Thou hast most welcome been and sorely missed.
Dare I rejoice, thou, to these climes, returned?
I hush… I quiet step… I so resist
So royal thy demesnes from which I’ve learned.
So timidly, in reverence, go out
Among these places once I reminisced
Had left these climes bereft and lost in doubt,
As only such in shadow may persist.
So quiet-speak my joy as must it be;
Although I would my exaltation shout.
My forays brief, my traces few to see;
I dare but little to dissuade throughout.
Yet gingerly I turned my praise for thee
To hopes I’ve earned such days as come to be.
Thank you RLK for
the manner and degree
of your return.
The days went by in silence, with occasional bouts of laughter, while still reeling under overpowering memories that came rushing in the week before. I do not yet know what format of diary writing I should adopt, hence trying this new one, where I put date within the blog post. One way that this ‘pledge’ of writing a weekly diary has affected me or my life is that now I look forward to making every moment count, so that, at the end of a week, I have something remarkable to write about. However, life is not too remarkable in itself, and therefore to expect every moment and day that make up life, to be “remarkable”, is ultimate Utopian fantasy. Why can’t days not be remarkable and still worthy of being written about?
My week wasn’t remarkable. It was routine. I continued reading books that I have been reading for a few weeks now, and struggling to complete them under tight work schedule. However, I do steal some moments to read books. In lunch, while having dinner or while having a quiet cup of coffee in the evening, or late in the night. Apart from them, let me confess that I am totally caught up in football world cup frenzy, and I try to find 90 minutes to watch at least one or the other match during a week. I did watch Brazil vs Chile.
One day I shall sit, and stitch words together to write a blog post on a non-remarkable week. To recollect memories of non-remarkable events is tough, almost impossible, and same is happening with me now. In future, I shall write on insignificant days. I haven’t seen or read books on insignificant people, insignificant events, insignificant moments and days. A large, in fact most part, of existence on earth is mundane, is insignificant and therefore, traditionally, not worth recording. I haven’t read books on insignificant events and people. A life of a regular farmer, or a regular salaried middle class employee, may be they have been written, but it must be because something about their life must have been remarkable enough. Are insignificant events or people or moments not fecund to give birth to a story that is worth reading for pleasure? Would I want to read about an insignificant farmer, with well-to-do lifestyle or a poor farmer with tough life and trying to fight against a “system” or “society” or “injustice” in his/her own manner? I have no idea.
Memories are a curious case of human existence. Nobody knows how they exist, where they exist, how they are formed, what triggers their formation, and how they are dissolved. Yet the society exists, because memories exist. The relationships, the bonds, the friendship, the love, the longing, the wait, the separation, the union – all these social equations exist only because of memories. Imagine if there were to be no such faculty as memory. Would the world be same? Would it not be more painful and full of sufferings? Or would the reverse be true? To not have memories might have saved us from building relationships, their eventual fall and then subsequent sufferings. We will, perhaps, never know.
Many memories rushed in this week. The week was particularly poignant but in the backdrop of a Brobdingnagian happiness. I was not there, yet I was there. I was there, yet there was longing to be there. There was longing to be there, yet it wasn’t particularly a longing. A dear friend got married. To a girl, he always loved. After fighting all odds, they are together to see the sunset of life while holding each other’s hands. Memories are so strong driver of human relationships and love is proven by the fact of their wedding. If not for memories, they might not have felt so strong. Sometimes I wonder whether the memories are created in brain or in heart. When I see them, I like to believe that memories have no connexion with brain, rather memories are created, stored and recalled – from heart. That perhaps explains how neuroscientists have not yet found the cause of memory. They have been looking into brain all this while.
Week started on a low note, but ended on a higher note. A very happy note. In sea of memories, in thralls of nostalgia and in lap of anecdotes – this is where I found myself at the end of the week. I heard those voices whose owners form indelible part of my earthly experience for many years now. No matter how controversial one’s stand on relationships is, but there are some friends who want you to believe in them; not by forcing you, but by their sheer acts of love, respect, gratitude and sharing. I have been particularly selfish to them, leaving them at my will, joining them at my will; however they were not ill-bothered by it, they let me be part of them, they never asked why I left then, why I came back now. May be, it’s just that the frivolity is not in relationships, it’s in humans. Humans like me. They are the friends I will always be grateful to, for being so magnanimous in their conduct. I will always attempt to treat them to those magnificent standards, with which they have treated me, and continue to treat me. I am particularly proud of my friend who got married. People like him and his wife put words like commitment to action, and the words like love to be something more than a mere empty promise or a hollowed feeling of a rambunctious heart. They not only challenge the cynic in me, they defeat it comprehensively.
Food wasn’t particularly great in this week, apart from the English breakfast [in the evening] I had at “Across The Road”, who have the silhouette of Beatles crossing Abbey Road as their business logo. What made the breakfast more delicious was my favourite song of them being played by the live band there, which truly was meant for the week and for the couple of the week:
Life goes on, however, as a friend put up on a social network website, that for every joy of life that passes, something beautiful remains. This week is now weaved into my memory.
I see that I have become quite irregular to the blog. Given that this blog is my best friend, I shouldn’t be treating it so, but then I am a human. A selfish, greedy, mean, mortal devil – a human. It is only natural that I break relationships whenever I deem it fit, without letting the other person [in this case, the blog] know, or reduce them to mere acquaintance, whenever I deem it is fit to step back. It is only natural that I break all ties, even with a best friend, whenever I deem fit; and form new ties elsewhere, only to dump them in near future, whenever I deem fit. I always try hard to overcome my human fallacies. I have always travelled extra lengths to maintain a relationship, to extirpate the element of frivolity that so naturally glues to the bonds we develop with fellow creatures, animals, mammals, sea creature etc. included. As I said, I am just a human – to fall in the fallacies is merely animation of fatalism .
When I realised that frivolity is seeping in, in my relationship with my blog, my best friend, and that our relationship might fall apart, I decided to brace up. I am now committed to travel that extra length, to preserve the bond that I have now come to cherish with this blog. I will now be maintaining a weekly diary – a personal diary – the events of my sometimes mundane, but mostly exciting existence – which will be evaluated through lens of philosophy, contemporary morals and ethics, politics, language and culture. I promise to improve my prose and make it lighter so as to weave it comfortably with my ideas and thoughts. I do not yet know the protocols of evaluation of events because I have never done so before, however I will develop them gradually. The first question that faces me, even before I write my first weekly diary, is that whether my actions constitute as events. I have no answer.
Dear blog, neither will I let you go, nor will allow you to leave me! We are both here to stay together, and together shall we see what the duck is this life all about. I am aware that life is meaningless. You shall know that too. Hopefully, those who read, they shall know it too eventually. However, I will not purposely evaluate the events through the good absurd lens of nihilism, rather I will do a double-blind study of events [which I do not know how to do yet, will learn eventually], in which the lens [the conductors] and the events [the subjects] will be stranger to each other, sharing no personal bonds and inflaming loyalty or passions, in fact as cold to each other as a human is, or can be, to fellow humans.
In a preferred embodiment 