Skip to main content

In Search of Conclusions

It is amazing how a day I should be proud of, begins with many things I am ashamed of. But I realize I am not a consequential being. Freedom earned, freedom gained in a particular context means little to a mind grappling with freedom from a spiralling thought processes.

Efforts, sincerity of purpose, struggle seem to draw nothing. Just like the words. This last bit hurts more than everything else. About a decade ago, I had addressed a fellow being, thinking something mattered. Something might move. A heart, a character, a system, a humanity.

I see the parade of the Americans, the Russians, the Taliban, the Israeli, of the right and of the left.

I see death of soldiers and terrorists. I see victors and vanquished. Everyone seem to be in a state of eternal existence with no conclusiveness. 

Then there is the rapist and the raped. As much as I hate to bring them in the same sentence the butchery of living demands, that I do. There is the system and the anti-system in which they try to eke out a living. But nothing moves in this ever-moving world.

The tortured stay tortured, the system stays the system and chaos simply fuels further chaos. The order seems to protect whatever it can only till someone falls over to the anti-order.

Amidst all this, the single greatest observable event of my lifetime has been the fading of sensibilities. There is so much to comprehend and make sense of and so little time to do so, that nothing seems to matter anymore.

Imagine my vantage point to be a transcontinental flight with ultra zoomed in camera. It is a world imagine-seen as an exercise in pessimism. There are rapes dotting the landscape and kilometres away angry marches in solidarity with victoms or protests; there's bombing and there's life happening a few miles apart; there are unprecedentedly big sporting events and there are equally unprecedented hoards seeking asylums; a billionaire makes never seen before flash display of brazen spending and a little away floods have ravaged and destroyed at least two generations worth of wealth (if a scraped hut and some belongings can be called that). 

Anarchy and blood rules the streets somewhere and sunbathers with wine, a little elsewhere. Somewhere believers throng shrines in increasing faith; and molesters, looters and politically evil eyes supervise their coming and going that same where. 

Meanwhile, my disillusionment and faith in illusions of love, hope, order and peace keeps true to my upbringing in a directionless world. I wonder how my parents could create a corner of respite and innocence amidst a cruelty called life.

A little above me, on the opposite side of the orb is an astronaut crew trying to hold a promise of a future whose shape or existence may not be guaranteed ever.

Back down, parties, revelries, accidents and brutalities can all be seen straddling side by side in varies geographies across the globe. The encashers keep encashing and the ponderers keep pondering.

If ever there was a semblance of thought and action as to where life was heading on this planet, there seems to be no evidence of it, like the arrangement of thoughts and words in this article.

By the way, the rest of the biotic and abiotic world, the tamed and the untamed, keeps struggling to come to terms with whatever humans draft around them. 

Then along comes a festive occasion and I am all smiles this day; until, on my way back from a family dinner, I see that belly scratching man with what seems like his daughter and wife sleeping next to him on a footpath on a road bridge.

No event and every event, no moral and every moral keeps playing in association and contradiction to each other. 

And I know not what to make of it.

Comments

  1. The dichotomy and duality of two extremes are the true sources of existential crisis. Though it seems extreme on the out look both are co-related and interdependent on each other for the existence of world itself! Man made horrors and the symbiosis of nature are two extremes where we don't know if they are interdependent on each other for the survival of life itself on earth!! Still there is a dirty Harmony in our existence and survival...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The line “…like the arrangement of thoughts and words in this article” really made me cackle haha

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Kindergarten Eye View of an Ideal World!

One fine day a child was put forth to the mercy of mortals on the 1st of Jan 1986! This is his take on a new world around him.  "Here I was treading into a different world and you have no idea of the magnitude of 'different'; A place they called school, about which I was made to feel excited as if being taken to Disneyland. How another was it... oh… no adult could ever imagine! Nervous, anxious, choked whatever you call the feeling, I would simply describe it as being ‘on the verge of tears’. The build-up leading to the D-day (first day at school) was cleverly planned. I was beaming with a false sense of pride developed from reciting stupid somethings, in an alien but sweet language, to every single visitor at home. But all these rituals had an ulterior motive! I was going to find out for the first time that, apart from my cousins and other kids in my building, there are innumerable 3 or 4 year olds' in the world. Apparently, they too were tricked into comin...

MAYA - PART 1

Nothing in that moment of tranquil sun suggested anything wrong. I was standing in a dreamy room overlooking the Parvati Valley in the laps of Himalayas. She liked nature so much that she painted her own little outdoors on the walls. A rising, glistening sun froze-rising forever on the golden sky that was her wall. It complemented the real one for most part of the year, like brothers posing one in front of the other. She had told me that her mornings began comparing the real and her wall sun. Real and surreal. Both were both to her depending on mood. On the opposite wall was a dark and dense valley, again, just like the one outside. It played heavily on the minds of first-time visitors to her shack. But it comforted her, she said. Sometimes, over and against the real view. I first saw Maya in the clouds - somewhere over the Caspian Sea. She was standing in front of the restroom from where I was taking forever to come out. Flights make it harder for me to go! ...

IDENTITY

I opened my eyes. The left one felt skin obstructing its opening. The right one opened up to a sight of nostrils; beautiful, pale, white nostrils. But it took me both 5 minutes and a year to make sense of this sight. The flooded banks of the mighty Brahmaputra had brought me, or us, asunder onto a remote bank. My head was resting on a woman's belly. She was motionless, just like I was 5 minutes ago. I sat up. On my other side I could see and hear the river in full spate. Hut material, animal carcass and endless stream of branches and twigs drifted past as a stream within a stream. I tried hard to make sense of the sight around. The moment I realised I had leaned on a woman, I jerked myself on my feet and away from her. I looked around. Not a soul. Only nature made sound. I pushed myself for answers towards the woman. She was dead...  Three months ago an Indian journalist had landed at the Guwahati International Airport. Next to him on the same flight was an anxiou...

This Night

Laila is playing Holi with her relatives in their ancestral home. In a remote Uttar Pradesh village, this has been the yearly tradition of the Chaudhari family. One that Laila always looks forward to. But this year her anticipation was adulterated with dread. The elders say they will wait for her graduation. But preceding Chaudhari marriages indicate otherwise. Elsewhere in a village of Haryana state, three men died after consuming spurious liquor. Their wives are crying their hearts out. These tears are mixed with pain; not only from the loss. As they wail, one of the ladies' sore throat hurts. Another woman's badly bruised lips and chest hurt as the salty liquid flows down her face. The third is pregnant for the fourth time and has travelled back from her parent's home for the funeral. As is the practice and widely believed, no, she was not at her parents for pregnancy period but to collect the latest instalment of promised dowry. The wound marks on her privates ...

In-Person Stories (Part - Whichever I Recollect)

I wanted to publish a detailed account of a dear friend's wedding. So I copiously took some notes while going through the revelries, being very much a part of them. Or so my concerned friend thought! But those painstakingly gathered observations got lost with time, people and life. Majorly disappointed, I thought of giving up on writing this self-anticipated account of a much awaited event in our little lives. I never thought my straight friend would be considerate enough to take a partner.  Not that he was a misogynist or a misogamist. On the contrary he has gone out of his way to make women feel at ease, whenever he came across one. In casual parlance, he sucked up to people (read girls), especially if he ever got to know one. Even to the discomfort of his friends like me. He had attended the most number of family marriage functions as the rest of us put together and does so still, dutifully. Although he was, as they say, never 'matrimonially inclined.' But some trickery,...