This design is for someone with the initials SP. They have just started a position in Ops. So the first game is playing around with the three letters S, P and O.
The second game is with the bird. The eyes also imitate the eyes/feathers of the peacock. That’s why I have coloured the image in as blue.
The third game is with visible and invisible birds in the word art. Some are obvious, some are more subtle. Hence one is the peacock – known for its visibility. And the other bird is ‘invisible’, a deliberate contrast to the peacock.
There is a game with the S letter – There are two S letters that can be discerned.
The four eyes around the sides also have a symbolic meaning based on a certain Indian idiom…
This is a story of one man, from the lowest castes of India, from the rural poor in India, from a working class background, an ethnic minority. A man rejected for no good reason from the Higher Institutions of learning in this country despite a PhD, top publications in journals and a published book proving that he is an expert in his studies. A man with no network. No helpers. A man that works seven days a week and then studies in the mornings and the evenings for an Art History degree. A man with nothing but a laptop. And a free WordPress website. This is the story of a dream of a free, Open Access Press that became a reality. A Press whose books are read or visited every single day. A Press that spreads knowledge about Hindi films and Indian culture, art, fiction, non-fiction. A Press whose mission is to share the gift of decades of reading, learning and writing with the world.
Because books are not money. Books are not commodities. Knowledge is not a commodity. Books are love. And knowledge is love. For the people. For us.
The attainment of knowledge is not for the ego. It is for the community. It is to be shared.
This is the story of a revolt against capitalism, ego, conformism, control, marginalisation and racial subjection. This is the story of genuine freedom of thought. This is the story of anarchism. This is the story of THE MEHMI PRESS.
I have been writing poetry and stories since I was six years old. Maybe even before. It has been my ambition to be a writer for as long as I can remember. Other people think about money, status, fame. I think about writing. That is how I gauge how successful I am in the world – by my contribution to the world of thought and the world of letters. I have been published in student newspapers, in academic journals, in poetry magazines, in the academic press, in social media sites. I write tour scripts in museums. All the different types of media. I have kept a blog site to share my ideas and thoughts.
But, despite that, there was a hunger. I needed something more. I needed something that was my own. Something uncensored. Something where I could express the spirit of anarchy and revolt. Something that could capture the thinking of the revolution. One man against the entire world of injustice. One man against the world of money and its fire of ignorance. One man against the same voices, the same people, the same thinking, the same bullshit. The voice of the Untouchables and the marginalised.
One day, I watched an Indian film ‘Super 30’. It was about Anand Kumar. He was a brilliant mathematician. But he could not accept the offer to go to Cambridge University because he was poor. And so, he started up a movement of free education in India to help poor students get into top universities. He did it with nothing. Except for his brains.
And then, I started thinking about Nietzsche, who wrote what he did without an audience. And Kafka, who never even published in his lifetime. Only his friends read his work.
I realised that I had to forget my ego. To become free, I had to shed the validation of other people and their thoughts about my writing. I had to forget about money. I was going to model THE MEHMI PRESS on Anand Kumar’s model. All you need is your brain. I had the basic necessities: a free WordPress site, internet connection and a laptop. And, I had something more than that: about four decades of experience as a writer.
I didn’t learn book design. I had desktop publishing software – how perfect did I need these books to look? I could do a bit of digital art. The rest was all stuff that I had done before when I wrote and published through all of those places.
So in 2023, I made the move. THE MEHMI PRESS was born.
How successful is THE MEHMI PRESS? It is read basically every single day. Although no one talks about my books and no one tells me about them, people are reading them. Most of them are perhaps people that I know. That is what is most likely. But I do not know who is reading these books. There are no reviews. No comments. No one ever tells me about reading my books. But they are read constantly. So, THE MEHMI PRESS is a success.
Without time, help, friends, connection, a network, any form of love, THE MEHMI PRESS has triumphed. With all the problems I have faced over the past two years, THE MEHMI PRESS has triumphed. Because it is the voice of the counter-culture. Because it is the voice of hope.
