In The Silence Of My Solitude - A Novel (Part 14)

                                                       
                                                      18. Isn’t it obvious?



I was just born, and was sleeping in my mother’s lap. She was singing a song. I was trying to find a world within her lap, which formed into a  shape of Uyyala, as if that’s how the world should be….a  world which provides you the solitude you required. The only visible things were my mothers eyes and the blue sky. How safe I was! How peaceful I was! Me alone in my mother’s lap. Yes, my mother was shielding me from everyone…the evil in the word, all the hurts in the world, all the pain in the world..all the anxieties in the world..

Then, she stopped singing.

I asked her, without opening my eyes . Don't stop, sing.

She started laughing.

Mother, why are you laughing?

Then, she started crying.

Mother, why are you crying?

I opened my eyes. I saw the beast’s tongue trying to touch me, and I screamed.
That woke me up from my dream which had turned into a night mare.

“You okay?” my dad shook me.
“What happened?”, I asked.



I noticed my dad’s face. It was pale, a paleness that could only come with shock.

“Dad, what happened?”, I asked again.
“Nothing happened. You fell down. That’s all”, he replied.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“How am I looking?”, he tried to change his expression.
“I don’t know”. I had no clue.

I noticed the date on the calendar. Already seven days had passed since my breakdown – since I saw that creature that night. I didn’t remember much of what happened during those 7 days.

I vaguely remembered scenes of me in a hospital, feeling comatose and sleepy, as if I was dreaming. After repeatedly pleading my Dad to tell me what happened, he finally revealed that I had a mental breakdown, one of those breakdowns trauma victims go thru after horrible accidents. He was forced to admit me in an hospital, and I had pretty much made a mess in there, alternating between being fearful, being confident as if nothing happened, and then sometimes becoming violent, trashing everything near my bed. I was talking to myself it-seems, sometimes shouting..I saw the devil..I saw the devil…

I pretty much slept for the next two days. On the third day, everything came back, all the memories, all the incidents that happened, the incidents that caused my mental breakdown.
I became extremely fearful, and then as if someone flicked a switch, I became very confident, and then it turned into pure unadulterated rage. But, this time, I observed it all -- My mind playing tricks on me, as it was trying to make sense of what had happened. It was alternating at furious rate, going through my states of mind as if to solve an unsolvable problem. It was permutating and combinating all the chemicals in my brain. But, the fact that I was able to observe it, meant only one thing – that I was coming back to my normal self --The self which tries to observe itself.

Once I started my observation of my own mind, I began to gain confidence slowly, but steadily.I tried to kill the thoughts of fear and rage, with thoughts of reason. I decided that I needed a philosophy, a collection of positive thoughts, remembrance of which would produces thoughts which would fight with thoughts which were not in my control. I sat down, wrote a big essay titled ‘Practical Philosophy’; even though while writing, I felt that I should have written it using bullet points, like those quotes of philosophers people always quote, but neither understand nor follow them.

After looking at my finished essay, I felt that the breakdown, indeed, helped me. I went through hell, and the hell rebooted my mind, well, almost, because noting can erase the memories. But, I found new strength and speed in my thinking. The buggy programs and harmful virus got deleted from the computer, from the sharp strike of an accident, most probably an accidental deletion of those programs. I should add though…I could have gone the other way too -- crossing the borders of sanity.

Armed with that ‘Practical Philosophy’; a philosophy which I believed almost like a religious faith, except giving myself a few percentage points of doubt; I began to understand, not feel, the incidents that happened.

It became obvious to me that my mother had gone through the same mental breakdown I went through. The difference was that, she crossed into that hellish world of insanity, most probably never to come back. It must have been pure luck that the exact opposite happened to me. But, would an insane man know that he is insane? May be not, but could an insane man observe his thoughts, and observe the reactions of the people around him? Most probably not…and my probability of being sane was higher than being insane. I came to the conclusion that I was sane, without answering the question, “What is insanity?” I was aware of that loophole.

