I sit in the classroom, and the professor cracks a joke about the celebrity sports star or a legendary musician of the black
and white times. I sit through the seminars and gaze in awe as the speaker
throws at the crowd his words of intellect. I toss between being the impatient 'incomplete self' and an admirer of the "other-I-wanna-be". I sit with my friends as they
discuss the most popular TV series, directors, actors, movies, and music. I
hear boys talk about cars, cricket, girls
and gadgets and girls’ chit-chat about exams, parents, clothes, and boys. I toss between being a 'dumbo' who is clueless about anything to a 'dude' who has something to say about everything. I listen to frustration of students over their career, jobs, supervisors, and their
‘nothing-is-going-on-in-life’ stories. I get news of my old friends getting married and
make babies, some of them struggling with their jobs and some of them clicking
pictures all around the world. I toss between hope and despair. Different people do different things. Somethings I very well know, some I attempt to know and some I ignore. Certain things interest me while certain things don't.
It is difficult to disentangle what I think I know, what I would like to know and what I should know. It is a constant struggle to acquire the characteristics that are 'respected and expected' and to give up those that are 'unwanted and unappreciated' in the eyes of the others. I am an outsider as well as an insider to this process i.e., I observe/expect as well as participate/change as a response to everything that is happening around me. I am a part of this larger crowd trying to be different among the same and trying to change yet remain the same. I am the ordinary yet unique, and I am the static yet dynamic. It is this constant process of transformation between the 'self and the other' that results in turbulent changeovers.
I oscillate between sudden bursts of boredom and excitement, happiness and moodiness, confidence and confusion, ambition and aversion, fascination and repulsion. My thoughts wander here and there like a meandering river. My attention drifts and the imagination goes wild and swift. In the flash of a second, I disengage from the concrete and engage with the abstract and vice-versa; I disengage from the present and engage with the past and the future. Where things can never settle but instantaneously change, what a tiny thing is my mind and hence I realize the futility of the search for the ultimate certainty and stability. So, here I set out to bother not about the trivial but the profound, not the logical but the creative and not the convergence to the set boundaries but the divergence away from them. I, after all, live in the world of contradictions and therefore I progress.
It is difficult to disentangle what I think I know, what I would like to know and what I should know. It is a constant struggle to acquire the characteristics that are 'respected and expected' and to give up those that are 'unwanted and unappreciated' in the eyes of the others. I am an outsider as well as an insider to this process i.e., I observe/expect as well as participate/change as a response to everything that is happening around me. I am a part of this larger crowd trying to be different among the same and trying to change yet remain the same. I am the ordinary yet unique, and I am the static yet dynamic. It is this constant process of transformation between the 'self and the other' that results in turbulent changeovers.
I oscillate between sudden bursts of boredom and excitement, happiness and moodiness, confidence and confusion, ambition and aversion, fascination and repulsion. My thoughts wander here and there like a meandering river. My attention drifts and the imagination goes wild and swift. In the flash of a second, I disengage from the concrete and engage with the abstract and vice-versa; I disengage from the present and engage with the past and the future. Where things can never settle but instantaneously change, what a tiny thing is my mind and hence I realize the futility of the search for the ultimate certainty and stability. So, here I set out to bother not about the trivial but the profound, not the logical but the creative and not the convergence to the set boundaries but the divergence away from them. I, after all, live in the world of contradictions and therefore I progress.
hai kranthi,
ReplyDeleteThis is Janaki.How are you? I like your writing skills.Feeling happy that you are writing frequently.Last year I saw your blog.You wrote about your HCU experiences and about your sister then.Now you are writng frequently.Glad to see this.I liked every post of yours.