While I’ve come across various literary and artistic works praising the art of looking, what truly led me down this path was Nirmal Verma’s Ek Chithda Sukh (1979), translated as A Rag Called Happiness (1993). In this Hindi novel, the 14-year-old narrator Munnu writes moving descriptions of everyday life in his notebook: ‘This I’ll remember, the boy told himself; I’ll put it down in my diary. Bitty was hanging clothes out to dry.
A pale light filled the room. Darry sat back against the wall, his eyes on Bitty …’ Under its influence, I began to narrativise the world around me, so that my journal entries became ready reckoners for the future me: I’d simply page through for what was happening in my life outside the usual things we remember – family, friends, work, city living. I catalogued the ephemera that tend to slip between the days and the headlines.
The dreams I had and probably hated; my thoughts about a bitter cold in the middle of summer; my anxiety before a job interview; the excitement of watching a movie that overwhelmed me. These are details we tend to gloss over in a 24-hour cycle, but in aggregate they accrue meaning – they slow me down, make me more observant. They denote a sense of time and the self, coming together in a way their digital counterparts don’t.
It helps that I journal with pen or pencil, not phone or app, the better to etch the small things in my mind. At the end of A Rag, all Munnu has are these recollections of times spent with Bitty and her gang of theatre friends over the summer. The break, the year, all these people, pass him by so simply, but the filled-up pages of his notebook, all the observations he has amassed, will stay forever as markings of a time lived – well or not, only time can tell.
To read more about Verma and his works, read the essay ‘A Patch of Sunlight: Remembering Nirmal Verma’ (2017) by Priyanka Dubey in The Caravan magazine. In the Aeon Essay ‘I awoke at ½ past 7’ (2025), the historian Elena Mary dives into the Victorian era of diary-keeping to bring out the ways in which our current digital oversharing starkly resembles Victorian habits. I will confess that, when it comes to sports, I am a fair-weather fan.
I like basketball but had little interest in the New York Knicks until they made it to the NBA finals in June. I’m barely interested in soccer unless the Canadian team or the Korean team make it at least to the World Cup round of 32. I root for teams when there’s cause to hope and, when they do advance, I’m as joyful and riotous as any fan.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