If you shed money, shed ego, shed selfishness and greed, if you shed external validation, you can have a genuine, authentic and pure voice. You can have something of your own. If you have ideals, you can create a new space for the people and the community.
THE MEHMI PRESS is dedicated to the Dalit Community, the Untouchables, the lowest castes in India. THE MEHMI PRESS is dedicated to my mother, the immigrant woman from a poor background. THE MEHMI PRESS is dedicated to my grandfather that told me the stories and shaped my life for learning. THE MEHMI PRESS is still in its infancy. There are many voyages to go on yet. Now, I do not have time. But there will be more books in the future. And better books.
As I say, before I start every voyage in this life, Jai Maa Kaali! Minoo tere Shakti didi! (Hail the Dark Mother! Give me your power!)
In Thomas Hardy’s novel, Jude the Obscure, the eponymous character at first makes an elementary mistake in translation. He believes that words have fixed meanings independent of context. It is progress in the language under study that enables Jude to see that context determines meaning. Words have a plasticity, not a fixity. Their situation is what gives them meanings. In this piece of writing, I want to investigate the meanings of the word “ruswa” which is used in a number of South Asian languages. Ruswa is a word which aims to convey a particular emotion. I want to stress the multiple meanings and understandings of the word rather than insisting on one univocal meaning. I will first outline the differing contemporary interpretations of the word by summarising arguments from an online translation site. I will then investigate my own meaning of the word through the use of autobiography. I will then reflect upon the political implications of “ruswa”.
I first began to think about the word “ruswa” while I was translating myself. One of the major loves of my life is Hindi music from Hindi film soundtracks. However, Hindi is not the language that I speak at home. I am therefore a life-long student of the Hindi tongue. There is a particularly lovely song from the movie Aashiqui 2 (Love/Romance 2) entitled Sun Raha Hai Na Tu, Ro Raha Hoon Main (Are you listening? I am crying) which had a few words which I didn’t know the meaning of. It was while I was reading the song translation that I stumbled upon the equivocal significations of “ruswa”. I had first thought that I knew what the meaning of the word was. It seemed that there was much more argument over the word than I could have imagined.
The online translation of the song can be found here: http://www.bollymeaning.com/2013/04/sun-raha-hai-na-tu-ro-raha-hoon-main.html . I will present the part of the song that is illustrated, so that the reader can see the context (legally for ‘fair use’, non-commercial and scholarly purposes of commentary):
Manzilein ruswa hain – (my) destinations are not cared for..
Khoyaa hai raasta – the path is lost..
Aaye le jaaye – (Someone, you actually) comes and takes me away
Itni si iltijaa – only this is my small wish..
Ye meri zamaanat hai – This is my surety,
Tu meri amaanat hai.. – you’re mine..
Haan.. – yes
Ruswa is translated by the website’s translator as “are not cared for”. While I had thought ruswa was an emotion in itself, the translator related it to emotion by relating it to the emotions of other people. This translation was very controversial and drew dissent from a number of interpreters, who posted their thoughts in the comments section underneath the translated song. I will summarise some of the positions. An anonymous commentator wrote:
“dude you don’t know the meaning of “ruswa”?? it’s not angry or annoyed. it means “badnaam” or “negatively famous” or simply “infamous””
This first meaning was one that I had never associated with the word ruswa. There was a reply to this first comment: “Ruswa means sad..so the translator s almst right”. This meaning was more in keeping with my own position. It stressed that ruswa was an emotion, although I did not see the emotion as being one of sadness myself.
Both of these translations of ruswa aroused further discord. The next poster wrote:
“Ruswa neither means sad nor angry… or badnaam or even annoy. It means destroy… manzilein ruswa he… translates to my goals or destinations or simply dreams… are destroyed….”
