth of memory. I hoped the glasses had been left at the party venue, so I called the host and asked him to look out. He called a while later saying my glasses were safe on his kitchen table. I dragged my weary body back to his place around 7:00pm, only to discover that the glasses in question are in fact not mine, but some other jerk's. Very possible he left his and took mine, very possible that he left his and I lost mine. So anyway, I go to another friend's house, the same one who I had inexplicably deserted in the wee hours of the morning. We eat dinner and are in the middle of watching Sweeney Todd when another friend calls, at about 2:00am.

We are to meet him at the bus stop in 10 minutes, and the 3 of us are to go to the house of a 4th who is asleep and will have to be woken up so that we can have a place to chill. Anyway, 3 of us are at the stop, right outside Victoria station, waiting for the bus. There is a nightclub 50m away and a drunkard is thrown out by the bouncers. The usual screaming and empty threats follow, while the drunkard's friends are pissed off with him and are walking away. We had stopped enjoying the show and were chatting among ourselves, smoking our cigarettes. The drunkard was now walking away from the bouncers, walking in the same direction as his friends, who had just walked by us. He was screaming "I win, I win" and it was coming nearer, so I turned my face to look in his direction.

He was less than 2ft away, his arm already raised, fist closed in a punch, already moving towards my face. And sure enough, it made contact, hit me hard, fucking hard, on the left of my face. And he made a run for it. After a 2-second shock recovery time, I began running after him but was stopped by my friends one of who proceeded to tell me that catching that arsehole and beating the crap out of him was not worth the effort. If only the 4th friend, the one whose house we were going to, had been there, things would have been nicely different. We would have probably killed that fucker.

On Friday, as I was leaving work, my boss told me to not party too hard, and I had said "why not?" in response and left. On Saturday evening, I had been talking of drunken rowdiness being a nuisance in this country, and there it was. Just an hour before going to the bus stop, at the beginning of Sweeney Todd, I was extolling the virtue of vengeance, and I did jack-shit. But one thing is for sure, I am sick and fucking tired of this whole memory black-out business. And I am pissed off, so fucking pissed off. Life is not a fucking bed of roses anyway, and I really can do without the random fucking punch from some drunk white trash piece of shit. Maybe I should start carrying that knife...