12 February 2012

The Final Act

I'm shutting this blog. It is bygone, cold, dead, deceased, departed, done for, exanimate, expired, gone,inoperative, invalid, kaput, late, lifeless, lost, nonexistent, obsolete, out of commission, vanished. No, i'm not especially verbose at 3.00 in the morning. A wonderful invention called Google exists.

For those of you who actually follow me, please take the time to visit the new blog:
http://planckconstant.blogspot.in/

The only difference between the two is that, I've put up only my very few favourite posts from this blog on that one. And I've sincerely promised myself that I'm not going to whine anymore. I don't deserve it. So the new blog will have new stuff. Starting tomorrow. And regularly (well as regularly as law school curriculum and my creative genius allows it.)

Also, if any of you get the double pun, I'll be very pleased.

Here is wishing all Paper Boats a very happy journey on the River Styx. Goodbye for now.

10 January 2012

All My Futures

I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story. Let me tell you a tale of destiny and chance.


There was once a star in a galaxy so far away. And on that star lived a single being. A woman so beautiful, so ethereally lovely, that the star, her mother, named her Destiny. For, she could change the destiny of the universe. The stars had deemed it so.
Meanwhile, there where wars raging between galaxies. Stars were dying. The universe was slowly losing its light.
And still Destiny waited for her time. She was but a lone being of a lone race in the whole cosmos. And then she met another like her. In the vast entirety of the universe, there was but one other who looked at her and understood the depth of her isolation. She was called Chance. And even in their similarity they were so very different from each other. They were like opposite poles of a magnet, forever attracted yet never akin.
Chance was against everything Destiny had been brought into the world for. She was but a bastard child, a trick of luck. Destiny undermined the very foundations of Chance’s beliefs. For what was spontaneous in the world, what was free-will, if there was always a Destiny for you?
It is but obvious that these two were from different factions of the warring world.

Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars. And love is the largest war of them all.

For whether it was destiny or chance, these two lonely beings, torn asunder by circumstances and by their innate natures, found in each other sisters. Friends. Soulmates.
And the universe reared upon them with its entire wrath and banished them from each other. For in the politics of the cosmos, enemies could never become friends.
And so our friends decided that to save themselves and to save the universe, they would work great magic. Magic which would allow them to shape the future according to each choice made.
Yet magic as we know rips apart the soul. And so Destiny and Chance vanished forever. Or did they?

Sometimes destiny is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You have to leave it to chance to survive. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones.




PS- You were a tomorrow who became my yesterday. And today, I realise that on distant planets people wish on us, for we are but stars to them.

I have made choices in my life; some of them have led me to where I am now. But even so, every now and then I feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, feels like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I can hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world is hushed at four o'clock in the morning. Don't you think it would be wonderful to get rid of everything and everybody and just go some place where you don't know a soul?

That's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right out of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.

The train of memory starts to move forward. Slowly at first, but gathering speed. The landscape drifts by like the last wisps of a dream. In the early morning hours the train begins to move into the opposite of memory. Into a future time when someone will look back at us now, wondering what our days were like and why we did the things we did. Or why we did not act, as the case might equally be. Someone will be unable to make our lives make sense. The train has no answers, only forward momentum. We open our eyes. It is moving very quickly now. Moving always ahead. It never arrives.

Goodbye.