Hi Friends,
This week when I was reading the blog of one my fav Tamil author Jeyamohan (JM), I got one my long time question answered. From my school/college days I always want to become a writer one day, but then in parallel one more question will come to my mind. That is “What is the use of writing stories/poems?? What value it adds to human life”. In essence “what is the use of literature?”
Here is how JM narrated what he thinks the answer for this question. Below lines are an abstract from him Tamil speech during a Singapore Tamil Conference.
He is saying to answer questions like this; we need to approach the situation from very basic objective point of view. To illustrate the approach he quotes about a book “The Naked Ape” by Desmond moriss. In which the author try to understand human behavior from animal point of view. Desmond just sees humans as hairless ape. Desmond wonders about two big radical changes in human animal than other animals. They are, It can even kill himself for others (suicide) and whatever learned by one ape becomes asset to the whole community. That book goes on like this…
The point is you can analyze the need for literature also from an external point of view like this. JM ask us to imagine if there are aliens come down to earth and start making report on humans they may report like below.
Humans are very interested in seeing themselves again and again. You can even call it as an obsession. Their cities are filled with posters and bill boards of human pictures. Their cinema, Television and internet every thing is filled with human pictures. They can see this picture and movies round the clock with out any boredom.
Human are continuously making one type of noise. They call it as “Talking”. If you learn you can understand it has meaning. Humans are always “Talking” about something. If you understand that closely, they always talk about what they did or going to do. They keep talking about what they do every day. When that is not enough they add imagination to their daily activities and talk about that as if they already did it or going to do. They are not tired of talking. Don’t know the use of it but they need it like breathing.
Every man is always thinking about himself. They are always processing many events and scenarios keeping themselves in center. They call that as “Mind”
Humans are always thinking about their life in many dimensions in their imagination. They write elaborately about their lives and read them. They are acting their life as movies and see them again and again. They are keep talking about the life and listen to them again and again. If that imagination is closer to their real life, they celebrate that as great creation. In this way, every human is living many many lives using this imagination. Every kind of life they want live can be lived through this imagination. They multiply, their happiness /sadness into many folds though this imagination.
Basically for humans their biological life is not enough. They multiply their lives though this writings, movies and all creations called arts and literature. We see 300 core human lives in earth but there are 300 thousand lives are lived here.
In a nutshell literature gives man the freedom to live beyond his one life and experience eternity. It helps the author live much longer than his protein shell (Human Body).
You can read the original version of JM’s speech in Tamil using the below link. http://www.jeyamohan.in/?p=46
The above imaginative discussion JM gave me liberated understanding about why we need literature. Hope it excites you too... Catch you next week…
No comments:
Post a Comment