- Life has lost its sheen in our hyper-connected, Prozac-driven world
Madness has many hues and nuances. Solitude removes all the distractions and smoke screens allowing us to peep inside our minds. Creativity is observing the familiar and seeing something novel. All three are beasts of a different nature yet play a very pivotal role in the lives of individuals and progression of arts and sciences.
What is madness? Why is solitude necessary to achieve a deeper, nuanced understanding of ourselves? What urges do creativity satiate? All these questions are eternal. Philosophers, theorists, religious figures, social scientists, poets and writers have been grappling these queries for as long as we humans have been condemned to servitude of words.
Those among us who deviate from the norm are madmen and women. Those who lead solitary, secluded lives away from the hustle bustle of chaotic daily life and seek refuge in their minds, canvasses, pages or nature are the renegades who refuse to play by the rules. These maladjusted blokes and dames are single handedly responsible for making our species leap ahead and discover new frontiers.
The great mass of our species have always been busy in making ends meet. The pressing physical needs for food, shelter and security has kept the majority of us on our toes. The demands of the body have consumed billions of us. The perils of thought and mind cast their gloomy pall on few.
Alas, in our age we have mastered the art of concealing our madness by antidepressants, crowding our solitude by memes and notifications and channelling our creativity to appease the base tastes, number of likes and shares
Always a creature looking, craving and finding distractions, we humans found it in rituals of elders, sights of nature, poetry of bards, tales of ancients, spectacles of misery, tricks of magicians and illusions of eyes and ears.
Alas, in our age we have mastered the art of concealing our madness by antidepressants, crowding our solitude by memes and notifications and channelling our creativity to appease the base tastes, number of likes and shares. The dawn of information technology held promise of an era where ideas will float freely, the world will come closer and a more dynamic, more democratic, more open society will come into being.
All of these hopes have been dashed, dear reader.
Now sights and sounds vie to grab our attention. There are WhatsApp messages, Facebook notifications, Twitter updates, Snapchat statuses, Instagram posts, ubiquitous billboards, and unsolicited advertisements that beg for our attention, squander it once they have it and make us crave for more. The solitude we want to be with our self is dead and buried.
We, according to zoologists, struggled hard to become the alpha predators in the animal kingdom. We mastered our environment, we conquered nature and we triumphed. However, we who succeeded in roping in the odds have ultimately given in to our own machinations. Presently, we are, in all honesty, the clueless prey in the claws of attention devouring creatures we made.
Their control over us is complete. We hear, see, and enjoy the boisterous bits on our black screens and then laugh out loudly, press like and share it with the world. Once we are done, the wait for the next hilarity continues and since there is no dearth of such stuff we keep on consuming it while craving for more. Be it gaffes, fails, lewd comedy clips, ravings of some random, frustrated guy crack us open. All it takes to have our attention is to have something that instantaneously gratifies us.
We are prisoners of our own creation. We are held captive by gadgets and gizmos we made for fun. We are dummies and puppets of things we thought of dummies and puppets.
The omnipresent black mirrors-our TVs, our phones, our computer screens- have made us believe that every calamity that befalls on someone else is an opportunity to giggle at as it didn’t choose us to be its victim. Our glee, it seems, lies in all catastrophes which spared us. Our creation, dear folks, has become our pacifiers. Without them life seems nothing but an endless aeon of boredom.
The madness urge, the solitary cravings and the creative impulses have all given up on us. Now the monotony of existence and the angst can be best endured, so we believe, when we are either laughing our lungs out, shopping our wits out or dining our appetites out.