Braving the new world.

( Photograph : Kala Ghoda, 2010)

From the moment we open our eyes into this bewildering world, and realize that it’s larger than the walls of the womb that we’ve been used to since the beginning of our existence, we are on a relentless mission to take it all in, to understand how this new place functions and more importantly, how we figure into this functioning.

As new entrants to the planet, it is our aim to work over-time and try and catch up with the rest of the world that seems to have a head start. We’re in an instant phase of overdrive.

We see things.
We touch things.
We hear things.
We feel things.
We experience things.
We begin to relate experiences to people and emotions.
We begin to form opinions about these people and emotions and begin to find our own ways of expressing them to our then, fairly tiny, social circle.

The doors of our perception are flung right open. We see the world, maybe the only time in our entire lifetime, as it really is. The way we see it for ourselves, without being told how to.
No right.
No wrong.
No should.
No shouldn’t.
No decent.
No indecent.
No masks.
No rules.
No manipulation.
No images to uphold or hide behind.
No this way, or that.
Just pure unadulterated being.

If infants could talk, or if there was any other way of finding out what goes on in that baby mind, the revelations, I’m sure, would be mind boggling! The things an innocent mind is capable of, while still free from the filth that the world deals out to all of us eventually, are unbelievable!

When every thought is a good thought.
When every ‘Why’ has an answer (even if we make one up ourselves)
When Love is a given.
When ambition is anything! (And ‘anything’ is acceptable)
When the imagination is allowed to soar high enough to prove the infinity of space.

That’s when you know what the human intellect is actually capable of.
That’s when you know what an individual, as an individual, is actually capable of.
That there’s no real need for the paraphernalia we surround ourselves with:
The people we round up so that we’re not ‘alone’.
The objects we surround ourselves with so that we always have things to keep us busy.
The work that we make sure engulfs us so that we don’t have the time to deal with ourselves.
The money that we hoard so that immediate gratification of endless needs is never a problem.
The fast paced life we lead because patience is never something we learnt.

If only we could spend all our years like we spent our first few…
Family, food, sleep and our imagination.
That’s all we needed.
We found comfort in the loving arms of family.
Our hunger pangs were satiated with all kinds of food, over the years, albeit after some melodramatic howling, but that’s one of the few birth rights the infant knows of.
That, and sleep!
And finally, there’s the imagination that introduces us to people and places and animals, to this world and to others, to our own realities and to realities we cant even dream of when we’re older!

If only we could spend all our years like we spent our first few!

(Yes.. This is also apparently my little Huxley tribute :p)