Here was something that was new to my ears again. There seemed to be an element of violence in the word ruswa according to this latest poster. Other interpretations of the word ruswa then surfaced. Here were the other definitions:
Sad/upset
“khafa hona” (to become separate, alienated)
“Naraz hona” (to be angry)
Ruined
Wtf
Dishonoured
negative
blocked
There were a whole host of seemingly differing interpretations around the word ruswa. Each interpreter thought that they were right in assigning their own meaning and that everyone else was wrong. However, there were some, like myself, who also thought that everyone’s meaning was equally valid. My own thoughts are that ruswa is such a complicated term that it can mean several things at once, whether or not we can see all aspects of the word and the relationships to self and other that it entails. It was very illuminating to see how much discord there was around this word in a contemporary song by contemporary commentators. Clearly, language is not the shared resource that some people claim that it is, but rather an all-out war of interpretation and meaning in which meanings and significations are highly contested over.
I want to outline my own interpretation of ruswa through an autobiographical example, for I have been “ruswa” myself as a child. In Punjabi, which is my mother tongue, I was “ruswa”. However, in Punjabi, the word “ruswa” was never used. The sentence that was used is “oho russ gaya” (He has become ruswa). The English translation that was used is “sulky” – He is sulking. I was frequently ruswa as a child and the terms were used a lot. I can well remember what the emotion of ruswa entailed in my particular situation.
I would become ruswa when my will and my desire was thwarted, when I thought that my family hadn’t taken me into consideration. Ruswa was set in the context of competing wills and desires: those between an organisation or collective (the family) and the individual (me). The original translator of the word ruswa was right: the emotion entailed a sense of being uncared for, or neglected. The emotion of ruswa entailed a particular feeling. The moisture in my throat would disappear, leaving me with a parched feeling in my body. There was a slight feeling of pain in my head. I felt angry (naraaz). I felt alone. I felt alienated, separated from others. I was misunderstood. I was the victim of power: the organisation, which was more powerful than myself, had tried to destroy my will and desire. The organisation had tried to destroy me (destruction and violence). However, this destruction had given rise to a peculiar feeling of individuality: I was now more myself in my hurt than I could have been if I was part of the collective.
The emotion of ruswa led to a particular strategy in which I expressed my emotion to the organisation (the family). However, my power as a child was severely limited by the range of relationship that I could take and forms of action against the organisation, the family. The act of resistance was in silence and active separation, termed misleadingly by western commentators as “passive aggression”. I would sulk. I wouldn’t communicate with anyone, or share their language. I would refute their entreaties. I wouldn’t be consoled or comforted. I would dwell upon my injury. The emotion of ruswa in my mind is connected with a word which none of the commentators on the website touched upon: aggrievement. The dictionary definition of aggrievement is the quality or state of being aggrieved, which Miriam-Webster defines as:
For me, ruswa was aggrievement. I had been slighted. I had been oppressed. As the party of limited power, as a child, I had suffered from an infringement or denial or rights. There was a response to injustice in the emotion of ruswa for me. I was the victim of injustice. I had been oppressed by the many. I was in the minority and made to feel it.
Ruswa then, in my translation, in my own personal response, is aggrievement. It is connected to justice and injustice. It is connected to the rights of the minorities and those with lesser power against the will and desire of the majority and their greater power. In contradiction to the other interpreters of the word, my definition of ruswa is connected to law, justice and power, to the relationship between the minorities with less power and the majorities with more power.
For me, ruswa is a political term. I am still ruswa. I haven’t changed. However, the family has been replaced by this society that I live in. The meanings of ruswa, which is a specific emotion, expresses the position that this society is trying to put me in. I am still caught up in ruswa. Being ruswa is a result of politics and power and the expression of ruswa is a result of politics and power and the expression of language and resistance. Ruswa is a word that every minority group in the world has felt and known. However, they have never been able to fully express what ruswa means in a language that the world will understand. To understand ruswa fully, one has to be ruswa. And being ruswa also means that one does not fully know ruswa: one is caught up in the trap of self-reference, out of which one cannot escape. Being ruswa means being limited and severely constrained, both physically and mentally.
