Dream of the prehistoric
As I was riding from office, I encountered a dark stretch of road. Coniferous trees rose up to my left, and behind them, faintly lighting up the dark sky, was the beautiful crescent moon!
Immediately my memory rushed back to college days. We'd be returning home during vacations, a few of us, in a second-class sleeper coach. Sharing the side berths, we'd watch countless miles race past in the pitch darkness of the night. Hundreds of villages, shrouded in complete darkness, or sometimes faintly lit by the moonlight. Village after village - in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa - still and silent in the darkness, the dreaminess broken only by light from a small town or a factory somewhere. Sometimes, a Chilika Lake sparkling, shimmering as the moonlight bounced off it's dancing waves!
How I used to wish that I could jump out of the train and spend the night in the midst of that darkness and silence! The moonlight would feel hypnotic, calling me away from the crowd and the chaos and the bright city lights! There was some enchantment in that primitive setting - Mother Earth, darkness, celestial lights, and a lost human being - hasn't that scene been enacted millions of time before civilization took over? Wasn't that the reality in which humans have existed for millions of years ?
No, there's no way I could go back thousands of years in time, however hard I wished. The lights in my city never go off together. When electric lights in my locality are off due to a power-cut, trillions of lights from the other localities light up the sky and the clouds. I haven't seen a black night sky for a long, long time. A dull orange glow prevails. And a hum from millions of motors fill our senses.
I could only let my imagination take me away to the beautiful place where I want to be. Vast, empty space in front of me - a sea, or a desert maybe? Soothing sounds of waves lapping on the shore, or wind whispering through the shrubs - and a black sky, lit by uncountable stars and a crescent moon. I could spend nights after nights looking at those stars and speaking to them, as the nature sang to me. I could make wishes as the shooting starts flew past - without the slightest care for them to come true. How badly I want to belong to this reality !
I would take you with me too, if you wished. Would you love simplicity and solitude and darkness as much as I would? Would you forget the artificial net spun around us, and come away with me into the eternal reality?
Immediately my memory rushed back to college days. We'd be returning home during vacations, a few of us, in a second-class sleeper coach. Sharing the side berths, we'd watch countless miles race past in the pitch darkness of the night. Hundreds of villages, shrouded in complete darkness, or sometimes faintly lit by the moonlight. Village after village - in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa - still and silent in the darkness, the dreaminess broken only by light from a small town or a factory somewhere. Sometimes, a Chilika Lake sparkling, shimmering as the moonlight bounced off it's dancing waves!
How I used to wish that I could jump out of the train and spend the night in the midst of that darkness and silence! The moonlight would feel hypnotic, calling me away from the crowd and the chaos and the bright city lights! There was some enchantment in that primitive setting - Mother Earth, darkness, celestial lights, and a lost human being - hasn't that scene been enacted millions of time before civilization took over? Wasn't that the reality in which humans have existed for millions of years ?
No, there's no way I could go back thousands of years in time, however hard I wished. The lights in my city never go off together. When electric lights in my locality are off due to a power-cut, trillions of lights from the other localities light up the sky and the clouds. I haven't seen a black night sky for a long, long time. A dull orange glow prevails. And a hum from millions of motors fill our senses.
I could only let my imagination take me away to the beautiful place where I want to be. Vast, empty space in front of me - a sea, or a desert maybe? Soothing sounds of waves lapping on the shore, or wind whispering through the shrubs - and a black sky, lit by uncountable stars and a crescent moon. I could spend nights after nights looking at those stars and speaking to them, as the nature sang to me. I could make wishes as the shooting starts flew past - without the slightest care for them to come true. How badly I want to belong to this reality !
I would take you with me too, if you wished. Would you love simplicity and solitude and darkness as much as I would? Would you forget the artificial net spun around us, and come away with me into the eternal reality?
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