Asha Iyer Kumar (LIFE)
27 January 2012, 7:43 PM
The young gentleman standing across from me in the metro seemed like just another eager, home bound employee - a jolly good fellow who was smiling and whispering, perhaps telling his wife on phone that he was almost there.
And then I saw — he wasn’t on hands free; there was no one next to him, yet he was in conversation with someone, now complete with gesticulation and frequent contortion. Soon, others noticed it too, some openly gawking, some more discreet. Even as the man struck me as odd for his apparent behaviour and I verged on labelling him slightly demented, I felt a hard, phantom thump inside my head. Whackk!!
So, what’s strange about him?
He is talking to himself. Isn’t that weird?
Oh, yeah? But you too do it all the time, buddy. Ever realised it?
Me? No way. I have a saner top storey, heh..heh.
Really? So who on earth do you think you are in a chat with right now, and every time that you are by yourself?
I..er..um..
It was an instant of sudden awareness and awakening. I gulped emptily as I became alive to a cabin full of people engaged in animated conversations with themselves. The air at once was filled with a muted cacophony of conflicts and debates, fears and ecstasies, anxieties and emotions, all wrapped in individual cloaks of vainglorious entities. I looked again at the young man in the corner, still caught in his quixotic inner world. The difference between him and the rest of us around, now I saw, was, what he articulated for the whole world to see, we camouflaged with aplomb. The difference, I realised, was merely in the posturing. And the world stamped him a weirdo!
Thoughts, thoughts and more thoughts, some wired, some wilted. About yesterdays and tomorrows, men and matters, life and death. The seamless weft that allowed no empty space or time for me to rest and rejuvenate. How many times have I vented them, at the cost of being branded vocal, vociferous or belligerent! And how many times have I swilled them into my heart indignantly and smiled and pretended that “all is well’! Silent or spoken, they have been around, these mental eddies, tossing me up and down, freaking me out. Yet no one thinks I am a weirdo!
The madness in the mind has never ceased, it feeds on the external world like a ravenous beast, asking for more, even as the agony aggravates and makes me want to retch. You need to think, think sane, they say. Thought and sanity, what an absurd, mutually exclusive twosome! Yet I strive to put them on the same page and get them to work together, day after day.
Is there someone who can stop this frenzy and place fetters on this cognitive riot? Someone who can build us a log house by the sea of insanity, into which we can escape when witless thought waves run amok? Don’t we long for a private space, separate from the world, from where we would merely witness and not partake? A realm of blissful oblivion that we can enter for a while everyday and just BE – watching the waves rise and fall, wash the shore and back away - in the depths of the silence where we have only our cadenced breath for company?
Here is an anecdote to end the piece with. A little moth strayed in and landed on our window glass last week. A chirpy sparrow outside spotted the insect through the glass and pecked at it greedily. I watched with interest as the birdie spun away in despair, only to return and peck at the glass again and again, unaware that its prize catch was not on the outside, but inside. Bliss inside, pursuit outside! It was a moment of instant Zen, inspired by a moth and a sparrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment