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

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...

The music of an ageing man

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins. Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail. That’s how some people are, I console myself. So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely re...

Mahatma Ayyankali’s Relevance Today

About a year before he left for Chicago (1893), Swami Vivekananda visited Kerala and described the state (then Travancore-Cochin-Malabar princely states) as a “lunatic asylum.” The spiritual philosopher was shocked by the brutality of the caste system that was in practice in the region. The peasant caste of Pulayas , for example, had to keep a distance of 90 feet from Brahmins and 64 feet from Nairs. The low caste people were denied most human rights. They could not access education, enter temple premises, or buy essentials from markets. They were not even considered as humans. Ayyankali (1863-1941) was a Pulaya leader who emerged to confront the situation. I just finished reading a biography of his in Malayalam and was highly impressed by the contributions of the great man who came to be known in Kerala as the Mahatma of the Dalits . What prompted me to order a copy of the biography was an article I read in a Malayalam periodical last week. The article described how Ayyankali...

Duryodhana Returns

Duryodhana was bored of his centuries-long exile in Mythland and decided to return to his former kingdom. Arnab Gau-Swami had declared Bihar the new Kurukshetra and so Duryodhana chose Bihar for his adventure. And Bihar did entertain him with its modern enactment of the Mahabharata. Alliances broke, cousins pulled down each other, kings switched sides without shame, and advisers looked like modern-day Shakunis with laptops. Duryodhana’s curiosity was more than piqued. There’s more masala here than in the old Hastinapura. He decided to make a deep study of this politics so that he could conclusively prove that he was not a villain but a misunderstood statesman ahead of his time. The first lesson he learns is that everyone should claim that they are the Pandavas, and portray everyone else as the Kauravas. Every party claims they stand for dharma, the people, and justice. And then plot to topple someone, eliminate someone else, distort history, fabricate expedient truths, manipulate...