Nightmare Version of the Nightmarish World
This morning I woke from a strange nightmare, feeling quite uneasy.
In the nightmare, my parents lived elsewhere and I was visiting them for the first time. I reached there late in the evening and spent a while alone by the sea, wondering why my mother never told me they had a house by the sea. I forgot to ask her on returning home and I went to sleep early being tired by the long journey.
When I woke up the next morning, the sea was not to be heard. I went out of the house and the sea actually wasn’t there. I wondered if I had dreamt about the sea. The surrounding now looked almost like the paintings of Dali.
I asked my mother about the sea and she casually said, “Nothing here is the same every day. Everything changes each day.”
It was a strange land where the sea vanished overnight and a volcanic mountain emerged in the same place the next morning. People there, my mother said, ate fish when the river flowed and ate fruits when the forest popped up. The children swam when the lake surfaced and played soccer on the surface of the earth when it slept bare bodied for the day. People crossed the hill by foot to reach their offices one day and the next day drove their cars on a flat land clothed in well connected roads.
How do people live in such a world, I couldn’t understand. I felt claustrophobic there. Gasping for breath I broke away from that world and woke up.
After few minutes, still recovering from the nightmare, anxiously I opened the curtains to see if the coconut tree still stood by my window. As I laughed at my own thoughts and action, I realized the nightmare was nothing but Earth’s version of the techno-centric world we live in today- uncertain, unreliable, unstable but also quite eerily amusing with its unannounced flips and back-flips. A spectacle though spasmodic. Each day is new though not fresh and each day a challenge though the night doesn’t prepare anyone for the day to follow.
When such a world is grounded on earth by humans, it is development and prosperity. But if the Earth models itself in the same spirit, on the same principles, it is nightmarish, it is catastrophic.
A Separation
A friend who recently visited Coonoor sent a photo from a graveyard there. A cemetery angel standing in the center of the frame. The cloudy sky had filtered the light to give it a melancholic touch.
Speaking about the cemetery angel, my friend said the eyes of the lady had been gauged and the wings of the idol had been vandalized. These destruction, my friend told me, made the angel look scarier than the graveyard itself.
Had my friend not pointed out, I wouldn’t have noticed the missing wings of the angel. But when my attention was drawn to it, in a flash of imagination I saw the angel getting her wings back and she flying back to where she came from. When the flash of imagination disappeared, before my eyes stood this angel without eyes, without wings.
May be if she had wings she would have flown away. But sadly, some angels are damned and tied to the earth. Probably she looks scarier than the graveyard because being separated from one’s world permanently- not by death but while still alive- is more deathly than death. Probably dying is easier and better than having one’s wings chopped off and being separated from one’s heaven. May be.
Crazy Mind's Eye 