Opinion | The appropriate way to feel low in a nation of miseries
5 min read . Updated: 21 Jun 2020, 07:47 PM ISTSince we can’t accept trivial reasons for sadness, we need grand ones that are often fictional
The balcony people have been feeling low. It is not quite grief, but close. It is a half-gloom, they may say, though they do not know what the other half is. Death is in the air, the future is bleak, there is no holiday resort to escape to, their old ways are on hold, and cash cannot make all this go away. An actor with real black hair has killed himself, and in the middle of all this, China is menacing. Yet, India’s half-rich and the rich cannot freely express their despair the way the affluent in other nations can.
India’s threshold for misery is very high. Even in this golden age of self-absorption, you feel it is somewhat indecent to lament your half-gloom without a deep sociological or medical reason. By Indian standards, melancholy is a trivial problem, especially when caused by a pandemic. After all, here people starve, wail, walk hundreds of kilometres like prehistoric migrants out of Africa.
Yet, the fact is, sorrow need not always have grand reasons. It usually does not.
In a nation that never had any street joy or beauty in public spaces, all that the affluent had was a way of life in their island republic within a republic where they paid a premium to keep other Indians and reality out. Now even that respite is on hold. So, they say, they feel a deep growing sadness of the times within, but are also forced to quickly add, to save themselves from ridicule, that yes they are lucky, they have everything, it must be their fault; if they cannot breathe, it must be their fault because they cannot claim there is a knee on their neck.
Indians have always struggled to understand melancholy that does not have an earth-shaking reason.
Until recent times, Indians told each other that the rich were unhappy. They said it with a touch of jubilation. And the rich were other people, who went in cars. In more than one Malayalam film, the upscale woman wore a sleeveless blouse, smoked, and stared long at sleeping pills on her palm at night. We didn’t know the origins of her grief; she was this way at the start of the film. We were expected to understand that her problem was the state of being a rich urban woman. The sleeping pill of the 80s became, in the 90s, Art of Living classes and the philosophies of J Krishnamurthy.
As Indians prospered and the middle classes behaved more like the rich than the poor, they grew more sympathetic to the reasonless sorrow. It did not feel flippant anymore or fleeting, as melancholy never makes its host feel it is transient; rather, it portends a long tropical marriage.
The new Indians of the 90s wondered if it was all their fault. In their quest to understand their reasonless sadness, they wondered if it was some yawning emptiness within. But can any human being really be empty? We are filled with so much love and hope and fundas and misconceptions. There is a whole festival going on inside us.
In their pursuit of grand reasons for their sorrow, India’s affluent often find the wrong grand reasons—like spouses, parents, capitalism and caste. The fact is many widely-accepted reasons for melancholy are modest. Like insect bites, gut bacteria, bad food, sloth, and misunderstanding mad men as philosophers. But the most underrated cause of contemporary urban sorrow is boredom. I believe that every five years or so, we die within and become zombies, and we have to do something extraordinary to rise from the undead. (Some people have babies.)
The Indian requirement of grand reasons for sorrow also makes the rich perform their most cruel act—attributing wrong causes to the deep grief of the poor, thus farming the sorrow of the poor for politics. As a result of this phenomenon, there are demographic fables like “farmer suicides" that make the balcony people rush to villages and hand out cheap clothes to “the hands that feed us", while what the poor are actually crying out for is what most Indians secretly consider a luxury, like air-conditioning—an end to inexplicable innate melancholy.
A few days ago, Sushant Singh Rajput, an actor in his early thirties, was reported to have taken his own life. I wonder if he ever wore a mask in the pandemic. Surely he did, like the rest of us who wished to live. But then, the option of an early death was probably weighing on him for long, too. As he was a successful and famous young man, he was granted the broad reason “depression". He did not qualify for other gigantic sociological reasons. Even so, in the days that followed his death, people tried to manufacture some worthy causes, like discrimination by powerful members of the film industry. What Rajput’s death should instead convey to Indians is that highly-pursued sources of joy, like success, fame and money, cannot overcome the disease of melancholy.
The actor’s death also conveys a message to those who are not clinically depressed, who are only mildly melancholic – in effect, most people. That in this world, everyone feels like a failure. At every rung, there is a better rung, there is humiliation and dejection. Barring a dozen odd people in this world, everyone else is probably oppressed; might even be lost without an oppressor. Even billionaires, who cannot be oppressed by mere humans, manufacture an excessive fear of disease, artificial intelligence and sentient machines.
What we possess will not keep us happy for long. Happiness is the illusion of change, or progression—of zombies rising from the dead every now and then.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, and a novelist, most recently of ‘Miss Laila, Armed And Dangerous’
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