Birthday Contemplation

My Birthday Contemplation

Today is my birthday. So I decided to dedicate this little essay to myself, after all I have lived for a quarter of a century.

I was sitting in my balcony last night, and reading. Surprisingly, my music system was quiet, and the air was cool. I suddenly got this urge to listen to one song in particular. It was 11.55 pm.

It was a song by the master Jagjith Singh. I coolly lit a cigarette and sat down on the floor of my room. I started thinking. The moon was shining, unlike the season. And I was moved by a sensation so very new to me.

Here I was, born today, 25 years ago, in some strange place. I was created by love or rather by an act that symbolized love. I had grown in snug intervals, always breaking into the open to find a new path ahead. Sometimes I grew like a newly sprouted seed, and then sometimes I grew into a strong solitary tree, and then sometimes into a creeper that longs for support and will perish in the absence of it.

I was a man now, in every right of the word. I made a living on my own. I aspired for a family of my own. I longed to be loved by women. I longed to create, value and forms. I guess it is so much easier for women to create out of love. The most primitive and highest being bearing a child. But man has to love and explore and create to be satisfied.

In the course of the contemplation, I realized something. I had casually killed a fly that tried to bite me. And I saw many other flies too. The one that I had killed fell limply to the ground, while ants were gathering for a feast. Isn’t it a big cycle? Life feeding on death and death feeding on life. If the both can consume each other, then aren’t life and death the same? The creation of something, maybe love, joy, emotion….

When I live I will create what can be felt now. When I die I will be God. I would have created a new life for the world, by being absent from it. The world would be in a new dimension in the absence of one of its members. I would have reshaped its destiny, even by my death, just as I had altered it by my insignificant birth. I would have escaped from a thousand sorrows, missed a million joys and a multitude of illusions.

Life and death play parallels. Man kills a thousand animals during his lifetime and maybe even a few human beings. Man brings new men into this world, as death simultaneously takes them out of the physical dimension. But where do we all go? Where does death lead us? It cant be that a man dies and its just like a fuse that gets burnt and the electricity just vanishes, lost forever. Life will regenerate into life, even when death play the fiddle close to our ears. Pain will regenerate into pleasure, and pleasure into pain. It’s a big circle, with many concentric circles within, endless. And in the middle is the man, the Supreme Being, with the consciousness and the knowledge of life. He is the perfection towards which our souls move, till deaths do us apart from life. And man will be perfect after death, because death is perfection in our harried souls, the culmination of our strivings and supercilious consciousness