Success is celebration. Failures make it soulful. Failures are like bungee jumping. Until you land, it is a free fall, a long failure to land and land firm and safe. As you land, and land firm and safe, you celebrate the moment. The success of landing. Many failures just every day at training would have made Usain Bolts’ Olympic moments soulful, more spiritually uplifting. So, success is celebration made soulful by failures, else it will remain just another emotionally uplifting experience sans soul-connect. I failed twice over in the recent past. Two failures and terrible ones. Now I look forward to experiencing the soulfulness when I finally become successful in these two endeavors. First is a failed attempt at experiencing Prague as Kafka did,  or as Milan Kundera prosed about. The second was more miserable. An attempt to click away ‘a day in the life of a monk’. Today is the Prague story. At another time about Gangtok, monks, monasteries and momos!

Prague – As we huddled into a taxi outside Prague airport, we got our first experience of Czech language. The Bohemian dialect with its huge German influence sounded very Sanskrit as the driver said Praha (ˈpraɦa) for Prague. ‘Jaroslav, I want to see the golden skyline of Prague as Tereza saw while climbing the Petrin Hill’ – I said expecting he would know the main character of Milan Kundera’s classic novel, ‘the unbearable lightness of being’. Jaroslav, the taxi driver had a confused look on his face as he turned back to ask, ‘who’? I began realizing Milan Kundera is not as deep an influence in Prague as I expected. But as we drove closer, Jaroslav stopped the car to show us Prague’s skyline, across the Charles Bridge as Vltava flows underneath it, carrying intense memories of Prague’s alternating history of freedom and its sheer absence.

“On her way up, she paused several times to look back; below her she saw the towers and bridges, the saints were shaking their fists and lifting their stone eyes to the clouds. It was the most beautiful city in the world”, wrote Milan Kundera. And his words echoing in my mind, in my own voice, or was it in Tereza’s, I had the first visual of Prague. Back in the car, we continued our chat with Jaroslav. ‘Do you think someone who is a writer, a philosopher, and a political dissident can be a good ruler’, he asked. We were talking about Vaclav Havel. Was he expecting us to say ‘no’; I don’t know. His question made my mind wander away from the drive to the city of Prague to Winston Churchill, Jawaharlal Nehru, Barrack Obama – all of them writers who ruled well. By now we are in the old town.

Before walking towards Kafka museum, we ate fried cheese and sausages from a street side shack. The young friendly Alex who own the tiny roadside eatery is a Brazilian who followed his Czech girlfriend to Prague. He didn’t know anything about Franz Kafka, but volunteered to share deep insights on Prague’s nightlife. Seeing us, he probably felt we are less mortals looking for cheap sex in Prague than driven by a desire to experience a Kafkaesque sense of life, a complex mix of fantasy and reality, made more complex by his incomprehensible literary constructs. But, true to form, we both went along the thread of that chat Alex preferred. He knew way too much about the night clubs of Prague. As we walked past Wenceslaus Square on our way to find the trail Franz Kafka walked, lived and wrote; I didn’t at that time realize the city center is named after Charles IV who was born Wenceslaus. Earlier at the hotel’s concierge I had asked the lady who offered us a paper map of the city, who according to her would be the 3 biggest influencers in the history of Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia. She said ‘King Charles the 4th, Vaclav Havel and Franz Kafka. That was intriguing.

Prague offers a new romantic embrace to Franz Kafka’s life and body of work through a museum, a string of cafes, and even tours named after him. The new Kafka experience however sans the surrealistic predicaments, the deep sense of oppressed anguish, alienation, existential anxiety, and the absurd ways of constructs shifting between reality and fantasy that were all over just everything he wrote. In the Trial (Der Process) Josef K. goes through those inexplicable experiences of law, its inherent contradictions or even absurdities. K was arrested for reasons not known, by agents not known, acting for powers not known, to be tried by a court not known, per rules not known. Was Kafka, a trained lawyer himself, exposing the absurdities of man-made constructs of modernity? In Jurisprudence classes in law school, we never read Kafka. I wonder why? Instead of reading Austin, Hart, Fuller, Rawls, or even Ron Dworkin or Robert Nozick, shouldn’t we have read the Trial?  We walked, walked and walked to trace the trail of Kafka, starting from the old town square home where he was born, to Josefov, the Jewish Quarter, and over to his Museum.

But somewhere along those long walks, I lost myself into the tourist trail feel of the whole experience than what I read about Prague in Milan Kundera’s novels or experienced through Kafka’s existential anxieties. I knew we both were drifting away into the usual Charles Bridge experiences of getting caricatures sketched, sitting at the old Town Square sipping local beer watching people walk past us, an evening dinner with some nice wine, back at the hotel, and the next morning breakfast at the famous Savoy café. Ram was however, happy. For him it was an unexpected break, to be back living single for a weekend. So he was quick to say yes, when I called him and asked if he can board a plane to Prague from Stockholm a day before. He did.

After 2 days of walking Prague’s by lanes, on a plane back to Frankfurt and over to New Delhi, I felt an unbearable emptiness. The Prague I had experienced in Milan Kundera’s novels still remained alien to the Prague I just left behind. A chasm between real and fantasy, as inexplicable as Kafka tells it. May be another time, another visit – a soulful sense of emptiness, of failure.

[About Gangtok, and my failed attempt at capturing ‘a day in the life of a monk’ is the next blog. Stay tuned!]