Originally written on: Sept 20, 2002
You know what? I think I am going mad. Actually, I’m pretty sure. It’s one thing to lose hold of yourself but quite another to appreciate the reality. It is an altogether different, albeit bizarre feeling than any other, to know it and then to analyze it and write about it. Let me warn you that should you choose to continue reading beyond this point, you really ought to have a cast iron hold over your sensibilities.
It is a mad, mad world stuffed full of madder people. Madness is an epidemic and spreads like a raging bushfire in the Central Australian desert. It is also a vice that grips you and throttles the very last ounce of your resolve to fight it. The mire that it is pulls you deeper with every renewed effort you make to oppose it.
You never realize it until you are in it up to your neck and it’s only when it rises to your nostrils and asphyxiates you that you know you’ve been sold a dummy. Of course, it is too late then. You have long before stepped over the line of no return and yearn as much as you may; there is no prospect of going back.
In your last effort, however feeble, to get away from its tentacles, you clamor in pain and wonder why it happened to you. Why did you change and not know it. Every new day, you changed as did people and the world around you. Why did the sweet, little innocent thing everybody in the neighborhood loved to fondle and pet turn into a scheming and conniving Mata-Hari, always looking to cheat thy neighbor off his or her legitimate dues? It didn’t stop there did it? Oh no! You had to prove to the world that there’s none better than you, no matter what the ask. For that you had to use methods fair and foul, mostly foul, to upstage your unassuming victim.
This being a world of paradoxes, the victim is not always the hunted. Not hapless, he is just like you. Every good turn may or may not beget another but one bad will beget many worse. The hunter becomes the hunted and then has to escape the snare he himself set up, only by the skin of his teeth. Nary a chance that in the process you don’t lose a few years of your life and a little sanity. I tell you, it is a vicious circle. The pity is you get so engrossed in your drama of one-upmanship, that you don’t even realize the physical, mental, emotional and (in-) human metamorphosis that has happened to you.
Shakespeare aptly wrote, “All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” We could, at least choose our roles or perhaps the way we execute them. We proclaim until our throats bleed that we belong to the unique brotherhood of the human race. That, amidst all differences, we are the same. We united in our efforts to overthrow powerful dictators. We unite in an effort to protect the environment. We unite in support of our cricket team. Yet, ironically, even as we repeat our oneness like somnambulists in a delirium, our throats literally bleed in cutthroat rivalry and competition. All’s fair in love and war. Really? Is there no love lost between you and me??
I forewarned you that I am slowly slipping off the rocker. I am sure, by now you are too. That makes two of us in a unique bond of difference in this world that is full of surprises.
- The End
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