I was also aware that I was living in the same house – the house in which an Ataka existed, and in which, most probably, a creature had lived and was living. I allowed a bit of doubt, because, it could all be my imagination, fueled by reading my mother’s diary. I decided to doubt, unless I find 100% proof. ‘A rational person always doubts’, I rationalized.

Few things left: one of which was my dad’s side of the story. I wanted to know everything from him, and I confronted him that afternoon.


“Dad, listen to me carefully”, I started,” I found mother’s diary..well..not exactly a diary....a pooja book converted into a diary”

“What are you talking about?” my Dad asked with genuine surprise.

“Let me finish. I read that diary. She wrote that she saw something in this house. I believe she went crazy after seeing it. Ten days back, I believe I saw the same thing”

“Show me the diary”, he demanded.

I produced the diary, and explained how she hid her words in the pooja hymns.
I noticed his face as he read the diary. Surprise written all over his face.

“Dad, what are you hiding? You took her to a psychiatrist..didn't you?”

“Yes”, he replied.

“Why don’t you tell me the whole story?” I asked.

“What’s there to tell? There is nothing to tell. She broke down mentally..because of some psychiatric disorder..that's all…she left us.Gone..just like that..whats there to tell?”

“What about IT – the beast?”

“As I told you ..She had gone crazy…she went mental..she had lost it”, he raised his voice.

“But, I too saw that creature”, I too raised my voice.

“Isn’t it obvious?”, Dad shouted.

“What obvious?” I shouted back.

His expression changed from anger to extreme sadness, and his eyes became moist.

“Dad, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

“Listen to me. This is what happened. Let me tell you the whole story”…he took a deep breath.

He continued...” Your Mom, my wife, she was beautiful…oh my god..she was such a beautiful women. We lived happily for a while. But, as they say: Love, like happiness will not stay forever...we lost that love, and I neglected her as I became busy with my work. She became lonely. I didn’t care..I should have..but I didn’t care. Then, one night, in the middle of the night, she woke me up. She was a wreck.She was trembling with fear. She said, ‘ I saw a thing on the ataka.I saw something. It is looking at us. It is observing us”. At first I took her seriously. I searched the whole ataka and found nothing. I even took a photograph of the ataka, and also the photograph you found.I found nothing on the ataka..nothing. But, She didn’t believe me. Her descent to madness started from there. I took her to a psychiatrist…and he diagnosed as having schizophrenia… 50-50 he said. He said that she was going through some delusions..and the symptoms matched with schizophrenia. Whatever it is ..she started behaving very oddly. She lost all her beauty. She stopped talking care of herself, and she started hating me..for not believing her..for not supporting her. What else could I do in that situation? How can anyone reason with a psychologically disturbed person?”

He stopped. Silence.

“Then, what happened?”, I asked.

“Listen to me. Life is not like one of those stupid movies and novels you watch and read.Life is not about dreams..its not about idealism. You have to understand that”, he said.

This time, surprise was mine. “What are you talking about?”, I asked.

“Life is about moving on. We have to move on to live. We have to move on to survive. If you don’t move, we die. As simple as that.”

“Alright, I got that. What happened to her?”, I asked again.

“I gave up on her.”, he finally revealed, with absolutely no guilt in his face.

“What!”, I shouted

“Yes. No medicine was able to cure her. I just gave up, and one day she left. I searched for her..But as you know, we couldn’t find her anywhere”.

Silence for a couple of seconds.

“Dad..did you…you knew that she was leaving us on that night?”

No response from him.

“Dad, answer me”

Silence.

“ANSWER ME”, I shouted this time.


