Words Left Unsaid

There are words left unsaid,
There are whispers left unheard,
I never understood how and why,
I think its because there are poems left unsung.

There are depths left unfathomed,
There are tears left uncried,
Its not because there are shades left unsketched,
Its because there are questions left unanswered.

There may be pages left unturned,
There may be pictures left unseen,
Its not because there are conversations left unheld,
Its because there are meanings left misunderstood.

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.

CHANGE II – The Funny Side Of It All

Well after that dose (some people spell it as overdose) of philosophy in my last post, lets just lighten things up a bit in this post…. Here’s a list of a few funny and thought provoking quotes on change I stumbled upon… Just to assure my dear readers that I am not perpetually in a state of melancholy :-)

1. Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.

2. Change is good, but dollars are better.

3. Who we are never changes. Who we think we are does.

4. In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

- Al Rogers.

5. The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

– George Bernard Shaw.

CHANGE

CHANGE

Change has been a part of my life since time memorial. With more schools than fingers on my hands, and more names of new friends to remember than the number of elements in the periodic table, change and I have been constant companions through life. I attribute whatever little skill I have with numbers to the regular memorizing of my new phone numbers, roll number, house number, street number, STD code and pin code. After, more than two decades of being so close to change, I cannot say with conviction that I have understood change. For someone for whom change has been as much a part of life as breathing, I can’t say change has ever failed to mystify me. Change has always enchanted me. For me, change will always be as enigmatic as ever.

When things changed, I always looked for a frame of reference so I know where things are headed. To give me a sense of direction. But all my attempts to search for this stationary frame of reference were futile. I couldn’t pin point one thing in my life that has been constant throughout. Circumstances, materialistic things, people, everything seemed to change over time.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man”

- Heraclitus of Ephesus

But I need not despair. There were other philosophers to rescue me from drowning in Heraclitus’ flux.

This view was strongly opposed by Parmenides, who said that reality was permanent and unchanging. According to Lavine, Parmenides asked, "How can a thing change into something else? How can it be and not be?" According to Parmenides, change is merely an illusion.

Plato believed that each thing has one unchanging essence.

I just had to find that unchanging essence. I decided I couldn’t find it in the outside world. So I started looking within me. And I am still looking for it. I know, even I have changed over time. For I firmly believe, if you do not change, life will change you, but not on your terms.

Change is not always comfortable. Change is not always as simple as a diaper change. There is no guarantee that the new scenario is always warm and dry. The beginning and end of change is actually beautiful. It’s the middle that can be disconcerting.

“It's not so much that we're afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it's that place in between that we fear . . . . It's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to.”

- Marilyn Ferguson

But then again, change is not such a bad thing,

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers”

- M. Scott Peck

Change can be of various types. Ranging from the subtle yet ever present to the bolts from the blue that appear like lightning.

Change can be subtle. I can keep admiring the picture. Believing it to be reality. And all the while, the agents of change are hard at work behind the scenes. Changing each pixel of the picture. One by one. And before I know it a whole new picture emerges. New developments creep in. And a realization dawns that all this while, I was looking at the negatives. The real picture is much brighter. Or was it vice versa? The negative is the “real” original picture isn’t it? The brighter the picture, the darker the negative.

Change can be so imperceptible that only after black turns to white and white turns to black do I realise that nothing was actually black or white. Just shades of grey. Different shades of grey created by different densities of grey specks of dust. Suspended specks of dust were just obscuring my view. Let Father Time take a few deep breaths. It takes just a gentle breeze of time to blow away the dust and make me realise that behind the dust lies another ocean of grey sand. Every breeze changing the landscape as I had known it. Every breeze wiping away the trails. Every breeze inviting me to create a new path of my own in the sand. Only to be wiped away again the next time Father Time takes a deep breath.

The lucky ones amongst us get our grains of sand near a sea. The sea lets us build our castles… Sand castles… But castles nonetheless… Only to wash it away with the waves of time. The difference between the winds of time and the waves of time is that the sea is kind enough leave behind a clean slate on which I can rebuild. It cleanses me as it goes away with my castle… Sand castle... But my castle nonetheless… Leaving behind water among the grains to give company to my tears. The wind just blows it all away. No, the wind also dries up my tears. They are both kind enough to try to hide my tears. One by camouflage. The other by evaporation.

Change can be fleeter than our thoughts. Like bolts from the blue that appear like lightning. Revealing the things that were hidden by the darkness of illusion of permanence. They disappear faster than they arrived. Yet they leave behind the thunderous realization that the sudden change itself was not an illusion. It was there. It leaves its resonant impact on us. Even after the thunder is gone, the reverberation lasts a long time. Leaving us looking back and trying to find the microscopic threads that might connect our past to our present. Leaving us trying to cling to the last fibre that might help us establish any correlation between the past and the present. The past and the present - separated by the bolt of change that left us bewildered.

Change has been a part of me, part of my life for so long that its kind of hard to imagine what life would have been like without change. Yeah, I would have made closer friends over time had I stayed with them for a longer time. I would have been better at this game if only life would give me a chance to settle down. But as soon as I find the answer to one question, they change the question, before I can use my solution. But change has made it possible for me to feel the joy that one feels when you meet an old friend you haven’t met for years. Change has made it possible for me to have those endless conversations with old friends where we catch up on old times. Change has made it possible for me to have that adrenaline rush when I know something new and exciting is going to pop up.

Change will always be a part of my life. It has always been with me. It has kept me going. The driving force behind me. Unknowingly, over time, I have fallen in love with change. Change has made me what I am. I wouldn’t be what I am if it weren’t for change. Is that a good thing? My answer to that question also keeps on changing.

And thus as I fall in love with change, my search for something permanent comes to an end. I have found something in my life that has never changed. I found something that I can rely on to endure the waves of time with me. Surprisingly, its Heraclitus who comes to my rescue…….

“Nothing endures but change.”

- Heraclitus of Ephesus