What’s common to Karna and Matthew Perry?

Fairly presumably, nothing in any respect. Or nothing that will make sense to anybody however me. However this is my glib-sounding reply: the emotional kavacha. The armour that protects you from the world, hiding your vulnerability beneath a masking of toughness, or nastiness… or goofy, laugh-track-accompanied jokes.

Matthew Perry, who died in October, was a favorite of mine – going again to the early years of this millennium once I watched each Pals episode a number of occasions because the present was telecast day by day on two Indian channels. But when it has taken me this lengthy to write down about him, it is not as a result of I used to be coming to phrases with the loss. I simply most popular to binge-re-watch Pals as an alternative and to recollect a time when the sarcastic Chandler Bing grew to become the final of a sequence of lonesome sorts whom I strongly associated to – characters encountered between childhood and my 20s throughout literature and movie.

The primary of these was Karna within the Mahabharat, which is the place the kavacha is available in. As a younger reader, once I first grew to become obsessive about the luckless Karna, I wasn’t interested by subtext – however I’ll have intuitively grasped that the divine armour, hooked up to his physique till he cuts it away in one of many epic’s most stirring passages, had a symbolic operate too. I understood Karna’s anger and resentment in direction of those that knew their place on the planet and had been snug in their very own (common) pores and skin. And I wasn’t shocked when, a few years later, I learn the primary analyses of the armour as emotional cowl, defending him not simply from bodily weapons however from the world’s barbs – whereas additionally including to his defensiveness, serving to him nurture a way of persecution. And the way a significant development in character happens across the time he rids himself of this albatross, opening up, and accepting his future.

All this sounds solemn, however every time I pictured Karna in my head, I noticed him as a sarcastic man, able to being very slicing, and genuinely humorous at occasions. I felt he needed to have a way of humour – even when it was one thing just like the sardonic high quality that Amitabh Bachchan delivered to some offended younger man roles. However I hardly ever, if ever, noticed such a Karna within the many Mahabharat books I learn (or within the TV present): these both turned him maudlin, on the cusp of weepy self-pity, or (within the standard tellings the place the Kauravas epitomised evil) a foul man who was possibly considerably much less unhealthy than the others.

I used to be nicely into maturity when Pals entered my orbit, however Bing would fill this humour hole together with his protecting kavacha (‘Again then I used humour as a defence mechanism. Thank god I do not do this anymore’).To repeat: I do know not a lot connects Chandler and Karna (nicely, they each have father or mother points. One would not know who his progenitors are, the opposite has Kathleen Turner for a dad). However at totally different factors in my life, and in broadly comparable methods, they grew to become folks to establish with, serving to me articulate issues about my inside world. I did not totally recognize Chandler at first, however quickly I noticed that his exaggerated, hysterical comedy was central to his operate as a Greek refrain. In different methods, he was essentially the most poised and accountable of the six associates – regardless of being arrange because the man who retains making jokes which the others tolerate or roll their eyes at in the way in which that an grownup is perhaps indulgent of a prattling youngster. (The implication virtually being that they may, in the event that they selected to, say equally humorous issues, however had been too mature for this. Utter nonsense.)With Chandler (and possibly even Perry), there’s a sense that the ‘immaturity’ is especially performative, at all times with a tinge of self-awareness. And in contrast to my childhood hero, he would not have to lose the armour to turn into extra human. It seems you can drily touch upon the motion round you, even whereas being a part of it.

Or as Chandler would possibly say, ‘BING!! a part of it.’