He became furious. “How dare you shout at me like that? How dare you? Whats your life?
Whats your experience? You are nothing without me. You are insulting me? Are you capable of running your own life? Are you? Look at yourself….what a loser you turned out to be! That’s what you are..a loser. I put all my hopes on you, and sent you to foreign lands, with what…with my hard-earned money. And what you did? You threw away all that..everything..and came back as a beggar..as a loser. How dare you insult me? Everyday I am dying…everyday..whenever people ask me ‘Whats your son doing?’. What am I supposed to answer them..that my son is a lazy son of bitch, that he is loser, a jobless bum? That my son smokes and drinks..thats what he do all day..you want me to say that? Everyone is asking..’Why your son still single’?..what shall I answer them..that you are impotent bastard..that you are a freak? I lost all my respect in the society because of you. But, still, I showed you love. I cooked you food. I took care of you.I provided a safe roof for you…and, now, you shout at me? How dare you?”.

I was shell-shocked. Almost as if a bomb exploded near my face. Whose priorities got fucked? His or mine? Its my mother we were talking about..for fucksake.

He might have realized his mistake. He might have realized his fucked up priorities. But, the effect was reverse. That realization might have pained his ego, and he went ballistic.

That anger made him weak, and opened up the flood gates of secrets.In that moment of weakness, he exposed himself.

He continued…almost raising his voice to the top of his pitch, “ You want to know the truth? You really want to know? Okay, lets talk man to man. R u ready?”

“Yes”.

“Then listen. Would the woman you loved be the same woman after she lost all her beauty? Would the woman you married be the same woman after she lost her mind? If your soul-mate loses her soul, would you be the same person, and would she be the same woman? That woman ceased to be the woman I loved and married..once she had gone crazy. Aren’t we our minds and bodies? I ask you. How can you still love the woman who hates you with all your heart? My wife died a long back..she died on the day..the day..she imagined seeing some fucking creature..she died on that day. I lost my wife on that day. I couldn’t even able to touch her..you know why? Because that bitch stank. I never told this to anyone before…..after she had gone crazy..she started emanating some horrendous smell..I never ever ..in my life..smelled such kind of smell. It’s the smell of death..its the smell of devil. I never told anyone about this..as I didn’t want to become laughing stock. If she went crazy because she saw the most ugliest fearful creature on this earth..how about me…who was smelling the most horrible smell on this earth..day in and day out..It drove me crazy…and God, what happened to her face!!! It is not the ugliness I am talking about..it became weird..she became inhuman..a devil..a satan..but still, I performed my duties as a husband…I was/am a responsible hardworking man. I responded to my responsibilities. I was a perfect husband to her. But, how far can a man take the pain. People started avoiding me. I lost all the respect. A man is man only when the society respects him. That was the last straw. I had to take a decision. I let that ghost..a shadow..go. I didn’t push her. I just didn’t stop her. Then, she left. I moved on. I suggest you move on too. DON’T WASTE YOUR LIFE.COME TO REALITY”

I trembled with disgust. Who is this guy sitting before me? The same guy I thought as a human being for the last 30 years?

“What reality?”, I asked him..almost murmuring.

“The reality that we got to survive. We have to live. We have to move on. Don’t chase the past.It will destroy you.”

“Mother is past?”

“Yes.She was past”.

“Past becomes past when you find closure”, I replied.


He didn’t respond.

We sat there …silent..for couple of minutes.


I broke the silence, “So, you thought, whatever she saw was just her imagination?”

He nodded in confirmation.

“Then, how do you explain what I saw?”

He looked in to my eyes, with sadness in his eyes, and said “Isn’t it obvious?”.

Once I realized what he was implying, an invisible bond of father-son relationship
was smashed for a moment, and I started looking at a new person, an entirely new person.

A cruel, selfish bigot, I must add.

Continued here..

In The Silence Of My Solitude - A Novel (Part 13)

                                               17.The Constancy of Everything.

Dear Friends, Please listen to me carefully. Please follow my train of thought. Please try to feel my questions. Please understand me.

