Man and the Megacity

It's middle of the night...half past one. As I drive down the wide, open roads of the megalithic city, I feel intimidated by its cold vastness. These unwavering, unrelenting sodium vapour lamps cast an orange, shadowless blanket on the roads. The concrete buildings on both sides stand at attention like grim medieval knights dressed in burnt orange armour. But beyond the afterglow lies a vast darkness of the unending urban sprawl.

I am not alone, yet I feel helpless.
I am all alone, yet I feel afraid of someone.

The car feels like a refuge...an escape pod with some semblance of deflector shields..an apparition of safety. The world outside stares me down with its dark, invisible eyes. I can feel them all around me. I try to hide from their gaze by focusing on the trailing brake lights of the stately trailer trucks in front of me. The tyres of my car hungrily gulp down the black tarmac of the toll bridge. They understand how I feel. The river below is a limitless chasm that doesn't seem to end. There is a eerie calm under the star-spangled night sky. They're watching you... (I hope they're watching over me.)

I want these roads to end. I dont want to be a castaway in the middle of civilization anymore. I want to reach my destination. I want to be home -- a place where the space is of my comprehension, the habitat befits my courage; a place where the indifferent city does not creep in -- my oasis in the midst of a mortar desert, my atoll in the middle of a dark, electric ocean.

Creatio ex nihilo

Perhaps...perhaps I had a bit too much to drink. Perhaps I needed the courage. Lying on some horizontal surface, in a drunken haze, with eyes wide open, I'm numb, yet aware. I cant feel anything, I cant move a limb. I am acutely aware that if wolves came and chewed on my toes, I wouldn't be able to shoo them away. I feel like a heavy mountain that is made of grey puffy clouds. I wish to pass out, but cant. In this cloud-like floating state, I'm afforded an immense clarity, and I wonder. What is this? Where am I? Where did I come from? Where did all this come from?

Relax. Let the dust inside my head settle down. Or the dizzying heights of extra-cosmic time travel will make me puke.

But wandering is the natural state of a mind - drunk or sober. And I flowed towards flashes of Shyam Benegal's Bharat Ek Khoj...hymns of Rig Veda...there was no existence, nor non-existence, no air, no water, no space, neither life nor death. Where was it? What covered it? There was nothing but formless void.

Creatio ex nihilo.

The simplest explanation that man could conjure up was God -- that God created everything. Even my drunk mind asks a simple question to take the air out of creationism -- Who created God? Kaput.

Alien spores, interplanetary relocation, evolution...nothing really answers the fundamental question -- Where from?

Maya... It's a thought-cloud floating around, engulfing the entire creation. It's a snapshot of nobody's dream. A billion light years in a nanosecond. Its existence is no proof of its existence. It's no one's vision, yet it's visible. It grows from nowhere. It reaches to no end. Perhaps it began where it ends. Perhaps life is a freak of nature. Perhaps nature is a freak of time. Perhaps time is a freak accident. Perhaps there is no perhaps. And I'm none the wiser.

Maybe it's our conception of time that is the root cause of all our enquiry-driven angst. But kya karen? My creaking joints have a metaphysics of their own.

Sleep glorious sleep...

Mediocrity

He is bobbing like an unnamed cork
in a sea of mediocrity.
And there is a tempest of inanity
thrashing him about.
There's a storm of inefficients
lashing him about.

The behemoth of a system --
A spherical rock-mountain of rigidities,
A juggernaut of ghastly proportions --
It pardons those who abide,
Protects those who lie,
Nurtures those who shirk and
deify its mammoth edifice.

Mediocre is the new norm.
It's the garb of official uniform.
Mediocres love mediocres.
And despise everything out of box.
In the warm, cozy embrace of their likes,
Inefficiency is lulled to sleep
with sugar-coated excuse pills.
Ah! You don't recognise
the efficiency of inefficiency?
Cap your imagination buddy.
Or off to Section '84!

The boulder rolls on inexorably.
Dragging the coins
of the unsuspecting benefactors
in its wake --
They who out of humble reverence,
believe -- Mass Is the New God.

If money is the new token of your worth,
Once, I was afraid to die mediocre,
Today, I'm afraid to live poor.