Back home in India. Not quite. In Siddhachal, Thane, Mumbai, India, which is a difference. Disorientation is a function of the imagination. I close my eyes and see Singapore, I expect to smell the faintly aseptic essence of TV rooms and Lounges, and dog-shit, garbage, lead-dust, and other smells violate me. My head is swimming in excrement, at least chemically. Trees are dusty brown, not emerald green, and roads are warty, grey-green, not the frozen, placid sea of concrete. How beautiful, though....not the noisy chaos, not the desecrated earth, the dust-choked trees, but the inert-lipped persistence of the people, the tunneling eyes, the brusque strides. Is it puerile romanticisation, or a sincere expression of my emotions? I might never know, not if I take a path that determines not to care.
The world is infinite, man, infinitesimal. Hence he sees it in different ways. Food nourishes different parts of the body unequally, so do man's views nourish various facets of his thirsting character. I feel I am special because of a simple fact. One day I am in a pure citadel, a jewel on the pacific, the other, in the mountainous end of a rotting, floating city. One day I am among people of engaging innocence and unblemished optimism, the other amongst gritty township's repressed, yoked individuals. I am nourished, no, I am intoxicated.
I might know neither, if I take the path that determines not to care.
But wanting to know is to demand infallible certainty, yearning to experience is to demand omnipresence, insisting on changing is perhaps to demand omnipotence. How I wish I was the collective consciousness, the spirit of the earth, God himself. Then I can do all. The genie says, three wishes I grant you...here, these are my wishes.....that I know all, that I experience all, that I can command all...not as myself, but as all...to be a drop, and an ocean, to be a blade of grass and the vast continent. To be an atom and the universe. Not as little, alienated egos, but as....ineffable expressions of pure spirit.
However, I cannot ask for that.....the genie would not grant me these.....