What is the most horrible thing you have seen in your life? What is the ugliest thing you have seen your life? What is the most fearful thing you have seen in life which made you tremble with fear..giving you nightmares? What is that thing you have seen, and if God present yourself before you and grant you only one wish, You would beg him, ‘ Please erase the memory of that thing from me’?  Were you ever in a situation where you said to yourself, ‘Okay, This is it. This is the absolute fear. I never want to experience this again’? Have you ever come across people who absolutely abhor cockroaches? Have you ever met people who suffers from Ophidiophobia, and ask them, ‘What if when you wake up, you discovered a snake around your neck with its hood right before your eyes, and smell its breath?”? Have your ever panicked in your life? Have you met anyone who suffers from panic attacks?


Forget for a second about the reality. Even in imagination…

What’s the best horror movie or story you have heard or seen, which haunted you for years? What’s your worst night mare?

What is the most horrible fearful situation or thing the humanity has seen or heard?


Is it the image of those 16-pack skeletons in Auschwitz camp during Second World War? Is it the image of thousands of dead bodies being dumped unceremoniously during the same war? Or is it the image of that innocent dead girl among the bodies? Is it the image of that naked Japanese girl running on the streets when her town was attacked? Is it the video of massacres somewhere in Africa? Is it the image of a person being shot dead? Is it the video of people jumping from the burning twin towers? Is it the video of be-headings? Is it the video of black hawk helicopters killing civilians? Is it the video of women stoned to death?

What are those things,situations,images,videos, stories,nightmares…the world has seen,faced,heard,experienced, and imagined; Which made it tremble with fear, imagining itself in that situation, and plunged into action, saying, “ Never again. Never again such thing should happen to anyone in this world”.

I ask you, what are your nightmares?

Losing a job? Living in a shack? Begging for money?
Death of your loved ones?
Losing your beauty? Losing your fame?
Getting stuck in a bad marriage? Spouse having an affair?
Loss of love? Loneliness? Going crazy?
Boredom?

Why do people commit suicides? Because, they fear their own existence.

Fear is the root cause of every emotion in the emotional universe.

A person lives in his own emotional universe, and the meta-physics of that universe is determined by the absolute constants, just like the constancy of the speed of the light in the physical world.

Doesn’t the physics change if the max speed is beyond the speed of the light in vacuum?

That’s why, you don’t feel my fear, and I don’t feel yours. We have different absolutes.
If I have the same fears as yours, and If I can feel them the same way you felt, won't I came and kiss you and hug you with tears in my eyes?




                     And, in that moment, that night, the moment when I focused the torchlight on to that figure standing beside the candle….the fear in that moment became the Maximum Absolute Fear in my life.

Yes, the fear was mostly from what I saw. But; the whole situation, and the sequence of steps leading to that situation, the power-cut, the harsh light from the torchlight, the angle, the shadows, my state of mind, my imagination…everything..everything added to that Horror.

It was a 4 foot human/animal/Alien. May be, May be not. Whatever it was, it was a living breathing organism. If a tortoise mated with a crocodile mated with a large shrimp mated with a snake mated with a very old short woman…the result is IT. It was the ugliest living organism I ever saw.

It was standing on its strong hind legs, Which looked like the feet of a crocodile; Its front legs were so tiny, that they looked like a large shrimp; it had ears of a small elephant, with lot of white hair coming out of it, almost touching its neck; the face looked like a horse, and the skin around the neck and face looked saggy and wrinkled, reminding me of a very old woman; its huge tongue reminded me of a snake, as if the snake itself became part of the tongue; and its teeth reminded of the aliens I saw in ‘Alien’ movies.

But, what horrified me the most was its eyes. They looked human, as if they were capable of emotions. Those eyes were looking at me, they were observing me. They had the look of a very strict school principal who sternly looks at the irascible pupil…saying, “ Look, I am observing you for a long time. I was patient till now. But now, you have crossed your limits. You are going to suffer”.

