Indian Standard Time

My wise three year old sister reckons that there is too much tomorrow in our todays. And she frivolously put her point across by saying that someone says tomorrow is school, someone says tomorrow is a holiday and someone says that we are going to a movie tomorrow. There is too much tomorrow she declared knowingly and waked away.
 But isn't she right? There is too much tomorrow in today and it's terrible. We as a nation too, are
incredibly confused when it comes to time. Time is like knitting for us. It weaves in and out, and old women sew, patiently and tenderly waiting for the end product which they gift to their grandchildren. How could a nation whose word for tomorrow is the same as its word for yesterday ever be clear about time?
Kal. There is also the matter of the Indian God of time who destroys. Her name is Kaalli. So yesterday has been destroyed and tomorrow will destroy so our only safe haven is today. So should we crouch and hide in our place of refuge and never peep out? Is that the moral of the story?
Besides kal is ignorant too. It is black: kaala. Black is everything, yet it is nothing. So tomorrow is nothing and it is everything. The Hindi word for time is kaal. In it today is very conveniently forgotten and now it ceases to exist too.
Then, there is the word for do: kar, which is hauntingly similar to kal. So, should we do before we are destroyed by tomorrow? Or is it only in tomorrow that we can do? I think it is the former.
What we have concluded hence, is that tomorrow and yesterday are the same, they both are destroyed or destroy , they are everything and nothing, today is an illusion and we should do before we are destroyed.
How do we survive then? How do we retrieve today's illusion? Or should we consent to be destroyed by time? 

Creating Oblivion

We all seek to be part of something great. Something extra-ordinary, something that makes us engraved in history. The people who deny this are either completely unambitious or lying. I recently came across something that made me question this almost painful yearning of mine to become out of ordinary; to become great?

 It was a rather ridiculous scribbling of one’s name at the back of a great tree. Is what we all crave to do this? Do we all want just a small relic of ourselves that mars and shields the true beauty of something greater than us? Are we so recklessly determined to not fade into oblivion that we don’t mind tainting the beauty of something truly wonderful. In fact the first thing that striked to me when I saw the tree was a thought of millions of insignificant squiggles all crying for attention in unison.

 It is not pleasant, it is just cacophony. Do we really want to be like this? I know that it is difficult but we all must resist this desire to be significant and instead do are part, follow our heart and just live because to try and emerge from oblivion we are creating a new oblivion. 

The Rainbow After the Flood

The grumbling clouds had never bothered Anamika as much as they seemed to bother everyone around her; the reason being that she herself enjoyed grumbling very much. Even the beaming morning sun hadn’t been able to cast away the clouds of gloom in her temperament; yet today seemed like it was going to be different. There was a definite scintillation in the room, of an alacrity that she had never experienced before.  “Gosh! Everything seems too happy.” She dully soliloquized.

She dressed up in a hurry as usual, brushing off the anticipation growing in the pit of her stomach. By the time she stepped out of her shabby apartment and looked at the sky, much to her delight, it had melted into a gray mass of heavily laden clouds. She got into her second-hand car, grumbling about all its faults.  The day seemed to be going smoothly so far.

The cars honked too loudly, there were potholes everywhere and the worst of all- the heavens had burst open pelting a heavy rain onto Earth.

Anamika at this moment happened to be stuck in a horrendous traffic jam, the cars of which had begun to float a few inches above the flooded street.

Strangely, as Anamika peered out of the window, enjoying everyone else’s plight, she noticed something that made her heart skip a beat. It was a brown furry squirrel struggling to remain above the water. A childhood memory flashed before her eyes like lightning. She had loved a limp-dog once upon a time, its name was Bruno and it had died struggling to float in a swimming-pool.

Suddenly, her limbs didn’t seem her own anymore. She watched in astonishment as they autonomously bolted open the car and arduously made their way to the squirrel. She then took hold of it and stroked it reassuringly. She drew it to her herself and the thought of her new shirt didn’t even cross her mind! She ambled back to her car and leaned against it for support.

It was at that very moment that the rain stopped and a rainbow emerged and smiled down upon her. Her soul, heart and mind was filled with an indescribable joy of incredible proportions. She felt her mind unclog as she embraced the squirrel and with it she embraced all that was good.

