When you're done listening and singing...

After the music fades out and the skies settle, there is a void that makes sure it engulfs all that it can find. Then slowly the void begins to appeal, and turns into a living death…slow and severe at the same time, with an intense tune to it. Your body starts to dance to this tune, and by the time you’re done dancing, there’s nothing but your body left…because all the music was being made of you, feeding of your existence.

Your existence becomes an excuse of itself. The tune continues to play, and becomes a part of you, and you have no other choice but to have it feed off you.

Now there’s darkness, and you realize you begin to see, and then anything that has to do with anything you've known ever crumbles into pieces. And you understand everything, and analyze and comprehend it, you also live it, not knowing how to.

There are pangs of joy and elation, and the moments that you perceive as your own, but nothing remains your own, because you owe so much to the world. But you also owe so much to yourself.

There’s no reprieve, from your demands of the world, or from the world’s demands of you. Then one day you decide it’s all futile, and there’s just one way of doing it.

To not do it at all.

Not my woes but still...

Normally, humans are known to adapt to changing times much more efficiently than to changing people (ok...its another one of my theories, and its valid!) I'm making the effort to empathize with the generation of parents that didn't quite know what hit them until it did (that happens to all of them, I guess, but these were particularly badly hit.)

They were born into nice, naive post-independence middle class families - minimum exposure to the Victorians or their way of life. Or any other, for that matter, besides their own. And then when they had their own kids, suddenly the world seemed to have started speaking a different language. Their kids too.

I understand it when they say they don't. They aren't naive - they just lived in a different world.
They cannot come to terms with having invested all their life's effort and emotions into a bunch of people that would grow up to demand their 'space'. The concept is alien to them. Its like a family full of prodigal sons (and daughters). Only these never return. And they don't even ask for money. They're taking away too much - even the right to crib and complain.

These kids seem to be making all their choices, and only informing when they deem necessary. And what's worse - these choices seem like utter blunders to one generation, while the other seems to be absolutely confident about them. There's no negotiating this.

Its easier to understand it, than to rationalize it. I'm trying to understand where they stand right now. I wish it made some sense to them.

Telling Time

Telling time was what it did best – but it was also an indication of how much darker the patch was getting. But now it was gone, and the philosophy that everything material can be replaced with money, seemed a little skewed. As did my perception of everything else.

I sat there – not knowing what I was to do to find some moments of quality solitude. The noise from the thoroughfare outside, along with the garbled music from the TV and music system in the next room suddenly gave me a glimpse of what an asylum might feel like. And some raised voices and pointless disagreements to complete the orchestra.

Witnessing a profoundly hollow matrimonial obligation all my life has left me with close to no faith in the institution. I’ve been watching them for 28 years now – two completely different people – they couldn’t even be called diametric opposites. They were just two strangers brought together by the social imperative of matrimony. And since that also entails procreation, they did that too, almost, sometimes I feel, without any real thought. Like a divine mandate to take the species forward. Well! Nice excuse.

The cacophony is what receives me when I get home after many hours of intellectually battling the hollowness of a work less corporate job. It’s the cacophony of social convenience and compromises, dependency and dramatics, and a little affection thrown in at times. Many generations and personalities at the threshold of explosion – but not quite there for want of indignation – just not prepared to accept and too scared to confront.

Seen from outside, it makes an ideal case study for social scientists. But the gnashing experience of living through the trauma of a social structure in flux is not exactly the best learning. It’s an unending saga of the trials and trepidations of a middle class family that is always unfairly dependant on some of its members for its survival. It’s unacknowledged, unaccounted subjugation, and mental claustrophobia. And a vacuum of a life – that has no experiences to share, no insights to give, and no perspective to offer.