THOSE TIMES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There are times I wonder. Wonder if anything matters. Does my wondering matter? Do I matter? Star Trek wanted us to believe that space was the final frontier. So, do frontiers matter? And if they do, why would Mr. Kane utter a ‘Rosebud’ symbolising his sleighing days as the happiest, when he was dying? It might appear from this analogy, that, perhaps ‘being happy’ matters. But does it, really? I have an unflinching faith that since this was the simplest answer mankind could find, it has stuck to it. Were you not HAPPY when you chatted for hours with your first love? But does it really matter, now that you are treading paths as different as they could be and you having a very strong hunch she’s chatting away those very same hours with some other of your kind? Were you not happy when you went on that vacation with your family? But you always had to come back to your abode, now very much dusty, and clean it up. The romance always fades; the honeymoon always ends, doesn’t it? But you have SWEET MEMORIES, I hear you say!!! So what do you do of those? Go into a trance? Use them as a bulwark against bad days? As some sort of a rosy view for difficult times. Wouldn’t they BIAS you for INACTION? Wouldn’t you be better off shedding off that slumber and delving into the problem?

I am a believer in the value of relationships, but at times as these, I even wonder about the futility of these. In contemporary times, where individuality is celebrated, are these but traps for a more comfortable and less stressful existence? Does love matter? In the early days of my first romance, I didn’t quite agree with Harivansh Rai Bachchan when his poems asked people not to mourn too long on the loss of a close aide and as FASTRACK now tells us to move on. But experience and reason have made me reason better now. You lose a loved one, well, numerous people do, each day, each moment. Does it change the universe one bit? It changes your universe, huh. Well, how long then? And do you not adapt yourself to your newer environment? You do, of course, commemorate the moment of the loss, but there are numerous other moments when you don’t, when it matters not one bit. And various worthy beings (who do matter, partly if not as a whole) have even faded without ever getting a favoured response to their love. I could very much relate to Vijay’s character in Pyaasa, when he questions the sort of people who ever got love. It might sound remarkably hedonistic but I often wonder if we value love, as much as we do, only so that we can escape the pangs of loneliness or have a companion to share experiences or bad times. And if it is so, does it really matter if one has the love of one or the other, few or many, or perhaps none at all?

It might sound like the tragic vision of Ancient Greeks about humans being fated to die without knowledge of any world transcending purpose. Well, I meant it to. It is indeed the greatest tragedy of all times. Countless men have come and gone, deeply immersed in shallow water of ignorance (read BLISS for them). Countless men will come and go, worried just about a beautiful wife, pension and SOCIETY. Such a colossal waste on immaterial issues!!!! In such times of fury, I am willing to accept no Martin Hansen-like consolations of ‘nobody wins’ and sort and neither that wisdom comes with age and that time is the answer. Bentham supposedly read the History of England at age 3, a seemingly implausible attainment. We are being told for ages now that you are just an actor in this world, which is but a stage. All you need to do is play your part well and not worry of the consequences. There is a higher power to take care of such intricacies. You can just hope for a final union with that higher power. But this is leaving too much in hands of fate. So much not in control of your life. Is it not better to take control then? I sincerely believe that if we pursue harder enough and longer enough, we could make it matter.

Remember Guy Pearce in Memento. Creating puzzles for himself in order to give his life some sort of a purpose and direction. Are we all, not in the same league? Whatever we do, whatever we aspire to attain, is it all just to give some purpose to life. It might be like taking NIHILISM to the extreme, but would we not be better off in quest for the purpose of life, instead of giving a purpose to it????

I am not always this critical and judgmental and do take use of a lot of crutches to support my life. These thoughts are of those times I wonder. I do not know if I will succeed in getting a single answer, but back to square one, I am certain that I MATTER and undoubtedly those times matter, THOSE TIMES THAT I WONDER.