Things happen. People who may be doing the same thing everyday for as long as you can remember suddenly take to doing very different things. Signposts disappear, and they leave a vacuum. Things that apperaed absolutely ceratin yesterday no longer remain as predictable anymore. More importantly, you no longer remain the same person--you chop, you change. Sometimes these internal adjustments harmonize with the external mutations and then people call you mature and happy and successful. More importantly, most of us learn to enact such a harmonization with time, often with varying degree of success, if only to keep repeatig to ourselves that we are not so different after all. Deep inside, we all know what we are inside is neither completely in tune with what we appear to be outside, nor would it ever be. May be like political economy, there is an economy of personality projection too, one that deals with learning to make optimum use of limited supply of this personality harmonization.
Well, even for a renegade Bengali like me quoting a bit of Tagore often comes as a great rescue in moments when I struggle for words. In one of his most popular--and prfound--songs he spoke of--and to-- God as finitely infinite. This is a challenge we all are socialized to undertake-to harmonize the finite with the infinite in a vein attempt to mimic the almighty, whoever or whatever s/he is. We are all a bit like the Khuro in Sukumar Ray's Khuror Kol--we keep running after the impossible because it looks very tempting. To be sure, this is how we keep excelling ourselves and keep raising the bar. Someday, we are tarined to believe, the final frontier will be crossed-we would know all that is knowable and do all that is doable. But you see the fun is that the distance between Khuro's Kol-with its sackful of mouthwatering delicacies--and his reach will always remain constant. Yes, Khuro does ceratinly manage to cover in one and a half hour the distnce he would otherwise have covered in no less than five hours, but is he any closer to the Monda-Mithai than when he started off?
That, my friend, is what life is all about. You set out to do something with great vigor, having already been trained hard to imagine the goal as eminently achievable when you start. You run hard and pass many milestones on the way. You reach destinations no one has reached before, you do things no one has done before. People look at you as a pioneer and keep gawking at your audacity and so on. But more often than not you realize this is not what you had set out to do. Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans, said Lenon. From my own experience, I would add that both good and bad things happen to you when you least expect them. When you think you have made fullproof arrangements for something and that nothing would anymore go wrong, you discover the Murphy's law as well. Mercifully though, good tidings too come precisely on moments you think you have done your best and that nothing more can be done to save the situation.
So what is it about Khuro's escapades that is so ennobling? That if we stop worrying about precise outsomes, we are all in some way or the other breaking new grounds. So what if this is not the ground that I had set out to break? May be I am making it easy for someone somewhere. May be someone somewhere is doing things that'll make things easy for me. May be we are all engaged in a gigantic cooperartive enterprise without our direct knowledge. The feeling does probably lighten our burdens of personal failure a wee bit. Funny isn't it? I mean if you begin to see things this way, things and signposts that appear to disappear before you might just be making a grand appearence in someone else's life. Now that is seriously funny because then somebody else somewhere might be losing his milesstones so that you discover yours all over again. But are they the ones that had disappeared to start with? I don't know. I'm just relieved that today is only a passing phase and tomorrow I'll have new milestones to look forward to. Yeah, Khuro and his Kol make a hell lot of sense to me. And promise.
N.B.-Please read all the 'we's as I. I have no right to impose my premises and my conclusions on anyone else. The shameless humbug that I am, I always use I when talking about good things and 'we's when writing about failures and inadequacies, as if I do all the right things and others mess up my good works. As a matter of fact it is more often the other way round and I jolly well accept it.
Well, even for a renegade Bengali like me quoting a bit of Tagore often comes as a great rescue in moments when I struggle for words. In one of his most popular--and prfound--songs he spoke of--and to-- God as finitely infinite. This is a challenge we all are socialized to undertake-to harmonize the finite with the infinite in a vein attempt to mimic the almighty, whoever or whatever s/he is. We are all a bit like the Khuro in Sukumar Ray's Khuror Kol--we keep running after the impossible because it looks very tempting. To be sure, this is how we keep excelling ourselves and keep raising the bar. Someday, we are tarined to believe, the final frontier will be crossed-we would know all that is knowable and do all that is doable. But you see the fun is that the distance between Khuro's Kol-with its sackful of mouthwatering delicacies--and his reach will always remain constant. Yes, Khuro does ceratinly manage to cover in one and a half hour the distnce he would otherwise have covered in no less than five hours, but is he any closer to the Monda-Mithai than when he started off?
That, my friend, is what life is all about. You set out to do something with great vigor, having already been trained hard to imagine the goal as eminently achievable when you start. You run hard and pass many milestones on the way. You reach destinations no one has reached before, you do things no one has done before. People look at you as a pioneer and keep gawking at your audacity and so on. But more often than not you realize this is not what you had set out to do. Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans, said Lenon. From my own experience, I would add that both good and bad things happen to you when you least expect them. When you think you have made fullproof arrangements for something and that nothing would anymore go wrong, you discover the Murphy's law as well. Mercifully though, good tidings too come precisely on moments you think you have done your best and that nothing more can be done to save the situation.
So what is it about Khuro's escapades that is so ennobling? That if we stop worrying about precise outsomes, we are all in some way or the other breaking new grounds. So what if this is not the ground that I had set out to break? May be I am making it easy for someone somewhere. May be someone somewhere is doing things that'll make things easy for me. May be we are all engaged in a gigantic cooperartive enterprise without our direct knowledge. The feeling does probably lighten our burdens of personal failure a wee bit. Funny isn't it? I mean if you begin to see things this way, things and signposts that appear to disappear before you might just be making a grand appearence in someone else's life. Now that is seriously funny because then somebody else somewhere might be losing his milesstones so that you discover yours all over again. But are they the ones that had disappeared to start with? I don't know. I'm just relieved that today is only a passing phase and tomorrow I'll have new milestones to look forward to. Yeah, Khuro and his Kol make a hell lot of sense to me. And promise.
N.B.-Please read all the 'we's as I. I have no right to impose my premises and my conclusions on anyone else. The shameless humbug that I am, I always use I when talking about good things and 'we's when writing about failures and inadequacies, as if I do all the right things and others mess up my good works. As a matter of fact it is more often the other way round and I jolly well accept it.
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