TO WIVE SHOULD WE SHRIVE?
The urge for creativity breeds neglect. The neglect of the better half and the neglect of the progeny she bears. Skirmishes, the wordy duels become the order of the day. The stepping stone of any creative fervor presents many horrid disappointments and the disappointments breed new challenges but the gradually fraying out family fabric with the growing resentment in the hearts of your materialistic wife and her over shadows of resentment gradually carrying away the warmth you long for in the homely atmosphere, the germinating seedlings of mistrust your progeny is constrained to germinate and nurture in such disturbed disharmony from their very nascent stage, and the inexplicable infernal frustration, which would ultimately drive you to alcohol and leave you crippled ultimately. Otherwise Bhushan who should have emerged as the glorious legend in the annals of the photographic enthusiast’s history would not have been reduced to die demented, dishonored, discontented, and disreputably in a disdained way. Creativity demands a single minded sincere effort and this effort casts palls of smoke screens of appalling nature making a man a bit indifferent to the strains of the family responsibilities. In this changed world, where the husband is reduced to be looked upon just as a unit of economic resource and all other emotional attachments being relegated to the back seats is seen to be scorned upon when considered economically unproductive. If a woman considers the man, only as an economic resource then can there be any difference between a wife and a whore?
Well! Economically unproductive attitude should be scorned upon but not with a mental state of hypermetropia but did you find a wife of the intellectual stature who can look ahead and visualize the dizzy heights her husband is destined for at some later date in the future if left unhindered, unfettered, unperturbed, kept free of humiliation, contempt and infamies? Did you ever take a look at the lives of people like Socrates, Leo Tolstoy, William Shakespeare and other umpteen numbers of stalwarts who have left indelible imprints of intellectual impressions upon this world? Were their wives happy, I mean, as happy as the wives of the street side cobblers in their vicinity? Then how can you call the wife of Bushan mean and her children disloyal? In this present world the worthy husband by a wife and a worthy father by a son or a daughter are assessed as a worthy father or a worthy husband only by taking into account the number of rupees he brings home. How do you account for the intellectual eclipse suffered by the marvelous poet Edwin Markham all through the best part of his youth? Had the rituals of three marriages and three divorces got any thing to do with this intellectual eclipse? Why did Milton write the Paradise lost after marrying and the paradise regained after a divorce? Gone are the days when a woman was called as the embodiment of service and sacrifice. Why do you think the adage that behind every man’s success there is a woman now carries an appendage always discouraging him? It is the woman who creates an atmosphere conducive for the man to be lured towards alcoholism and later humiliates him calling him an alcoholic wreck and deserts him or even if she persists with him within the environments of marriage and hypocrisy of the ritual of the vows of a marriage, would present him with all the torment necessary to stay glued to the alcohol till he breaks down both intellectually and economically. Whatsoever be the reasons, a great photographic genius is reduced to dust and now remains only as a subject for wrangling around for the proceeds he had left behind in the materialistic forms of gold, money and fixed deposits. The photographs trampled by feet lying in dust, his slides stampeded and crushed. I am talking about the photographs and stills which would hold the people who love and admire photography to be gripped by a gasp and stay mesmerized for hours. The gruesome life he lived and the unceremonious way he died keeps reminding me of the ordeal suffered by Vincent Van Gogh the great enigmatic painter. His memories haunt me and make me spend sleepless nights stirring restlessly in bed frustrated at the thought of the genius so cruelly wasted, all the while my heart bleeding profusely at the way his photographic relics have been stampeded and crushed but the enquiries about his camera the proceeds that the sale of it brought is how shared and how disposed, seen kept alive and debated. These thoughts have made me to take this world with a great disgust and threw me into the microscopic retrospection of my life that had been. What would happen to the literature work I cherished will the manuscripts be consigned to waste paper merchants when I stand snuffed out like Bushan is the question which runs up an uneasy chill up my spine. What would be the glowing tribute, the most appropriate one that I can pay to this dear departed? What must be done to put his wandering soul in torment at peace and rest? All are the trillion dollar questions which keep swarming and buzzing like bees in my tormented mind. My photographic genius was dead and was cremated unceremoniously in the month of April 2005.
NOTE: This piece in fact was written by me for a Photographer who is an associate of Royal Chamber of photographers, in the capacity of a ghost writer. For some reasons I did not like him and did not give him this work. But this work had so impressed me that I have drawn a great bit of soul satisfaction. This was written keeping a particular lady in mind and this is not my general opinion what ever particulars the photographer told me in telugu language were joyfully interlaced and a good and self satisfying work emerged so I request all the female members of the forum not to treat this as my work and no woman had deceived or cheated me and I hold all the women I came across in my life in a very high esteem.trinityshiva