Cold, Ash and Dust

- Indra Shekhar Singh, BA Prog-I

It takes a moment to realize keywords like location, time-frame, socio-cultural halves, etc. They are one of the few foundations on which the modern world still functions. Ironically, these pillars of our social stability change very quickly when applied to individuals. 'Who' becomes 'what' and the 'what' becomes 'how' and it goes around in cyclical rotations that go beyond the numerical range of man. Again, addressing the question of this essay, where is the 'I'?

College, yes, that is my location. It was a much-awaited location before this, with respect to the general time-frame of life, but what about the time I got here? It was a shock. The experience was like waking up from a sweet dream into cold, numb and noisy misery. The very pillars of existence built by hardened experience seem to question existence itself. People so completely morph into something very vaguely not-them. It is confusing, I must say. People prey on innocence and celebrate death.

It's never too late to grow out of the pond and into the ocean, but I didn't expect reality to be this harsh. Life did now start to feel like harsh winter winds depositing dust on me. The very ideals of my life were where the dust settled. The dust coated new experiences on my life and slowly, I started feeling different under these heavy layers. I felt burdened and was slowly losing myself.

Realizing the difference between the traditional, prevalent atrocities and modern righteousness is not a tough task. Most people with beautiful blindfolds accept the earlier, rejecting and crushing the righteousness to the core. 'My father discriminated and so will I', 'My family exploited women and so will I' and the tradition of sadistic acts continues with yet another generation. I stand at that deciding juncture with choices laid out on two platters. The first, the silver one which serves violence in silver packing, and the second, the mud platter that serves nothing but old righteousness. We are conditioned to take this decision. So what do I pick: the 'hard right against the easy wrong'?

Winter has come and the cold reigns. The cold now preserves the dust. It perceives the wounds of innocence, stopping the healing and preserving it for the start of the spring of decay. The dust and spilled blood blend into a colour that is not even seen, but felt. I guess the dust is still settling on me and the cold enforces it. At the start, I was lost in this rusty illusion, fighting enemies that outnumber and out-smart me even now. All the enemies want one thing, and I fight to be myself and not transform into them.

The term 'One World' seems to be flashed around a lot. As soon as we hear the phrase, our 'idealist caps' come out and the world of wisdom dawns. But rationally analyzing the term 'world' with subjectivity conveys a different meaning. People with sensitive words fail to feel pain even after they see atrocities. People have become narrow and so has their world. It is a selfish world, in a cut-throat age. The peripheries of our world have come closer. Only things that we relate to are 'our world' and the things we don't relate to become blanked out spaces on a dark canvas. Delving a little deeper on this, for most people writing similar or copying similar essays doesn't really matter if the world goes on as usual - if people sleep abused, underfed, exploited. So the question of the use of 'world' is answered quite simply by the things we choose to see, to feel and perceive.

I can say with some conviction that we all are obsessed with the notion of individual 'backgrounds'. To me, all backgrounds are either biased, oppressive, aggressive or rigid in certain ways. If we only think of and follow the socio-cultural boundaries of life we might take a regressive turn back to where we started. I believe rules and regulations of any kind, whether they be constitutions, laws, religion, or even ethnic rules, are like iron, iron that is necessary for survival, but if not preserved suitably, will rust. It will corrode into a thin sheet of defunct metal. My view of the world today, with respect to my location and cultural milieu, gives me a single line of vision and I see a hard reality. I see too many block, too many iron-headed individuals overrun by their ideas of communism, feminism and these -isms that never end. It's difficult to call these ism-creatures men. They simply feel like heated machines fuelled by their respective -isms. A man fascinated with 'fundamentalism' blows up buildings and people, another one is so fond of 'capitalism' that he eats up two countries and even refuses to burp. We slowly fall to the -isms and blindly start a kind of 'activism in response to terrorism that is funded by capitalism in an effort to check socialism'. The wars of one -ism unto the others are never-ending.

Has the dust here overpowered my whole existence? Am I too late to walk on the middle path? Have the -isms confounded me too? Or is this all a dream? - perception being the only thing that matters. Paranoia/optimism - perceptions of what, how and why things are done. It's like a block dot, constantly stormed by the winds of delusion.