Friday, August 28, 2009

Random bottled genie

Here we are, living inside our tiny bubbles all content that our world is beautiful and that life is fun. How often do we step out of it and look around? We are so engrossed with the pursuit of happiness that we end up missing out the essence of life. Its like zooming into your own body. You start off looking at the skin, alive with blood flowing beneath. You go much closer on a microscope and see the cells, all alive and happy about it. You keep zooming in, into the nucleus, into the atomic level, and then further, into the subatomic level, protons, electrons, ….all of which are non-living . Somewhere while zooming in, life slips through your very fingers and you don’t even notice it. In your search for the base of your life you end up glued to lifeless particles. You are left wondering where exactly you lost touch with the soul or whatever it is that makes us alive. At times you wonder if there is a soul at all or is it all in our brains, with every human emotion a mere chemical reaction. Why then does your so called brain get uncomfortable every now and then when your eyes meet those of the child looking at you from the photo below the article about poverty in the news magazine?..., with his ribs showing, a vacuumed hollow beneath the rib cage for his belly, and with flies all around waiting to lay their eggs in him once his body goes lifeless so that their little white maggots can feast on his rotting flesh. If you knew his name, would you feel better or more uncomfortable? Would it make it easier on you if you knew his dreams? If somebody offers you a doorway into his bubble, would you take it? You pick that book someone writes about one of his kind. A smaller version of his bubble develops inside yours and grows as you learn more about him. But there is only so much you can let it grow. You close the book and the bubble slowly moves out of yours and you watch it linger around for a while and eventually disappear into oblivion. That is the farthest you would ever go. In due time, you get back to wondering whether there is a soul, or is it all in your brains. In our modern world where the vast majority of the people is ‘happy’ in their bubbles and out of touch with everything else, they consider it fashionable to believe in only what they can see, touch, and measure. They live their lives based on the calculations in their brains. They choose to ignore the voice that seems to be coming out of nowhere begging them to feel…to have a life and not what can be described as “secure existence”. Then one day, the voice dies out. They blindly accept the ‘truth’ their brains had cultivated over the years. And in the end, when life seems hollow and flavorless, they join hands with the grumpy old woman who once told you that “Life is unfair”]