This city is home to a lot of events. Amongst them, literary meets. Amusing things.You reach there and understand how knowledgeable fellow human beings are. Everybody knows everything. The cosmos overflowing with knowledge. Anybody can speak about anything under the sun. And more surprisingly, everyone understands everything. A microcosm of heavy intellect. Heavy to the point of claustrophobia. There's no air around. It's all intellect, dripping away in each particle you happen to inhale. Words of wisdom, critical insights and high philosophy soaks every inch of your being. Everyone is high on aesthetics, academics, art. An unthinkable jostling of bodies as starving souls seek enlightenment. Invites pour in from all ends. People tell you they are 'doing' poetry or literature with devotion and sincerity. 'Do' is the new in-thing. You are expected to be there. To see it all being done. To appreciate, applaud. Steaming coffee, stimulated brains, sincere nods and sweet smiles. Claps that permeate the universe as novel ideas are articulated amidst the holy blessedness of human breath.

Amma sits outside. With her stupid gaze. Comprehending nothing. Her prescription and bowl of expectations in front of her.

As the gathering dissolves, important, enlightened two legged beings emerge. A few coins to Amma. Perhaps.

Social service, self-importance and knowledgeability. Ask the ragpicker, yeah, God's world couldn't have 'done' it better.

A bruised soul sits ashore
As relentless waves
Play upon the remnants of wounds Enshrouded
In prenatal indifference



Numbness is an art
Sometimes called poetry

Just as the little busy bee realizes that she can stand on her feet and manage herself, her limbs and everything she understands as belonging to her (except for the essential supplies) quite peacefully, they begin singing rhymes to her. Nursery rhymes. Beautiful rhythmic chantings, which need not necessarily generate a meaning at that stage. Say for instance, twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are, up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky. The little one repeats and repeats and further repeats, not really gathering the meaning or trying to gather the meaning, but simply because it's fun - the rhyme, apart from the compulsion of tests and grades. 

And then gradually the world of meaning comes crashing in. She is taught what twinkle means, what's a star, what is wonder, what is world, and of course, the sky - very vague meanings, but meanings nonetheless! As she grows up, imagination steps in. It blends her rhyme with her perceptions. She imagines the star and the stories of stars she might have heard - how loved ones might have become stars, how there are other worlds in those stars far above etc. She looks up at the sky - the same place where aeroplanes go by, where birds fly, where the sun rises and sets, where kites dance to the tunes of the breeze, as the abode of the star. She internalizes the conceptual vastness of the sky without quite technically comprehending it. And per chance she develops a fondnesss for the rhyme, she repeats it to herself even when there is no one around to appreciate her babblings. 

But knowledge is a fundamental catastrophe. The Sapien world will ensure you know it All. Period. So gradually as she grows up and happens to find herself in a school, they begin telling her how the stars are not little but huge. How they look little because they are far far off. They define a star and she must accept it, at the expense of her imagined stories, loved ones and little worlds. They tell her the twinkle technically results from the luminosity of the star - the star which has a life, a duration and so much more to it which can be precisely calculated. Lo! The element of wonder is finished. The star becomes an astronomical object at the expense of those five edged scribblings one had always believed to be representing the star. She struggles to return to the realms of simplification. But once you've entered the realms of meaning, there's no escape. So they tell her, how 'like a diamond' is a simile and how the entire thing called the rhyme has a specific prosodic structure. The fun of the chanting is now lost as one of the earliest childhood favourites now stands almost entirely explained. And if that were not enough, she might further land up into zones of fine linguistic classification where they tell her how the 't' in star is an aspirated phone of the /t/ phoneme.

Tired, she plugs in her earphones and plays a random song in a language she does not understand. There's no compulsion to figure out a meaning. As the brain ceases to function, the heart is at peace.

Sometimes, it's so much fun to return to meaninglessness. 

Meaning has a meaning when it means a potential, else it's a prison in the mind. Let's have some ventilators.

Meaningless is meaningful when meaning becomes meaningless.   

In ancient times, sometimes known as childhood, there used to be these hours of dismal darkness which elders would call 'load-shedding'. It was an age when one understood neither load nor shedding. But one, of course, most diligently parroted what was said. So during load-shedding, since the world had still not experienced the light of inverters or the smartness of smart-mess (better known as mobile phones), one used to have the concept of light confined to the glow of a candle.  A candle, then, used to be a simple white cylindrical object. If you wanted to be a part of the scantily lit room, you ensured you found a space somewhere in the vicinity of a candle. As minutes matured into hours with no sight of electricity anywhere and you did not quite know what you were to do, you began fidgeting with your fingers. And as soon as you looked up at the wall beside you, Voila! there was a new something taking shape out there - black amidst the soft reflection of the candle light! You stared at it, quite spellbound, trying to figure out what was going on and as you changed the position of your fingers, you found that the shape changed. You realized that you were the source of that little something black on the wall moulding and re-moulding itself into new entities as you changed your finger positions. It was fun. It was refuge from a lot of everything else without having the slightest idea of the bard having written - life is a walking shadow. Knowledge is beneficial perhaps, but certainly not essential. Ignorance is existential and, sometimes, yes, bliss. The line of demarcation between ignorance and innocence is surprisingly thin. Ignorant thus of dialogue-worthy worldly wisdom and baffling philosophical implications, you simply brought up the other hand and experimented further, until you had replicated known shapes and put them onto your momentary load-shedding canvas. You made dogs, human faces, rabbits, human figures, fish, snails, ducks, bears, flowers and what-not! They moved, they spoke and there you were - creating stories beyond the grasp of language in the darkest hours of the long day!