"I" am Ravi."I" like writing."I" am a Bengali."I" am studying to be a Mechanical Engineer.
But who is this "I" and what does it point to?Is there some entity out there that possesses the "exclusive rights" over this particular permutation of attributes which make "me" me?Do all the I's point to the same thing and if so,why?If not,does I really mean anything?Is it not just like any other letter of the alphabet except that it bears the misfortune of being the ultimate source and cause of every activity,the syllable that spews all Ego.Many would disagree and it appears that they have been in this state of constant denial since the very invention of language.The writer of this post recently read that perhaps,the oldest word in the English language is I.Each one of us,human beings is an ego-maniac to some degree.We might not tell it aloud,but we love to take responsibility for our actions,good or evil,it makes us feel alive.Life is a huge playground,we may win or loose,play till the end or get injured in between but we do not like to sit on the bench and watch things rolling past us like a movieAnd amidst all these actions,stands "I" ,like a beacon ,reminding us of how lonely we are in the choices we make and how we are always caught in the web of circumstances,trapped like 'bugs in the amber",no one ever bothering to redeem us,simply because no one can.
Being fanatically individualist,he would have been really happy if things were really the way he has just described .How wonderful it is to think that "I" am truly the center of the universe,just like how the men of the Renaissance had postulated.How wonderful it is to know that everything you ever did carries in itself the mark of your free will .That brief period in self -aggrandizing bliss did not last long.Ravi was reading random articles on conjoined twins when he discovered this shocking picture of two babies conjoined in the head.What was this,a brutal anomaly or a revealing omen?Not that he hadn't seen it before ,but this time it had brought to him the most disturbing of epiphanies.These two actually shared a brain,the temple where "I" resides and thus shared "I."They could have shared anything else,they could have shared a heart,a limb,kidneys,stomach,anything! but they shared the brain,suddenly "I",the origin of one,pointed to two ,"I"seemed to loose it's hallowed standing,it was sheer treachery on its part.How stupid he felt to be living on a delusion for his twenty long years.He felt like burning his beloved novel of adolescence-the Fountainhead.John Galt looked a living mass of lie.He felt like reaching out to Galt's heart and extinguishing the soul out of it.It did not deserve to exist,A blatant betrayal suffered at the hands of what he glorified to be the most novel of virtues-individuality.That next day,he attended all classes,had all my meals,wrote every word that came out of every professor's mouth and slept on time.He even went a step ahead and contributed most willingly to the most banal of all conversations,and took great pleasure to be classed ,even if for an instance as "normal" and "sensible".A return to docility appeared to be the surest expression of a rebellion against the Ego.It was with its soothing revelations,though.When one child in the photo grimaced when the other was pained,it betrayed to him the wellspring of human values like charity and compassion.The inevitable fact that all human beings are connected to each other just like how these two were,now stared into his face.Paulo Coelho's concept of the Universal Soul no longer sounded so mushy to him.And taking the liberty to widen the scope of Jung's ideas,it seemed the only consciousness is the collective one.
Being fanatically individualist,he would have been really happy if things were really the way he has just described .How wonderful it is to think that "I" am truly the center of the universe,just like how the men of the Renaissance had postulated.How wonderful it is to know that everything you ever did carries in itself the mark of your free will .That brief period in self -aggrandizing bliss did not last long.Ravi was reading random articles on conjoined twins when he discovered this shocking picture of two babies conjoined in the head.What was this,a brutal anomaly or a revealing omen?Not that he hadn't seen it before ,but this time it had brought to him the most disturbing of epiphanies.These two actually shared a brain,the temple where "I" resides and thus shared "I."They could have shared anything else,they could have shared a heart,a limb,kidneys,stomach,anything! but they shared the brain,suddenly "I",the origin of one,pointed to two ,"I"seemed to loose it's hallowed standing,it was sheer treachery on its part.How stupid he felt to be living on a delusion for his twenty long years.He felt like burning his beloved novel of adolescence-the Fountainhead.John Galt looked a living mass of lie.He felt like reaching out to Galt's heart and extinguishing the soul out of it.It did not deserve to exist,A blatant betrayal suffered at the hands of what he glorified to be the most novel of virtues-individuality.That next day,he attended all classes,had all my meals,wrote every word that came out of every professor's mouth and slept on time.He even went a step ahead and contributed most willingly to the most banal of all conversations,and took great pleasure to be classed ,even if for an instance as "normal" and "sensible".A return to docility appeared to be the surest expression of a rebellion against the Ego.It was with its soothing revelations,though.When one child in the photo grimaced when the other was pained,it betrayed to him the wellspring of human values like charity and compassion.The inevitable fact that all human beings are connected to each other just like how these two were,now stared into his face.Paulo Coelho's concept of the Universal Soul no longer sounded so mushy to him.And taking the liberty to widen the scope of Jung's ideas,it seemed the only consciousness is the collective one.
He looked back at his small personal history with heavy distaste instead of pride.Peering harder at what he thought to be some of his greatest acts of self-assertion,he saw now how each one of them can be traced back to the most trivial of incidents.If he was allowed to go back and change just one moment of his past,he was pretty sure he would end up as quiet an antithesis of what he was now.It dawned on him what the Joker means when he calls himself the agent of chaos .Actually,we all are.Just that only the Joker is aware of it. But,do not worry ,He will not turn into Joker, he will keep writing many such crazy posts.He finds a lot of solace in making literature out of his own tragedy and he thinks it is exactly what Theodore Melnechuk is trying to do in these beautiful lines of poetry:
Our puppet strings are hard to see,
So we perceive ourselves as free,
Convinced that no mere objects could,
behave in terms of bad and good.
............................
We seem to from a nested set,
with each the last one's marionette,
who, if you ask him, would insist
that he is the last ventriloquist.
May Rene Des Cartes turn in his grave.He was wrong,because "I" think he was. :)
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