Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?
There is a Czech proverb that describes their easy indolence by a metaphor: ‘They are gazing at God’s windows.’ A person gazing at God’s windows is not bored; he is happy. In our world, indolence has turned into having nothing to do, which is a completely different thing: a person with nothing to do is frustrated, bored, is constantly searching for the activity he lacks?
I would venture to guess that upon reaching the word ‘bored’ in the Kundera passage I have quoted, you let out an indulgent smile. Perhaps my frequent diatribes against boredom have led you to believe that I may have, at the haunting midday of my life, finally come to terms with boredom, and perhaps even be holding out an olive branch or a conciliatory drink to settle down with an old antagonist Moriarty-Holmes-style, simply because I am now holding a brief for laziness, or because I am held hostage to the lazing age. Quite the contrary.
Boredom, as Kundera points out, is the craving to engage. Laziness is the attainment of the desired condition of disengagement. It is saying, ‘Enough of engaging’ not with a sigh, but with the final positioning of many final positionings of pillows—both under head and between the legs. Our nature is, I suppose for perfectly existential and evolutionary reasons, inclined in favour of action.
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After all, human greatness has been defined by it, while the opposite has been defined not in failure to take up a course of action—although Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to ‘appease’ Hitler has been projected, in hindsight, as a desire not to act—but to either take up a course of action and fail, or to lead it to conequences that have proved unfortunate for men. Greatness. But like the number of unborn outnumbering both the living and the dead, there have been enough angels who consciously decide, without fear, not to tread where many fools have sought to rush in Mel Gibson-as-William Wallace style. Laziness is not the first refuge of the scoundrel.
It seeks to take leave from both justice and injustice alike. It chooses to leave the field altogether. Whether it can in this sublunary world is another matter. But not seeking something because it cannot be found in its full roundness is cowardice, an active force too many times conflated with indolence. becomes enjoined with action. At best, pussilinamity has been seen as inaction’s muse. And it is this brave, underrated and unappreciated aspect of laziness that I present in your diwan-i-khas.
Hopefully, I won’t make out indolence to be just a simplistic decision to not do something, but as a force to do nothing, especially when the alternatives—both doing nothing and not doing something—are to risk facing as well as doling out pain. The great writer Shibram Chakraborty not only understood the value of laziness but had the genius to distinguish being lazy from being idle. For him, indolence is a force that through the green fuse drives the flower, the kinetic charmed into potential, the wind humbled into air.
In a 1972 interview conducted by Amitabh Basu in his column ‘Dainandin Jibone’ (In Everyday Life) where in every issue of the film magazine, Ultoroth, Basu posed a set list of questions to writers, Shibram had articulated the nous of laziness. Replying to the very first question, ‘When do you get up in the morning?’ he sets the warp, woof and tone:
It depends on the time. I try to get up as soon as I wake up. But after sleeping all night I feel so tired that to clear that very tiredness I need to sleep a bit more. As I keep doing this, when it becomes impossible not to get up, when it looks bad, then I just have to get up from bed.
This is languor as joie de vivre, the purest manifestation of freedom, life as unmovedness—until internal compulsion compels. As a questioner, Basu is taken aback, and asks Shibram the obvious question, ‘During the whole day when do you write?’ The response is disarming:
I don’t feel like writing at all—whether at night or during the day. It’s just that if I don’t write, I won’t get food on the table. So, for the sake of staying alive (without being under the influence of any muse) I write because I have to write. Like if a rickshawala doesn’t pull the rickshaw he won’t be able to eat, my situation is a bit like that…
And then the coup de grâce: ‘I write the next day, because I know only too well that writing the next day won’t last.’ This is not some social, Marxist exposition of the need for equitable labour, where the term ‘working class’ contains a perverted pride in working and an inverted shame for ‘working for the man’. Your copy of Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays is buried somewhere here with me.
But I’d be damned if I hunted for it to shoot it down. But I did look up the title essay for the purpose of our current investigation, and the philosopher’s argument of equating the need for people to unburden themselves of work with idleness—doing nothing or making ‘spare time’ (sic)—remains as myopic as his role in Mohan Kumar’s atrocious, untrustworthy 1967 anti-war movie, Aman.
In the scene, Russell meets the cretinous Rajendra Kumar—not Manoj Kumar, as I keep thinking—who plays the role of Dr Gautamdas, a medical officer off to serve victims of the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Russell plays Master Yoda to Rajendra’s young padawan, giving him a spiel on pacificism (the voiceover translator introduces him as ‘Lord Russell, shanti ke neta’: ‘I have the greatest admiration and approval for your project.
I hope with all my heart that you will be sexsexful in finding the cure.’ But I digress. For a man who well knew that the cessation of war is only one kind of peace and not peace itself, his praise of muscular idleness is both strenuous and misleading. ‘I think there is far too much work done in the world. That immense harm is caused by the work is virtuous,’5 Russell writes in his essay, and in this we are in agreement. He invites ‘leaders of the YMCA to start a campaign to induce, good, young men to do nothing,’ rightly adding that ‘the morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
But then he Das Kapitalutes and goes all poltico-socialite, suggesting working hours be reduced to four, and that people working to provide themselves ‘necessities and elementary comforts of life’, spending the rest of their time ‘to use as [they] might see fit’. Ah, the Russellian wobble that sees matters only via negativa in terms of a leisure class whose dependence sits on the Herculean, perpetual labours of others. This is praising wakefulness for its ability to recall dreaming.
Leisure, in its modern Bertrand Ghat usage, is not our supreme act of the laze, or araam, which signifies both pleasure and stillness, and certainly not pleasure and activity-that-is-not-work. The industry built around leisure—the oxymoronic ‘leisure industry’ giving the game away—is frenetic, frantic, hectic, repugnant work, a pig with lipstick but a pig nonetheless. This, my friend, is where laziness remains a challenge as well as the holy grail, a guilty pleasure, not a workshop activity ‘to destress’ or some satsang gathering where the herd both gets off and gets it off. Most importantly, like sleep and death, laziness is an anti-social activity that should be valued for being against deterministic schemes and for rescuing the individual from the herd.
This excerpt from Indrajit Hazra’s ‘In Praise of Laziness and Other Essays’ has been published with publishers Simon & Schuster.