Waves of Disquiet

It seems the only way I can write is in semi-fiction mode. What else will I write but about myself and my life? What is interesting other than that? 

Politics has changed in this country. The election changed everything. People are rejoicing in the huge victory of the leader. Was it their leader? I wonder. How are they able to show such a vigorous support for him? Do they know him so much? How can they put so much of faith in him? I cannot understand. It is the way humans are. The mass resists to be understood.

I can't write about the mass, its choices, its urges and its behaviour. I don't want to know either. Life is led by a vacuum of desires and drives and motivations. When you are engrossed in that vacuum, you don't even know that it is a vacuum. Everything -- shouts, rejoice, hopes, virtues, morality, values, sense of wellness, happiness, joy, ambitions, devotion, dedication, convention, tradition, culture, revolution, genocide, holocaust, hegemony, slavery, debt, wealth, assets, investment, confidence, comfort, anxiety, anger, desperation, fear, animosity, hatred, pride, redemption, struggles, wars, ethnic cleansing, riots, rape, liberty, surveillance, internet, pornography, vendetta, defamation, corruption, sexuality, fellatio, fetishism, pederasty, perversion, hunger, poverty, democracy, monarchy, fanaticism, machismo, emasculation, feminism, writing, poetry, cinema, smile, laughter -- revolves around that vacuum. A vacuum which reveals itself as an absolute presence, a nothingness which appears itself as a fullness, a hole which portrays itself as a gravitational pull. 

I also feel the illusion of that presence, that fullness, that pull, but I also feel its absence, the emptiness, lack of any force and direction. Perhaps, I have some inherent deformities -- maybe blind, maybe insane, maybe something else. But I am away from the madness of a crowd. I hate crowd. I am timid of a crowd. I can't subscribe to the crowd's interests. I am away. I am alone. It is not that I want to be away, alone. It is that I am alone and away, that is why I am alone and away.

I am not living in a desert. Yet, I find myself alone as if in a desert. I find my voice getting crushed in the continuous flow of loud shouts from outside. Those shouts, when deciphered, form a vehement call for a change -- an unacceptable, unwarranted change. They want to create a homogeneous voice -- a loud, monotonic, unending sound. A deafening sound that is external and absurd. That sound will not compromise on its monotonousness, homogeneity, and superiority. It wants to eliminate all the different tones, all the variations. The colour of that sound is a pure, boring white. An insipid white. White that will not tolerate any other shades on the canvas. 

I am a stain in a pure white canvas, a canvas which people mistake for containing a beautiful painting. I am a wrong note, a deviation, in a monotonic music, which people mistakes for a beautiful music. I can't make their painting pristine nor make their music pure. I am here to stay as a stain, a deviation, as I am, eluding even my own understanding of it. The truth is that I am a stain even I can't clean myself. I am a deviation even I can't rectify myself. Perhaps that deviation, the sense of being a stain, defines me. Perhaps I have different sensitivities than the crowd. 

Who knows it right? The more I observe anything, the more it eludes me!

Sandeep

Chennai, May 25, 2014.