Saturday, March 22, 2008

Loneliness

Imagine you're standing inside a moving bus. An overcrowded one. If you want, you can easily look around at the million and one faces surrounding you. Each face having a story of its own to tell. A peek into the eyes would give you a glimpse of its past and a glance at the lips could help you prognosticate the future. But you seem to be entangled in an entirely different spider web of sorts. A question that has plagued your mind ever since time began ticking for you : "Who am I?". That precisely is loneliness.

Loneliness is usually associated with an inexplicable sense of detachment from the very essence of your own existence. You realize that you are an abstract from the realms of reality yet you aren't sure of the entire concept of material subsistence. Thus the initial euphoric feeling of being one with everything else fades away once you realize that in all certainty it is never actually possible. Because the entire universe is made up of zillions of independent points, it can never come and join hands to form a single identifiable unit. Each point in it is like the human mind. An island of isolation by its very own. That precisely is loneliness.

But do you actually have to look so afar to feel it? Even inside your own self your heart, your mind and your own body are three apparent incoherencies. Three separate entities which make you up but are disjointed in every single moment that you feel your own presence. Whenever it comes to taking a plunge it's these three which are more often than not at loggerheads with each other. It all depends on you whom to heed and whom to ignore. Finally when you think that you have created a consensus amongst them there's a lingering feeling that these dissonant forces inside you keep on growing but stronger by the day. Influences which can never be converged and aligned to a single point in time. That precisely is loneliness.

That brings us to time itself and one wonders how craftily each instant is disconnected from all its preceding moments and how magically it concedes no resemblance to all those which follow it. True that the events of present have a bearing on those of the future but then swiveling the spotlight again on the larger picture shows us very clearly how isolated the specks of time which parent these events are in reality. However persevering an effort they put up to reach out for each other, they never actually manage to do so. That precisely is loneliness.


Thursday, March 13, 2008

The Window

The solitary piece of heaven which peers through my window,
Weaves dreams of the scornful sun and the lashing rain,
And I hold on to these frame'd delusions to consider,
The eternal beauty of the world through the gaze of my window!

With reflections traversing but not afar the Alps,
You stare at a million specks nearby,
An auburn tree waiting desolately on the brilliant snow,
A tiny frame of the world in its own colourful glow!

And as you sieve through the moments that make up your life,
Stifling visions to match the contours of the edge,
You wonder what name to christen your world with,
Is it Heaven, earth or Heaven on earth?

But when the enchanted dusk paints the sky in crimson,
You strain your ears to hear the cries of those wounded hearts,
And feel the consuming insignificance of,
The eternal beauty of the world through the gaze of your window!

Unfettering yourself from the chains and borders of your own mind,
You sail away on distant voyages to uncharted places,
Ruminating on how one paints the boundaries of countries,
With this infinite image staining the window lens..

Yet unconcerned is my window about religion,
Heedless is it of nationality,
Oblivious of greed and possession,
Is the window to my own tiny world!

Am indeed indebted to the window of that hotel room, the ceaseless snowfall over the weekend and the blocked roads which forced me to skip work and inspired me to scribble this.


Tuesday, March 4, 2008

What color is sanity?

Ask John Lennon who enjoyed insanity more than he suffered from it. Ask Shakespeare who even found "a method" in it! Or ask your own self. Isn't somewhere lying dormant in the most clandestine chambers of your heart a desire to twig away from this vast maddening world of rationality?

Why not pause for a moment and reflect back to those days when we were all uncut diamonds? Those days when we were taught that humans beings possess life but a sculpture does not. Those days when we were coerced to believe that an apple falls down due to gravitation and not because of some heavenly stroke. Weren't those the days when we first exchanged beauty for reason? Creativity for calculativeness? Wasn't that the first time we strangled insanity?

Have you actually ever ruminated on how the world would have looked like if Edison hadn't succumbed to his momentary bout of irrationality and ceased midway through his marathon run of over twenty thousand experiments which finally culminated in the discovery of the electric bulb? Well back then a certain Dr.Reason had intelligently prescribed a much safer approach. That of nipping all seemingly pipe-dream possibilities of an experimental breakthrough and accepting the status quo. That he didn't. And thus we all owe him our "enlightened" nocturnes to that single act of persistent foolhardiness !!

To be concluded later...post some more bouts of unadulterated lunacy!!

Afterthought : Why does one have to finish everything that he has begun? Isn't an unterminated piece of life always more interesting?