Skip to main content

Emptiness


Some days are like that: vacuous.  Nothing stirs in the consciousness.  Even the annual budget fails to rouse the spirit.  Nothing matters really.  “Earth to earth and dust to dust,” the cleric at the funeral service makes a ghostly apparition in the consciousness filling its foreground with what William James described as “a sense of surrender to the empty passing of  time.” 

Shadows walk about in the haze of moonlight that has turned marmoreal for no reason.  Reason becomes a spectre that has put on dark goggles and a mocking smirk and gallops through the dying embers in your consciousness. Clop-clop-clippety-clop.

Emptiness is unbearable.  Even if it is the DNA of life.

Fill it.  With whatever you like.  Words, for example.  As I’m doing.






Comments

  1. Sir, there are people who have nothing to fill it!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That would be painful! I've seen most people filling it with money, some with power and a few with dreams.

      Delete
  2. Wonderfully articulated - the bitter fact of life struck at odd times!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's like you've gone empty all of a sudden though there are a lot of noises all around and even inside.

      Delete
  3. I feel that very often - and only words seem to bring some solace. But sometimes they fail too....I sometimes wish that the carefree nature of a child would be a constant as we grow up but alas ! that doesn't happen....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The child continues to survive and that also creates a conflict! The child in the adult is incompatible with the society.

      Delete
  4. I can so relate to what you say Sir. There are days when I react to the happenings around me for the sole reason that it is expected of me while inside I feel blank. Its like a vacuum. I function because it is something to be done. I guess it is a phase of life and even this shall pass as the famous saying goes :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It will pass, no doubt. In the meanwhile, it's a consolation to know that there are many who experience similar situations.

      Delete
  5. I dread that feeling. It kills life, while the man lives on. even if temporarily.
    Just like Renu has said, I do things because they have to be done, without feeling anything but it happens with me only when I am hurt.. in a way that neither I am able to cope up nor am able to let it go.
    Otherwise, mercifully, emptiness inside me is a rare thing.. In fact, I am too full with matters ranging from cosmic to trivial! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good you have a range of things from cosmic to trivial to fill the void. I have to invent things.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...