Tuesday 27 November 2018

24 hours

So it turns out that I didn't make any time at all to write in my favourite month of the year. Tsk. Such a sad story. But better late (November) than never (next year), I guess :P.

The title is a give away this time. I more or less come up with something cryptic yet befitting what I'm about to write. In some other stray cases, the title magically appears in my head once the writing part is done. And some very times, both the title and the content fizzle out by the time I actually put these fingers to good use.

So Thanos proposed a plan that would be fair to all, irrespective of nature, wealth, looks, sex and just suggested that half the population be killed. It was a fair suggestion. Some people called it genocide. Some people called him a madman. But hey, it was fair. If like in the movie 2012 where only the uber rich had access to the fancy ships that China made, then there would be a new world with only the uber rich people, who (pardon me), would not perhaps know how to live or make do with basic necessities. Now that's not a world we would want, would we? Thanos' proposal should have been taken. A friend said recently after wading through Bangalore traffic that maybe that dude should have actually been in reality rather than in fiction. My friend would have reached his destination sooner if not for anything.

One of the times when you are overwhelmed with love and just feeling so grateful to life, well, that which at least works for me every time is when I happen to chance upon a video which shows the earth from outer space. A tiny blue dot (cliché) as seen from the outer space, perhaps from the moon or slightly farther. Not as far as mars because it would probably just look like a blue star like how we see the tiny red dot from here. But when I say all this, a vast number of thoughts and reactions start floating in my field of imagination. We are on that tiny blue dot. Like really 'ON' it. We are on a blue dot that's rotating and revolving quite fast. All that we know, all that we remember, all that we concoct, all that we yearn; people whom we love, hate, despise; things that we covet for; the science, the moments we get inspired from, moments we casually live in which inspire others, the ambitions, the quadrillion plans we have, every single fucking thing happens on that blue dot hurtling away. Honestly, it would have been a little comfortable for me if we were close to the northern pole. At least we would stand a chance to 'stand' on a fucking ball. We are almost on one of the sides, close to the horizontal diameter of the sphere. Kinda scary if you imagine it. But yeah, its quite an overwhelming feeling to think that all that has ever happened to us and all that will, has happened on this ball.

Nature, no matter how badly we have ruined it is also fair. Well, we learnt it in school when we were educated with 'survival of the fittest', evolution and the other phenomena that inevitably dictated survival. There were resources and nature decided the one who's able will get it. It was fair. You want it, you fight for it. You don't fight for it, you die. Now the thing that comes to our mind, at least to mine when we say nature is the natural habitat, the supposed co existence of man and animals or plants. Its quite rare that we see earth, its rotation as nature. It is somehow classified into astrophysics, or space science. It is just a natural course of action that has been happening for millions of years. Maybe in other births (suit your belief system here) you were something else, or later after death, you may be reborn into another form of life. Or like Bill Bryson says, it is just atoms that will leave your mortal remains and find some other form to attach themselves to. Well, even that is nature.

What nature has done to us, which is a fair treatment across nature, wealth, looks and sex is give us 24 hours. All of us equally receive 24 hours. If that's not fair, I don't know what is. Its an exact replay of survival of the fittest. You know how to put those 24 hours to use, you live. You don't know, you'll die. Not your mortal self, but you die inside. We see successful people. Of course success is relative. For a guy on a wheelchair, success would be to get cured and play basketball or go for a run. For an entrepreneur, for a musician, for an actor, for a teacher, for a sportsman, for an engineer, for a thinker, for an artiste, for a painter, for a manager, for a bodybuilder, for a scientist, success has its own relative definition. And all the greatest minds we have ever known, the greatest musicians we have ever heard of, the greatest people who became great with whatever they wanted to do it, all of them on the pale blue dot hurtling across the sky did so in the fair amount of 24 hours that they got. The earth never changed its speed a whole lot. A few milliseconds here and there is, well, insignificant. It has always - well, at least as we know, taken 24 hours to complete one rotation. These 24 hours that a Steve Jobs got, an AR Rahman got, a KS Chitra got, a Robert Downey Jr. got, a Vijay Narendra got, are the same. Nothing's changed. Nature's way of playing fair.

I'll leave it at this, a la X files.
Ta!

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