- How to live, laugh, languish and die in scattered, simmering world of today
Wounds are strange creatures. When they heal, they leave marks. When they don’t, they kill. Either way, they remain. We live with them, if they spare us. They go with us in our graves, if they don’t. We’re inseparable from our wounds. They make us into people we are, they chronicle our failures, they remind us of struggles that went in vain, they document phases before our hard-won successes. From the cutting of umbilical cord that separates us from our mothers at time of birth to last stitch, last cut, last bruise, last heartbreak, and last tear wounds make and mould us, our world, and our lives.
We seek solace in religion and poetry, we look for salvation in rituals and fame, we make enemies to test fortitude of our friends, we deify mortals only to crucify them for good sport, we hurt our beloveds so that they can mirror our imperfections, we set precedents to halt progress, we cry for revolution when routine bores us, we create havoc without to silent silence within, we forge alliances to tame adversaries, we break pacts to teach our friends a lesson, we, dear reader are dwellers of world of wounds. And in here we live, laugh, languish and die.
There was wholesale terror, war, famine and plagues in the past, we may read about them, draw our lessons, and move on. However, specific events of gore and gloom that unravel before our eyes affect us thoroughly for the hells we witness are the hells we know exist. A million stars will die and disintegrate in the vast silence of cosmos till you finish this piece, yet the loss of a personal belonging weighs heavy than perdition of entire galaxies. We, dear readers can mourn only what we comprehend, what we care for, and what matters to our transitory existences.
Perennially undecided over ‘and’, ‘or’ we look for right answers to our wrong questions. We question the symptoms, and expect the answer to address the illness. We condemn the voices in our conscious for they may hamper us in attaining the pleasures of our flesh. We witch-hunt to ensure tenacity of our faith. We spearhead crusades in the name of greater good of God and end up killing His children in millions. We fear hell for its endless tortures and suffering while we make dungeons and gallows horrid enough to make inferno shiver with fear.
On a collective level, we don’t give a dog a bad name and hang him. We hang the dog, his family, his friends, torch his vicinity, loot his property
We think that we’ve come a long way from tribalism, savagery and medieval ages for we’ve developed Artificial Intelligence, elect our own representatives, perfected ways to make our lives more comfortable and secure. Prima facie it all looks, sounds and feels convincing, scratch the surface a little and you’ll know that the very impulses that made tribalism possible are behind the rabid nationalism of our age, the very urges that made men savage are manipulated and channeled into moulding of extremist mindset and making of actual terrorists, the very belief in certainty of truth by medieval popes and kings has found its expression in belief of modern man in technology to furnish solutions of all the problems, whatever their nature, glaring in our faces.
We believe one thing, do what is diametrically opposed to it and expect something and someone else to intervene and make us do what we are supposed, believed, and want to do.
On an individual level, we believe an ideology, a cult, a quote, a self-help book, a powerful excerpt, a couplet or two, a pill of ecstasy, four days of exotic holiday in a land far-far away could help what ails us. We fail. We fail because many of us are oblivious of the fact that in one life, we live and die and resurrect many times. Our convictions get broken. We struggle to possess our love, win it and grow indifferent. We fail to possess our love, everything gets dark yet we persevere and years later we fall for the same trap with a different bait.
On a collective level, we don’t give a dog a bad name and hang him. We hang the dog, his family, his friends, torch his vicinity, loot his property, make him an example for all the dogs till there is another dog in need of hanging. In a dog-eat-dog world of ours, the different breeds hold sway over different localities, and everywhere pedigree ones are cleansing the world of mongrels through killing, maiming, bombing, and slaughtering en masse.
PS: Don’t trust what I or anyone else has to say about how to live, languish, laugh and die in the scattered, simmering world of ours. Live, languish, laugh and die the way you imagine to live, fear to languish, love to laugh and want to die, folks. Grand luck.