It was not only horror which engulfed me… all the other complex emotions that had their source in fear played a part in that moment. I abhorred, despised, loathed and hated it.

My panicked frozen body produced tremendous amount of sweat, and the torch light slipped from my hands. As I watched the falling torch light hitting the floor, the power came back, and the lights killed the darkness, illuminating the room, as if to wake me up from a strange nightmare. I looked back at the candle, to find that grotesque organism. It was gone. The lone half-burnt candle became the lone witness of that organism other than me.

I jumped to the floor, slipped, and as I turned back, I saw IT on the Ataka, standing exactly at the same position I had stood before, looking at me, observing me, with the same kind of expression it had before. How fast does this thing move? If someone photographed me at that exact moment, they would find that the expression on my face would exactly match with the expression my mother had in her photograph..the photograph which I investigated couple of days back. I was at the exact position..the same position my mother had stood in her photograph.

Then, it turned and walked away into the darkness of the Ataka.  When I saw its back, as it turned, I puked out of some extreme disgust. Its back was so smooth that the only expression I could be come up with was of disgust…just like a smoothness of a snake, the smoothness on the cockroach wings…the emotion coming from the contrast of an ugliest organism having a smooth and beautiful skin.


I ran towards the hall, checking my neck…as if to find some crawling insects, shouting in my mind..as if not to let the sight of that organism register in my memory…and then kicking myself ..as if to wake up from sleep.

I slipped near the gate, falling down on my face, mumbling something. I noticed my dad running towards me. and I shouted..


I saw it. It saw me. I saw it. It saw me.

Continued here..

In The Silence Of My Solitude - A Novel (Part 12)

                                                 16. What the fuck was that?

I woke up the next day sometime during afternoon, somewhere between 2 and 3pm.

Decided to run, and went to the ground, and I ran, stopping after every other lap.Imagine milk boiling in a vessel. Every time I ran to exhaustion the boiling milk reached to the brim of the vessel, and when I stopped, it was as if someone switched off the stove as the milk was about to overflow.

When I ran to exhaustion, I felt the pain, and the mind raced to ‘ I cannot’, ‘I cannot’; and when I stopped, the chorus changed to ‘I can’, ‘I can’, ‘just need a break..but I can’. Then, I ran again to ‘I cannot’..then stopped again to ‘ I can’. A ‘cannot’ cannot exist without a ‘can’. Just flip that coin, and everything becomes impossible, because we at one time thought it was possible. 

When I walked back home, I was full of joy. The confidence returned. Felt refreshed. The body began to recuperate, and so was my mind. Everything looked beautiful.

When I went back home, I laid down on the floor, feeling relaxed.

My mind is a beautiful thing. The world is beautiful. The spider web is beautiful.
Confidence is the by product of happiness. Yes, it is.

Everything is a thought. There is no escaping the thought. Where the thought comes from? Where does the idea in the brain germinate? I don’t know. But, what I know is that, only a thought can cure a thought. Only a thought can cure the emotion. Only a thought can fight with a thought.

A thought can free me from a thought.
If fear arises from a thought, I can cure it with another thought.

What remained to be answered though was, “What kind of thoughts I need to look for to cure that fear”.



That night, I went upstairs; this time armed with odomos for mosquitoes, and watched the stars for hours. I felt ecstatic looking at the sky. I noticed some moist in my eyes as I zoomed in and out of the galaxies.

It was 12 in the night when I finally came down to my room, when the moon aged the stars, making them invisible. I consciously pushed away all the questions that arose from the last night incident. I got that strength to push away the engulfing black cloud… from the chemicals that got released from my run. I needed that time-out. The ‘run’ gave me the confidence to postpone my investigations.

I looked for my dad. His room was empty. I switched on the TV and watched some shit on the TV.

Time 1 am.

