Skip to main content

One Way Ticket to the Moon


Given a choice, will I go to Moon or Mars? Moon, of course. Haven’t I always been there? Been a loony, I mean. There was always something wrong with me right from childhood. At the age of 25 I landed on the client’s chair in a psychiatrist’s office. Nothing much came of it. Remember Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye? After a whole year’s psychoanalysis, he remained the same: as loony as he ever was. Some of my benefactors in Shillong put me through a five-year psychoanalysis with almost everyone in the place experimenting on my madness as if I were a drum placed in the marketplace for anyone to beat a rhythm while passing by. Nothing happened again. I remained as loony as ever, if not worse.

Now as an old man, a senior citizen by my government’s reckoning [which simply means I pay more for insurances], I feel loonier than ever. If earlier I felt out of place in my nearby surroundings, now I feel like a total misfit in my entire country. I can’t understand what my fellow country people are doing nowadays. I think they are insane. But that’s not possible; the majority can never be insane. The majority make the rules. Loonies like me scoff at those rules. I mean, I can’t go around lynching people. I’m a loony, you see.

I belong to the moon whose one side is always dark.

Actually NO. I mean one side of the moon is not really dark. The sunlight falls equally on all sides of the moon. But the sane people on the earth can see only one side. They think that the other side is dark just because they never see it.

I belong to the dark side of the moon.

Send me there by all means. Let me fly away from all my yesterdays.

PS. This post is part of Blogchatter Blog Hop.

 

Comments

  1. To the moon!!, ahh I wanna come too

    And yes, none can see the other side, that doesn't prove it's dark on the other, your feelings are totally understandable
    Truth be told, I am a loony too, feeling misfit, looked as something different or weird.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hahaha. Taking you along will be fun with you trying to teach me and I trying to teach you lessons that neither of us won't want. 😊

      Delete
  2. Hari OM
    Interesting - I would opt for Mars. The further away I can get from this lunatic planet the better... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I once dreamt about going gallivanting in the infinite and reaching the edge of the cosmos. But i had to return. This is the only planet for us!

      Delete
  3. Let me fly away from all of my yesterdays...a beautiful way to end a post that meant as much between the lines as it did by itself.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. More often than not, I'm left wondering who is really sane in this world. If majority were left to decide affairs, there'd be only fish in my kitchen as there are more cats in my house than humans.

      Delete
  4. The Anonymous message was my me, Mayuri at Sirimiri

    ReplyDelete
  5. Loved 'I belong to the dark side of the moon.'

    ReplyDelete
  6. Enjoyed. We are all loonies in our own ways, aren't we?

    ReplyDelete
  7. It would be interesting to see the what the earth looks like from the moon and also what views the dark side has to offer. :)
    I'd like to go to see the red rocks on Mars too. :D

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Maybe science will give you a chance to make the visit, you know. The way the technology is leaping...

      Delete
  8. That concluding para was so evocative and thoughtful!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Well, a different take on teh prompt and you association with the moon.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r