I wrote this piece one month into my stay in the city of Pune and having spent nearly three weeks in my college. It was written hurriedly on torn pages of an old notebook in a ‘mock test’ in a quiet examination hall. I have begun to act since, upon these words. I pray that I do not stray from activity.

A premier preoccupation of the human intellect has been with decay. For the present neither interests nor satisfies. It is never sufficient to be okay with the present. This means that there is always an urge to see our surroundings as faulty or look ahead for the ideal. Much of Modernist Art is pretty much this. Why, think of MTV’s movie Nirmalyam or else in the world of words, one finds the Kannada novella Samskara that chiselled UR Ananthamurthy on to the constellation of the greats. In one faith has taken a toll and a domino effect is unleashed where morality has fallen to material considerations and in the other, tradition must encounter its obsolescence and existential threat. There is certainly something intoxicatingly stunning and profound about decadence.

I should know for I have been bitten by this bug. And where do I find this decadence? Right around myself. I live in a world which was constructed in the 1820s, or 1860s, or the 1910s. Well the universe is built like a tapestry, or Aristotle’s Scissor is it not?

I am surrounded by material with Gothic proportions, Victorian grandness, and pure elegance. The Sanskrit College or Deccan College as it is called. There are rooms marked as sites of study, life, thought, and being of luminaries. Inscribed on the Walks of Fame are stars of the literary cosmos. William Wordsworth, the grandson, Edwin Arnold, and the founders of entire disciplines in India – Archaeology, Maratha History, Linguistics, Social Anthropology, and branches of Philology. And then for lovers of words – tomes adorn rusted racks. There are singular copies of manuscripts. Biographies of Governor Generals. Grammars of little-know languages. Surveys of obscure motifs in Indian sculptural art. PhDs in the vernaculars, not just on them. Dictionaries to assist reading particular Classical Sanskrit writer, and better, specific works. While scrambling in these alleys, one asks – who read these? Which librarian bought these books? From where? Where had they heard of them? (Well – is this not why I was always compelled by the very profession and purpose of the librarian – my own very Madanakoti). Well, one gets the picture. The shelves, the water, the scent, and impression – they are none but a Nietzschean High Culture.

But where lay decadence? For that you should not see the shelves but the alleys they help make. You can then hear giggles of rendezvous. Grief from the previous night’s dreams. Boys and girls teaching each other cuss words. The scratches  of pens as they scribble against papers on Early 20th century archaeological reports. Or walk to the reception to see youths and to-be doctors issue textbooks, works prescribed in “portions”. ‘Introduction to Archaeology’, ‘Introduction to Indian Philosophy’, ‘Linguistics, A Reader’. When shall one get beyond the ‘Introduction’?

Weekends are only to get drunk on drunkenness alone. Wherefrom shall poetry come? Art exists not on papers or canvases; well art does not exist. What one can find in its current layer of the tapestry are Snapchat Stories that are contaminated by blaring pink-purple filters trembling to be part of streaks. A man whose soul has not yet quit the earth commented in 1987: ‘Do not let your eyes freeze in the stars. Look around, O little one!’

True true true that! Look around. What you shall find, it is that which we call decadence.