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I’ve just had the weirdest dream ever, last night…

I’ve had the weirdest dream ever last night. I was in post-apocalyptic Delhi, which looked much like a landfill, and was being chased by a pack of vicious and rabid street cats. I ran for a long time and lost them, came to this clearing were two big black bears were attacking a tiger. The tiger was losing. I hid behind a pile of garbage and was watching all this.

The tiger somehow escaped, and there was Pierce Brosnan in his James Bond character also standing nearby so the two bears set upon him instead. Brosnan / Bond started dancing, and the bears started dancing along with him. Like on two feet. That kept Brosnan/Bond safe for a while.

Then, he noticed me hiding in the garbage. So he decided I think the best idea would be somehow get the bears to eat me instead of him. So he took out a tranquilliser gun and shot a tranquillizer dart at me. Missed. I started running again, Brosnan/Bond started running after – while dancing, to keep the bears distracted – and the bears followed while dancing. I kept swerving and dodging while running but Brosnan/Bond kept shooting tranquilliser darts at me laughing a maniacal laugh that he’s had “enough shooting practice in the movies”.

I ran into a mall to lose them. It was full of Chinese people, for some reason. I knew I was conspicuous in that crowd so to push through the crowd and reach the elevator, I was crawling on the floor between their legs, shouting the only bit of Chinese that came to my mind at that time: “Taigo lo!” (which I think means “It is too expensive!”)

I pushed my way through the crowd to the front where the elevators were. They were made of a glass cylinder reinforced on four sides with a golden-coloured steel bars. The elevator was free hanging in the air, like, not in an elevator shaft, it was just hanging in the air. And then, it fell and smashed right in front of my eyes. Then my dad walked out of the crowd from nowhere and asked me what was the password to login to Tata Sky’s website so that he could renew the annual subscription pack. (I told him it was “tatasky”.)

Then, in my dream, I cut away to a different scene. I am watching a documentary about how (my dream world’s) economy works. The financial power of countries in my dream world, and I quote the exact words here, is “measured by the magnitude of a normal vector drawn on the political map of a country”. And then the documentary shows this animated map with a single, normal vector sticking out of each country, each with a varying magnitude.

“The magnitude of the normal vector is determined by how much cumulatively a country’s population score in the popular game of Minesweeper.”

Not on a computer of course. Instead of laser quest and paintball venues like these days, in the dream world, there are Minesweeper parlours where friends go to have fun and play Minesweeper on actual tiles by stepping on them. Fake tiles of course with computer-generated displays, no real mines. And yet, even though people pretend they are having fun, it’s a dystopian society where they know that what their game scores affects their economic rating and thus their economy. Of course, people in wealthier countries can play Minesweeper more so they get higher ratings. This whole Minesweeper parlour franchise as well as the rating system is owned by one private corporation.

This is where my dream sequence ends.

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Of haiku and poetry

I’ve never understood the ‘point’ behind haiku in English. Conceptually, I can grasp the idea that it’s just another form of poetry with its own rules – in this case, the restricting yourself to 17 syllables. (I’m referring to the looser form of haiku in English that isn’t necessarily associated with seasons and metaphors.) What I don’t get is how one can definitively count ’17 syllables’ for the purposes of haiku. I consider that in English the number of syllables in any given word can be ‘variable’ depending on what dialect of English it’s spoken in, unlike other tonal languages such as Japanese where the number of syllables for any character is fixed. What, then, is the bleeping point of haiku with this straitjacket if not just an exercise in control – and in showing off?

That is, until I read an excellent essay The Heart of Haiku  by Jane Hirshfield (exclusive to Amazon Kindle readers as a Kindle Single) which explains the essence of haiku through the life and work of Matsuo Bashō. I highly recommend this as a read if you like haiku / poetry, or even if you don’t because Hirshfield does such a good job of demonstrating how haiku is tied to higher concepts of Zen Buddhism and how the beauty of much of haiku gets lost in translation.

There’s one Bashō haiku that particularly stood out for me in its ingenuity.

looking exactly like
blue flag iris: blue flag iris
inside the water’s shadow

kakitsubata nitari ya nitari mizu no kage

I’ll let Hirshfield explain how ingenious this poem is in her own words:

The main point in the original Japanese is the poem’s mirroring construction: the two identical words at the haiku’s center replicate both visually and in sound what is being described. In Japanese, which is written vertically the visual onomotopoeia [sic] is even more clear; a small “cutting-word”, ya, creates the slim line of water dividing the flower stem’s two apparently equal stems.

That’s just brilliant, innit?! I desperately want to look at the original Japanese version now to see how magical this looks. (I’ve tried searching online for this, without success. I’d appreciate it if someone can post a link in the comments section if you do find it.)

I have an incredibly love-hate relationship with poetry in general. When it’s done right and is clever – like the example above – I can appreciate it and enjoy it. I also think that a poem should, in its own way, tell a story; perhaps that’s why The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is by far my most favourite poem. (The other reason being this poem is a major plot point in Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.)

What really turns me off from poetry sometimes is the sense of entitlement that poets and poetry lovers have, as if prose is somehow ‘easier’ to write or ‘worse’ at expressing thoughts and feelings. Good longform prose is hard to write and edit, just as clever poetry isn’t easy to write. Well-written poetry can be used to communicate complex feelings of a poet, but sometimes, poetry is merely used as a shortcut to writing less and yet still pretending that makes it better than prose that runs into a similar number of lines.