Felt thirsty. Went to the kitchen. Opened the fridge.
The light inside the fridge illuminated my face. I stood there looking inside the fridge.
Then it hit me – a feeling… as I said to myself, ‘Deja vu’.
But, it was not Deja vu, I remembered that the exact situation happened last night.
Then my old friend ‘fear’ said Hi, and I looked for a thought to back stab him, but found none.

I quickly turned my head to find someone near the window watching me. No one was there; Only shadows of the trees, from the moon-light, forming some peculiar patterns. They danced with the breeze. I felt as if they were giggling and dancing to make fun of me and saying , “ Look at this idiot. How scared he is. All his philosophies and analysis, which he thinks on the comforts of the bed comes to nothing when the shit hits the fan”. The shadows danced faster and faster, and then they swung to and fro wildly as if they were some reincarnated devils.

I quickly turned my head to right. No one. Then again to the left. No one.
I turned around, completing 360 Degrees. No one. It would have been chaplinesque if not for the fact – the fact that I felt that someone was watching me. Out of no where I heard a thunderbolt, and in a matter of seconds the clouds ate away the moon, and it started raining.

The rain, the wind, and me; alone in that moment. 

Making sure that no one was watching me, I picked up the bottle from the fridge. As I opened the cap, and about to drink; I smelled something. I stopped right there. Freeze frame. The bottle in the mid-air.

The smell – with a tinge of sweet and sour quality to it. Yes, the same smell I smelled few days back. The same smell my mother smelled a decade back. Yes, that peculiar smell.

I put the bottle on the fridge, walked all over the kitchen and the hall to find the source of that smell. The smell was very faint, and it became comparatively stronger as I walked to the ataka room.

Power-cut.

The whole house was enveloped in darkness. The wind might have knocked off some electric poles.

Damn! Please, not now.

I slowly walked to my room, found the torch light, and switched it on. The elongated shadows of the familiar objects gave an unfamiliar, eerie look to the room. I walked to the kitchen. Found a candle and lit it.

Then, I heard a small noise, a sound of whoosh, as If someone passed by. I focused the torch light all around the hall. All clear.

Just my imagination. Just my fucking imagination.

There was certainly some fear in me, but it didn’t stop me, it didn’t debilitate me. My situation was like that of a horror movie buff who watched hundreds of horror movies only to find that no new horror movie was scaring him enough, and finally declaring all of them as crap.

The fear became familiar, and that relativity of fear pushed me to action. I did not wait for the power to come. Some impulse pushed me.

I placed the candle on the floor of the Ataka room, climbed the Ataka, switching the torch light from left to right as I climbed.  I focused the torch light all over the Ataka, and found nothing out of place, except the smell.

I noticed that the floor was a bit damp, and as I moved towards the corner, the floor became wetter. The corner was full of suitcases placed on top of each other. Holding the torch light in my mouth, I began rearranging the suitcases one by one, and as I lifted the last suitcase, uncovering the corner, I found a small hole in the wall …a 0.5 x 0.5 foot hole. Water was dripping, drop by drop from that hole. That was the source of wet dampness in the Ataka. Rain water was leaking through that hole.

I got down on my knees, focusing the torch light into that hole. It was a foot deep empty hole. But the smell was strongest there. I sat on my knees for sometime trying to make sense of that unusual hole. Nothing made sense. Nothing.

I uncovered all the corners of the Ataka to find any holes. And, as I reached the edge of the ataka, and looked down at the room, I noticed a small figure on the floor, standing beside the candle.


I instinctively focused the torch light towards the figure.

Then….

I saw it.
It saw me.

It was already observing me as I climbed that Ataka. It observed me as I uncovered the hole in the wall.It observed the whole thing.

Our eyes met. The shock that resulted from that rendezvous froze me into a statue.

And, I didn’t move.Not an inch. It didn’t either.

Continued here..

In The Silence Of My Solitude - A Novel (Part 11)

                                               15. The Relativity of Everything

I couldn’t sleep that night. For a while, during that night, one emotion canceled another. The emotion of anger and shame worked against the emotion that came from fear. That resulted in apathy, a peculiar calmness -- a sense of surrender.

