Warning: Quite a dark and a dreary piece of text ahead
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The reality of life is simply ‘uncertainty’….one moment you are there and the other gone, vanished….turned to a mere cargo packed in a coffin being transported in the luggage compartment of a plane. The last two years have been portraying this ‘age of Aquarius’ concept to me. Blasts, fires, buildings falling down, suicide attacks, sudden deaths, deaths from drug overdose and what not…. Death is inevitable and try as we might we cannot deny it, but seeing the clutches of mortality tightening so blatantly makes living all the more surreal.
During my junior year at university, a sophomore guy got killed by his own gun in the class…. I had not known the guy, but my brother did and many other people did too….for them he was a live, walking, talking human and for me merely a name…yet his death intermittently haunts me especially now when I think that this would have been his final semester and that his parents would have proudly told everyone that their son was going to be a ‘Telecom Engineer’….I got to be one, but he never did. Another guy died when a football hit him hard on his heart during a friendly game and yet another senior of ours died of a brain tumor. And he was an only son, that too of elderly parents. 8 people were incinerated in the horrifying Berger Paints factory inferno few days ago and an Airforce plane crashed in the GIKI campus killing the pilot, co-pilot and a gardener tending to the little plants carefree of all the cares in the world. Heath Ledger, one of my very much admired, actor died of a drug overdose…
I remember how mesmerized I was by the movie “Final Destination”….Being alone, I had watched it in rapt attention forgetting the assignment I had been working on. It’s been like 4 or 5 years since I watched it but after that it often comes to how thin a border exists between breathing and getting a straight line on the cardiogram…….Last year I had gotten addicted to this song by ‘Junoon’ and I had listened to it almost in a recursive loop, it said:
“matti main mil jayen gay
Bhoolo na, bhoolo na
Geet hain jo teri meri saanson main
Khwab hain jo teri meri ankhon main
Saray mitti main mil jayen gay
Bhoolo na …bhoolo na…..”
And yet we wonder why the smell of the wet earth attracts us so. The other day my friends pointed out a building burnt to black soot during the 27th December riots and upon looking at it I had instinctively said “Wow!”…it really wasn’t a piece of art but come to think of it, what a stark combination the brilliant raging fire is to the black and grey it leaves behind. Some place which pulsates with the mirth of bustling activity is turned into ashes…becoming history in a matter of little time….such is the ‘uncertainty’ of the coming moment….unless we break away from the ties of gravity and mass and see the future itself..
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According to the essay that I had read about the “age of Aquarius” during my high school years…this era in itself marked the penetration of anxiety, dissatisfaction …..’Uncertainity’..since it was being ruled by the water
…Water, the magical element is fluid, never stops, doesn’t know its own shape, it flows wherever it finds an opening….and we are caught in between the troughs and crests of its waves….highs and lows…yet always being swept away from one point by the flow….