The Lights at night (another old one..)

There is a strange magnetism to the lights at night. especially in this city (Mumbai). The lights glimmer away at a distance and from heights that you wouldn't see in any other city in India.
The lights compel you to sit, and take a look at the life that is whizzing by so quickly. Every day something changes in our life, yet we never are quite able to figure out exactly when, that change took place. When is it that I started looking older? when did I gain so much weight? or the more profound ones... When was it that I lost my innocence? When and where was it that I lost faith?
There is this Sunday , and then there was another Sunday far far away, once upon a time.
They were lazy Sunday afternoons when I lay glued to my mothers bosom, pretending to be asleep (to be awake meant to be ordered to study, so an obvious choice) . I used to press my eye lids together, hard; and then listen to the sounds and smells of the world encompassing me. I remember how with each sound
or smell a new story in my utopian imagination started taking shape. The funny ones made me laugh. But this wasn't the best part... The best part was when I laughed too hard I got a slap on my back from my mum, and it used to dawn upon me that she was aware that I wasn't asleep. The fear of the possibility of facing algebra would grip me and I would shut my lids tighter, resolving not to be seduced by deceitful dreams, only to be caught "not napping" again in a short while.

Where are those slaps now ? What wouldn't I do to feel that again.The lights help me relive those moments for sometime.They transport me to a life which is closest to me. A life where everything was beautiful.

It is often that I hear people talking of how they have become smarter. How they have figured out not to trust, love, forgive or be selfless. How they have computed their lives in linear equations. How gross margins, ROIs and productivity maps decide what should be the road ahead.

There is one question that I wish to ask them, when is it that they were happier? living a life where cognizance has "illuminated" their lives or a life where a helium balloon could bring exuberance that would beat the feeling of one upping the market by 20%?

An old write up I found while rummaging through ..

Youth! So full of life, ideals, and dreams that are not Lilliputian by any standards. It feels so great to be alive, independent and free! So much so that the thought this might be ephemeral doesn’t even come close to crossing the mind.

Perhaps it would not be a hyperbole to suggest that youth is the best period of our lives. Childhood is still a sweet memory and teens just, yesterday. We no longer depend on others to support us like childhood and the confounding trivialities that captured us in our teens are things of past, so much so that we end up thinking and wondering if we really are the same flesh and bone we were then.

Power to do anything, fear, of nothing, integrity to be righteous and honesty to be true… and I daresay a small pinch of innocence that lay cached since our childhood… our own secret place, safe somewhere in our hearts. And yet …

“In the ocean even a shark can sink”

When the tide of reality hits us, and keeps coming back stronger our hearts are left wanting.

The juggernaut of cynicism devours the very essence that made us carefree. While telling us every time there is no escape. It reminds us that we no longer can cry if something didn’t turn out the way we thought it would. That our parents won’t hold us and tuck us into bed every night, telling lovely stories that somewhere deep down our hearts still yearn for.

That we no longer will wake up next morning thinking how we want to celebrate our birthday, even if it falls seven months ahead. The thrill of that little piece of ice cream that we got after hours of haggling with our mothers. Why oh why, this whole brick of the best ice cream in the market doesn’t even come close to that.

Above all the fantastic things we wanted to do as children, things which were stupid to say the least in the grown up world. And yet what pleasure we had !

Among all the things I mentioned, the thing that hurts the most is: our mistakes when we were children were so small that they didn’t matter, they could be undone with a tight slap or even the invocation of its possibility. And then we stand today as grown up men and women while we look back at our lives… it is just so hard to undo every small speck that we ended up doing.

With each heartbeat a piece of guilt attaches itself to the long incessant list of nightmares and agonies that will go on with us always, forever, till we breathe our last. I suspect that’s why god (what or whoever that might be) put a phase of senility at the end … so that it doesn’t hurt when we go!

In the end I might add an oft repeated line from the movie “Magnolia”

“We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us”