That calmness turned out to be transitory. Once the calmness had gone, my mind started the familiar process of problem solving by replaying the events that had happened couple of hours ago.

Did my eyes lie? All that stuff was just my imagination? If it was just an imagination, then, Why did I imagine in that particular way? Why did I imagine a midget? Why did I imagine a hooded figure?

No. It was not my imagination. There was no precedent for such kind of incidents happening to me. But, in dreams, peculiar things happen. Right? But, that was not a dream.

I was being watched by someone. Who would that be? A thief? If it was just a thief, why he looked back at me when he jumped the wall? It was, almost, as if -- he had no fear.

But, what surprised me was my Dad's behavior. If at all there was any peculiar behavior during that incident, it was his. I couldn’t understand why he refused to believe me, why he looked at me with doubt, why his face betrayed a sense that he was looking at a crazy guy.

I remembered the sense of victory I felt the day before, when I solved mysteries by my persistence and intelligence. I discovered that the mysterious object that my mother was looking at with fear was in fact a normal football. I concluded that my mother was psychologically disturbed. During that process, I might have discovered a new technique in programming to uncover the blurred traveling objects in a photograph, that too in a span of 5 hours. I was not sure about It though, but I might have.

But, all that happiness, that victorious feeling, a rush of feeling coming from the satisfaction of solving a mystery; turned out to be a starting point for sadness, anxiety; and the events turned in such a way that the ending point of the mystery became a starting point for some more mysteries.

I didn’t doubt my dad when he said that there was never a football in the house. Football was never a popular sport in that town. In fact, I had never seen anyone playing any sports, except cricket. Even if someone had brought a football to our house, I didn’t see any reason why the existence of that object brought fear in my mother.

All through these waves of thoughts and doubts and analysis; one thought prevailed through the end, the thought – What if all this was just my imagination?

What puzzled me the most were my States of mind.. I was fearful at one time -- body shaking, sweat-bathing anxiety; and another time, It was the rational mind; and the next time it was the mind full of Action. At one point, every thing looked clear, and then it transformed to muddy waters, and then, all I was looking at was a huge dark wall, almost like an abyss.

Isn’t that moment of clarity a permanent state of mind? Why am I not able to forcefully transform my mind into that perfect state? Is moment of clarity a relative term? If everything is relative, then does it mean that we are able to enjoy the clear waters of Hawaii only when we experienced the pain of muddy waters elsewhere? Is pain and pleasure the sides of the same coin? Can we find that true happiness without experiencing pain? Is pain a requirement for self-knowledge?

Does beauty exists without ugly? Does compassion exist without cruelty?
The beauty of the night sky, is it absolute or relative?

If everything is relative, then what is absolute in the universe of human emotions?

In the physical realm, If speed of the light is constant, then what is the counterpart for that constancy in the realm of emotions?

When thoughts come in waves, sometimes canceling each other just like the crests and troughs of two waves; I tend to wonder – How many people exist in my mind? What is that particular thought which I could catch and say – ‘Yes, This is Me’?

Thinking itself became a boon and bane to me. On one hand, it solved problems, but on the other, it made me question – Who am I? But, how could I run away from thinking? How could anyone experience the joy of mystery without thinking? Didn’t that thinking gave enormous pleasure to my heroes … Sherlock Holmes and Einstein?

I cannot escape from thinking. I cannot escape from that burden. I got to think.

Even when I was in that state of mind which I loved, and vulgarly named as ‘fuck it’; there was a thought which put me in that state. An observer was watching that state. But, an observer itself is a thought, right?

Look at it this way. We cannot observe something without the existence of an observable. When we observe something, it gives us a thought, and that thought itself tells us that we are the observer. So, that begs the question – Do we exist only in relation to others?

Is all our existence…relative?

Continued here...