I ask the reader to dwell upon the meanings of ruswa. I can only see aspects of ruswa, just as others can only see aspects of it. When I was a child, the emotion of ruswa would go away for a while and then resurface. I was trapped in a relationship outside of which there was no escape: the family. Even know, while I am trapped in the relationship of this society, there is no escape for the one who is ruswa. To escape the emotion of ruswa would take a world-altering event and only then would one be able to see what ruswa had meant, for it would be no more.
She is one of my favourite friends in museums and art galleries. She is a special person. She has helped me a lot. She promised that she would tell me this famous love story from her culture because she is as interested in psychology, people and relationships as I am. And now I have heard it. And I will share it, just like she shared it with me. Originally, her grandmother shared it with her, alongside many other folk tales.
Once, a man asked the woman that he loved how much she loved him. She answered that she loved him like the morning breeze on the flowing meadows in the mountains. He was angered. He thought himself rejected. Did she have a love for him that was like the wind, nothing, meaningless? Was he no matter at all to her? When he loved her so much? He struck her down. He killed her. It was an act of revenge for the rejection that she had given him. It was an act against the failure of reciprocity: she could not love him like he loved her. He had become ego: he thought that only he could love, that she was heartless, that only his love was important.
It happened after this – who knows how long after? – that he went up into the hills in the flowing meadows. The sun beat down on him. It punctured his skin, it vanquished his eyes, his whole body hurt from the heat. But then, like the kiss of a loving mother, the morning breeze washed over his body in a balmy embrace. And then, the tears sprung into his eyes. This. This is how she had loved him. This was the love that he could not understand. Her love for him was the love of solace, cure, repair, protection, shelter, caress, survival, everything that was needed, everything that was wanted. Her love for him was her life entire. There could be no love greater.
The ego of love was vanquished. What was his love for her compared to her love for him? Her who he had struck down and killed was the true lover. It was him that could not love in the right way. He had been a monster of delusion and insecurity. He had thought the wind had no weight, no form, no appearance, no reality. In fact, the wind was everything. It was the heart’s and the body’s greatest desires. His disbelief in the love was like the disbelief of the invisible God in the old days: he had been seduced by the devil and become an infidel, doomed to hell.
The man’s egotistical interpretation and its form of closure was a form of violence, a murder of the other. Of love and the lover.
When I was a child, my grandfather would tell me stories like these. Not about love. It was not the story of a grandmother to a beloved granddaughter. Tales of folk wisdom. From our culture. From cultures around the world. And then, when we had finished listening, he would ask us to tell him the moral to be found in each treasure. When we had interpreted the story, he would tell us the morals that were in it.
I watched my beautiful friend speaking, imagining her as a child listening to the woman that she loved so much, the storyteller. I loved my grandfather most for his stories, for teaching me. And when she finished, and I was still looking at her, we talked about what the story meant for us.
My initial thoughts were that the story was about the different languages of love that women and men speak. As someone who has had troubles himself, it seems that there are two different styles of expressing love. Some people – I am not saying they are exclusively women – express love in a veiled or concealed manner. They cannot say what they feel out loud in direct language. They think that would be too coarse, that it would expose their inner self too much. These people are scared. They are scared of love. These people – like the woman in the story – believe that their lover should be able to read their minds, know exactly what they are talking about and saying, feeling in their inner core. They imagine their lovers as the most gifted of communicators, as people able to interpret their every gesture, every tone in their voice. They forget about ambiguity which is structural to language, mistakes which are endemic, difficulties, lack of comprehension stemming from culture, background and socialisation, the gendering of people in every manner. These people feel that their lover is an extension of themselves and that communication doesn’t have to travel across a distance and a medium. For these people, the lover is an unquestionable expert in them: someone who cannot ever be wrong.
