One day, when I’m going to be rich and famous and have a lot of time on my hands, I’ll probably use some of it to devise some sort of a machine that will extract the myriad thoughts that run through my head at a particular instant of time and put them on paper in neat, well spaced paragraphs. I can’t even begin to imagine the sort of exhilaration that I’ll experience when it won’t take me eons to form a sentence that seems slightly, if not completely, befitting of my thought. The machine will present before my ever-forgiving audience, a bunch of sentences that will singularly explain what I want to say without distorting my original intent with metaphors, cryptic references or bad grammar.
I’ll carry the machine around with me at all times because I would have ensured its compactness. In all probability, it won’t have a moment’s peace because my life will slowly come to involve constant observation of the world, its inhabitants and their exceedingly pointless actions.
Just contemplating the innumerable possibilities is consoling, to say the least. I probably won’t have a breakdown in my system even at those rare times when I’m feeling slightly morose and am compelled to look outside a window in a moving vehicle, any vehicle, at life- disconnected, disjoint and only vaguely familiar; flitting past by, so completely and disturbingly unaware of my inconsequential existence. I’ll never fall in love with a guy simply because I want to ruffle his hair every time I look at him. My machine will help me create an ode or two about how perfect his hair is for the simple act of ruffling and I’ll never think of him again, except perhaps with a tinge of mild amusement. I’ll spend lesser time dwelling on all the forms of entertainment that occupy so much space in my head because I replay movies/songs/comics/books long after I’m done with them, thereby eliminating all obstacles in the path of real thought, enabling it to flow more freely and with more originality.
I’ll write more stories, because I’ll look for them everywhere; in every pair of eyes that I look into, in every awkward silence that I encounter and in every nostalgic moment that I indulge myself in. Not that I don’t try to do those things on an unnervingly regular basis right now. But I’ll do them with more conviction and more selflessness when I have my machine at handy. I might even cease to be the most important person in my life. I’ll cease to believe that I can tell a story with any amount of justice, if at all, only if it’s my own, only if all the information is first-hand and extremely personal.
Life will become comfortable, coherent and if I’m lucky, a little easier.
But, I know that there is little possibility of this machine ever coming into existence and if it ever did, I’ll probably be stupid enough to consider it a tad bit unethical. So, I’ll just go ahead and argue that life is interesting the way it is. That entertainment is supposed to overwhelm and that beauty is supposed to cause silences, awkward as they may be. And anyway, till date, the written word has always been given second preference on my priority lists. Even if that’s the case only because I’m too lazy to try anymore and end up fascinated by something as trivial as a periodically blinking cursor on a drab, white, computer screen.
I’ll carry the machine around with me at all times because I would have ensured its compactness. In all probability, it won’t have a moment’s peace because my life will slowly come to involve constant observation of the world, its inhabitants and their exceedingly pointless actions.
Just contemplating the innumerable possibilities is consoling, to say the least. I probably won’t have a breakdown in my system even at those rare times when I’m feeling slightly morose and am compelled to look outside a window in a moving vehicle, any vehicle, at life- disconnected, disjoint and only vaguely familiar; flitting past by, so completely and disturbingly unaware of my inconsequential existence. I’ll never fall in love with a guy simply because I want to ruffle his hair every time I look at him. My machine will help me create an ode or two about how perfect his hair is for the simple act of ruffling and I’ll never think of him again, except perhaps with a tinge of mild amusement. I’ll spend lesser time dwelling on all the forms of entertainment that occupy so much space in my head because I replay movies/songs/comics/books long after I’m done with them, thereby eliminating all obstacles in the path of real thought, enabling it to flow more freely and with more originality.
I’ll write more stories, because I’ll look for them everywhere; in every pair of eyes that I look into, in every awkward silence that I encounter and in every nostalgic moment that I indulge myself in. Not that I don’t try to do those things on an unnervingly regular basis right now. But I’ll do them with more conviction and more selflessness when I have my machine at handy. I might even cease to be the most important person in my life. I’ll cease to believe that I can tell a story with any amount of justice, if at all, only if it’s my own, only if all the information is first-hand and extremely personal.
Life will become comfortable, coherent and if I’m lucky, a little easier.
But, I know that there is little possibility of this machine ever coming into existence and if it ever did, I’ll probably be stupid enough to consider it a tad bit unethical. So, I’ll just go ahead and argue that life is interesting the way it is. That entertainment is supposed to overwhelm and that beauty is supposed to cause silences, awkward as they may be. And anyway, till date, the written word has always been given second preference on my priority lists. Even if that’s the case only because I’m too lazy to try anymore and end up fascinated by something as trivial as a periodically blinking cursor on a drab, white, computer screen.