Lonely at the Bottom

                                                           Lonely at the Bottom

We are familiar with the phrase “Lonely at the Top’. This is one of the poignant lines from the Oscar winning movie The King’s Speech. The King referred to is King George VI known as Bertie who in his youth was a stuttering, stammering sovereign and had to engage the services of Lionel, an Australian speech therapist to help him get over his debilitating nervous ailment.

In the film, Bertie tells Lionel that he’s (Lionel) the first “ordinary” person he’s ever really spoken to. He then reveals the loneliness and isolation he has had to endure as a part of the Royal Family:

Bertie : Sometimes when I ride through the streets and see, you know, the common man staring at me, I am struck by how little I know of his life, and how little he knows of mine.

Lionel: What are friends for?

Bertie: I wouldn’t know

Bertie’s painful acknowledgement of his ignorance about friends is a classic example of being lonely at the top. This is one of the paradoxes that men and women at the top live with. Though always surrounded by a crowd of people who fawn upon them, follow them, and are forever at their service, they remain lonely. As Francis Bacon said: “ A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.” Persons at the top find it difficult to connect with others because they are either put on a pedestal and therefore experience the pressure of living up to that image of larger than life or they feel isolated as everyone is compelled to be respectful and look up to them to the extent that they are neither known nor seen beyond what their title has made them to be.

But today many of us experience the reverse as we endure loneliness being at the bottom. True, being at the bottom, hardly anyone wastes his/her time courting us. There is none to fawn upon us as we have nothing to bestow on them. There is none to look up to us as we are at the bottom. Only we can be looked down. We are a small number, a minuscule minority whose presence hardly matters and whose absence is hardly missed and whose future is oblivion.

Who comprise this lonely club of minorities cadging for some kind of recognition, some kind of attention that is denied to them? Mainly intellectuals, thinkers, and all those who seek Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram(Truth,Goodness/Welfare and Beauty ) in their  daily discourses and activities are the loners today. Today’s world adores brash, loud and opinionated people who have no hesitation to climb up the roof and loudly express themselves even if there is “nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express." TV news shows are all about expressing nothing under the pretext of expressing something. A volley of words from the TV studios creating a verbal pandemonium is boastfully claimed as the best watched show with high TRP ratings. The lonely pipsqueaks who try to get a word in edgewise are shouted down and remain severely left alone. They try to cash on the five second silence while the shouters catch their breath for a fresh onslaught, but they realize like Eliot’s Prufrock, they cannot get their words out. Adapting lines from Prufrock, this is the pathetic lament of those at the bottom:

    And we have heard the voices already, heard  them all—

    The voices that fix us in a formulated phrase, (fossilized fool)

    And when thus formulated, sprawling on a pin,

    When we are  pinned and wriggling on the wall,

    Then how should we begin?

… … … … … … … … …

    And how should we presume?

 Even if they speak, they will not be heard- and worse, they will not be understood. They have no strength to push the moment to a crisis and win the debate. They know they are at the bottom and realize their moment of greatness flicker before the rasping lung power of the majority.

Civilized discourse is today antediluvian, confined to those that dawdle at the bottom; crass and crude jibes pass off as wit. Elegant and courteous talks are passé; arrogance and insolence mark the winner. Genteel manners are mocked at as effeminacy and cowardliness; rude and impoliteness stands for manliness and intrepidity. This has encouraged uneducated and semi-literate dregs of society to indulge in heinous crimes against women. Daily we come across stories of violence against women as these brutish men no longer walk but only stalk. It is frightening to think of the day when chivalry will lose its allotted place in a dictionary. Rape erasing it will signify the assertion of machismo. The vaunting vulgarity of the moneyed class, the acquisitive aspirations of the consumerist middle class and the anger and frustration of the deprived poor class have drained the society of all its refinement, sophistication, culture, civility and gentility. Those who yearn for finesse, nicety, taste, polish and grace are the lonely ones relegated to the bottom. The weight of crassness, insensitivity, boorishness and grossness in the rest of the society wears them down. The world has turned upside down when those at the top today make a chorus of  noise and stamp their approval of a loud, screechy society that has come to resemble the Tower of Babel.

This has affected all forms of activity that include music and dance, art and literature, fashion   and design. Shakespeare wrote: “If music is the food of love, play on”.This has been turned on its head today by transposing music and love. If love is the food of music, let passion flow on.  Our Bollywood is full of loud songs set to loud beats that appeal to sensuous excitement and carnal desire. The present era, greatly influenced by the 20^th century has seen the rise of popular music in contrast to art music that lays emphasis on lyricism, harmony, rhythm and soulfulness.  Popular music as the name defines it, is music for pleasure, music for group enjoyment, music that is noisy, music that gives a temporary ‘ high’ with its release of pseudo excitement.  The new age popular music appeals to the vast majority and does not demand knowledge and refined ears to groove to its loud sounds that go by the name music. The distinction between popular music and the classical kind is one focuses on the autonomy of the artist, who feels free to rap without a concern for beauty, lyricism and harmony while the other focuses on the autonomy of the art itself(music). A very small minority remains the custodian of the aesthetics of music, its canonical frame and structure, its self-sufficient autonomy that provides soulful enjoyment. The loud big bang music of the popular kind drowns the lonely voices that look to music the fusion of ideas, images, emotions and beauty. In a similar way, dance that is poetry in motion is an aesthetic blend of song, rhythm, movement and drama. The dancers of today are more like perfect acrobats or gymnastics whose ability to contrive the body into myriad forms is breathtaking though it assaults the aesthetic sensibility we associate with pure dance which a unique fusion of Nritta(rhythmic dance movements), Nritya(depicting a story through facial expressions  and physical movements and Natya( a combination of Nritta and Nritya.)

The lonely group at the bottom sits and ruminates over the aesthetics of dance that has been replaced by gyration without the need for words, music and expression. The sound of music is no longer heard as the sound of movements rent the air. This is the new age phenomenon. The only people who feel lonely are at the bottom.  All others are above them and no one is lonely on the top.

We who belong to the minuscule minority experience this loneliness at the bottom. We speak, no one hears. We write, no one reads. We sing, no one listens. I recall the words of Prufrock that I read five decades back:

                                       I grow old ... I grow old ...

                                           I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

                                           Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

                                           I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

                                           I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

                                           I do not think that they will sing to me.