The man is like me. He wants a clear, unambiguous declaration of love that he can understand because he has difficulty understanding women. He hasn’t experienced the same world as women – the flowing meadows in the mountains and the wind there. He is not scared. He never fears. He is a man of violence, a fighter – he comes from the culture of fighters who act first and then think afterwards. That is why he speaks bluntly. He does not allude to things, he does not compare. He wants simplicity. And he does not understand people that are scared of their own love. He does not think it is coarse to share your feelings. They are what you are. They are what you experience. They are the way that you see other people and the world.
Then, while I write now, I see the story to be about the egotism of the man’s love. He cannot understand that the woman loves him in a different kind of way – the superior kind of way – and expresses this in a different kind of way. He feels he is not important to her because of this. He is insecure. He is wrong because ego has taken over. He is insecure because ego has taken over. How could he ask her how much she loved him in the first place? It is not a contest. He does not accept the love that she gives him by being with him. He has to question. Then, he makes it into a contest. For her, love truly is everything. She cannot say it out loud. It is a realisation that he has to come to later on in his life, in the solitude of the mountains, when he is close to heaven and the angels. For him, love is not everything. Because how can you lay a hand on the one that you love like that? How can you kill her? Even if she does not love you, that is her choice. Even if she loves you and for some reason, she cannot do anything about it, that is her choice. The man cannot respect a woman’s choice. He does not have respect for women. He does not understand women. When someone doesn’t love you and doesn’t return your feelings, you can’t kill your own love for them. No matter how hard you try. But that is what he tried to do by killing her – he tried to kill his own love for her.
And finally, the moral of the story is what love means to the lover. It is what only the lover understands. Love is everything. Love is the protection against this hard world and the suffering within it. Love is the greatest comfort that you can experience. Whatever happens in life, I have been protected by the love of my mother. No matter how difficult things have gotten in life or the serious problems. Other people have money to protect them. Or their race or status or class. What we have had to protect us is love. In this one area, we are the powerful. Because the love of an Indian mother from the village is the breeze in the mountains in the morning. It is the love that the Indian man looks for in a woman romantically. So he looks for kindness, comfort, release from suffering, release from the brutality and arbitrary despotism of this world and its weathers. The happiness of comfort. And the man in the story killed the one that gave him all that. It is a story about ingratitude, the privilege and complacency of the men that get that kind of love and can’t appreciate it, the men who have no value for how lucky they have been, how destiny has embraced them. The selfishness of their love, the smallness of their hearts and their minds. And also – the reality that, nonetheless, the women will be with them anyway and give them the most precious thing in the universe – their hearts and the comfort that comes with it.
The Mehmi Press is an online Open Access publishing company which I founded in 2023. It is completely free to download, read and share my creative work. I hope you enjoy reading these titles which include microfiction and an artbook. Self-publishing gives you a freedom you cannot enjoy anywhere else and a sense of achievement which is hard to find in this world.
Stay on the lookout for more titles in the future!
By Dr Suneel Mehmi
SELECTED NOTES ON RACISM
PUBLISHED 2024
With a focus on the British Asian or Anglo-Indian experience, these are writings about the subtle strategies of racism in western culture which shape everyday life and also the cultural imagination through fiction and films. The aim of the book is to expose what is concealed but which orders life in Western culture for the ethnic minority and the majority culture.
Seven daydreams which I have been immersed in constantly. From dreams of freedom, to dreams of imprisonment, from dreams of knowledge to dreams of the body beautiful.
These stories are lessons, adventures, a means to share life and my experience with the little ones. An attempt to replicate the wonder of stories which my grandfather introduced me to, the ultimate storyteller. Written in 2015. The first collection of many to come!
An exploration of what the Paisley symbol means to me as a digital artist and how it signifies the tears of India for me as they are appropriated by the West.
diary of a lone man 