Capturing Time

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." - Albert Einstein

Einstein was a genius. He was a smart, witty, maniacal man but one thing he certainly seemed to lack was tact. For this persistent illusion of time is the reason an art form exists. If anyone was to say it out loud, I can bet that he would be beheaded the next day, by artists who would mutilate his body after that.

What are you saying? You ask, bewildered. It is the talent and passion of men which has created art. If time had simply passed without our existence, time would have been of little value. The enigma of time is a paradoxical one. Time, in ways is a resource at our disposal. We need it to exist but it is of little value without us. Little value to us that is, because we don’t exist.

If you were to pay close attention to the art forms we have. You will realise that all of them are an attempt to capture a fickle, fleeting moment of some intense emotion. The truth is that all of these ‘art forms’ simply aren’t ‘dimensional’ (for the lack of a better word) enough. We all grasp the writings of an author incompletely, like when energy is converted into a different form it is never possible to convert a 100% of it, some is always lost.

If truth be told I think that it’s it is impossible to convey feelings by art forms the same way it is impossible to describe a colour (go on, give it a try).

Or rather impossible to check if what you have implied is what the reader has inferred. That’s why beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder for we have no way of proving otherwise. 

Space

Among the packets of cacophony

I found a note of symphony

Among the lightning packed inkiness

I found a space of emptiness

Oh how could I resist the urge?

And not on it colors splurge?

And let calm this space be,

Uninhabited by malady

For although the labelled atrocities

Steered clear of infinities

Infinite pairs of matching rows

Gazed at the holes below

Thus I cultivate cacophony

And steer clear of infinity

I look down at the sky and sleep

For infinity’s hole is too deep

I Watch

The red flames crawl with stealth

Bequeathing them their final breaths

They cry, scream and roar in vain

Underneath the showers of drizzling pain

The sky above and land below

Became writhed ages ago

They scatter and scurry for refuge

Which we call bravery

But the wave of vermillion engulfs us all

Between love it creates a wall

The dreams shatter

Our windows rattle

I exist, shielded from existence

To all the laws I pay adherence

I sit and sip while they scorch

And all I do is watch

Longing Loneliness

    I believe that there is a certain charm in being alone. In fact the thought of being alone thrills me more than being with my friends. But why do we love it so much? Why do we crave for some alone time when obviously it is more profitable and entertaining to be with others? What is it that we really crave for when we’re alone? Is it the space and the absence people around us; is it the liberty to do whatever we want to? Then why do we get sick of it after a while? We feel terrible, like there is no one to comfort us. Then why want alone time at all? We might as well like looking at the sky through the glass, but be too scared of going outside.

   

    Perhaps we can answer this question by thinking about how it feels to be alone. The high comes first. In this phase, we feel happy. Not excited or crazy, but simply happy. Then we go absolutely bonkers, we start dancing around the room, singing or in the likewise.  Then we sit down and the revelation strikes: what is the point of being crazy if we have no one to laugh at our antics. And then we feel lonely and sad.

   

    So why do we feel so good in the beginning? I think it is because it feels like we have all the space in the world and we can spread our wings however and whenever we want to. Or perhaps we like feeling as though we are the only ones there. Or perhaps it makes us feel whole, and independent.  We like to feel like we are the only ones who matter.

    

     But the most likely answer, I believe, keeping in mind our significance-obsessed natures, is that we like feeling like we are the only ones who are doing something. And although loneliness is basically the feeling of absence and emptiness, it makes us feel like our activities are the only ones that matter. Like the entire universe is just space, and when even a little bit of activity takes place, it is as though a something spectacular has happened. It is different, amazing, shocking and great. Perhaps we like to delude ourselves in thinking that we are great. We enjoy feeling like we are significant and consequential. Even if we acknowledge the fact that we are all already unique we don’t want to be just another variation in the mercurial weather we want to be the thunder in the clear sky. We like to feel starkly different to everything around us. That is essentially how solitude makes us feel, like we are the only ones who exist.

    Then why get tired of it at all? Why not just continue living in this bliss? It is the same reason that we get don’t want to eat candies after a while. We realize that solitude is just not enough. We realize that candies don’t taste that good unless we have to eat the disgusting eggplant before it. And although this is a very controversial topic I still will use it as a base because well, controversies are totally my thing. Solitude is sweet but it causes cavities. So as a dentist would say, “You can have some solitude but it will form the loneliness plaque that will make your disposition full of cavities and very unattractive.”