Strange Encounters of the R kind

There are times when you wonder what you did to deserve what you went through. If you survive, you begin to look at life from a new perspective and begin to be more thankful for the good things in life that you have been blessed with. Not everything has a rational explanation, is a realization that came to me that night. There will come a time when you will realize that there are some things that cannot be explained. My time had come that night.

Most anomalous phenomena that confront scientific logic tend to have only local impact within their particular disciplinary contexts, and to arise and be resolved relatively quickly compared to the overall evolutionary paces of those fields. In rarer instances, such as the anomalous celestial observations that contradicted the prevailing geocentric models, or the array of atomic-scale physical anomalies that precipitated the quantum revolution, their implications can extend much more broadly, and efforts toward their resolution can become more widespread, protracted, and intense. The one anomalous human experience that has dwarfed all others in my mind is what I saw that night. Throughout my recorded history in my diary, anecdotal instances of inexplicable consciousness-related anomalies have regularly been reported and variously catalogued as "miracles", "magic", "intuition", "alchemical transmutations", "psychic phenomena", or "gremlins", along with countless other categories of elusive experiences, but little coherence has ever been established among them. Yet, these incomprehensible events have had immense influence on my thinking, stimulating the development of an acceptance that not everything has a straight forward explanation.

It all started as a harmless bus journey. But little did I know that I would regret not booking those train tickets early enough for the rest of my epic journey. The bus conductor puts in a harmless looking CD into the player. The tube lights up. The speakers come to acoustic life. And my worst fear stares at me in the face. With seemingly 1000 watts of cheap amplified acoustics as his army, he threatens to do to me what even the worst of twists, turns and potholes of Indian highways wouldn’t dream of doing. With no escape route, me and my trusty imagination embark upon a journey that threatens to kill my imagination itself.

The movie starts of as a normal regional movie with bad screenplay until the one person who can nullify bad screenplay with his sheer screen presence comes on the screen. Let us name him Rascules - Lord of the night(mares) (names have been changed for the sake of my safety). I wouldn’t mind calling him Hercules reincarnate straight away, but that would be undermining Rascules’ masculinity.

Wherever there is trouble befalling any member of the female species, Lord Rascules happens to be in the neighbourhood. Being the symbol of masculinity that he is, I wonder how there was enough masculinity in the universe to create us lesser males after the birth of Rascules.

My subconscious screams out “Eyes Left!”. I turn my eyes to the left and salute the passing presidential scenery with all my yawning glory by lowering my lower jaw with due disrespect. Literally a jaw dropping movie. God bless the inventor of the window. As the scenery, whizzes past, a strange analogy comes to my mind. Ever thought that the window of a speeding bus is like our memory? The scenes are memories. There are things that are close to the window, whiz past in a fraction of a second. Like things that just seem to graze the surface of your mind, never penetrating deep enough. There are things that are further away from the window. Like things that are deeply embedded in the window of the mind and they seem to travel along with you. Sort of hitchhiking their way along with you on the journey. The things further back are not always clear but they stay with us a long time. We don’t even seem to remember when they entered the windows of our thought. But they reside somewhere deep inside.

I turn to my right and my fellow passenger looks at me with a face that I interpret as “are you dyslexic to look out of the window when we are getting a lesson in humility by Lord Rascules in full splendour. Its amazing what a movie can do to a disease like dyslexia. Anybody not paying complete attention seems to be a suspect.

I could have sworn I could have made it out of that movie “alive”, had it not been for the subtitles. Without the subtitles, I had no reason to try to make sense out of the story. I need not have put my mind in danger. I could have just looked at the bone crunching, swearing, and tears dropping from glycerinated eyes adorned by perpetually fluttering eye lids.

Rascules seems to be better than my martial arts instructor. Not that my martial arts instructor can’t throw a flip kick. Its just that he always used to get his hair messed up after all that. But by god, Lord Rascules manages to maintain every strand of his hair intact. Flawless victory is an understatement. Rascules is no mere mortal. It would be blasphemous of me to think that its because of hair gel. For all I know, I think hair gel itself is extracted from Lord Rascules’ hair. Pleased by my relatively rational explanation, I turn to my left reasserting to myself, my newly acquired lifetime ambition, that when I grow up I will make sure that every citizen of this country, irrespective of his caste, colour, creed, sex, economic status and political affiliation, will get the opportunity to learn Newton’s laws. God bless Newton’s soul.

I always had the misconception that quantum mechanics comes into play only at atomic scales. But that night I witnessed new macroscopic physical phenomenon governed by a quantum law like quantum magnetic deflagaration. Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, is quoted as saying "No phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon." I reassert myself. It was quantum phenomena that I witnessed that night. I guess it must be something like, relativity of time between our world and Brahma Lok where our clock and Lord Brahma’s clock have different time scales. Maybe our dimensions of length, breadth and height and and Rascules’ dimensions are measured on different scales. That enables Rascules to demonstrate quantum phenomena like tunnelling effect through brick walls on what we consider as the macro scale.

Very few people have the stamina to maintain their consciousness after witnessing such supernatural phenomena. I am definitely not one of them. The quantum phenomena were too much for me as I turned to my left, and looked at the sky. I saw Orion the hunter facing Taurus the bull. My mind grew weary of the quantum world journey. My eyelids felt heavy. And thus I passed out into the dream world in search of more realistic realms.