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| Halt |
“A huge
clock was hanging against a foggy backdrop, and a small kid was getting
restless at its rapid speed. The boy grew anxious with each passing second and eventually
jumped onto the minute’s hand of the clock. Its lever and pulleys were so
strong that the boy started to move along with it. The poor child was sweating
in fright and angst but he could not succeed, eventually the clock rang with a
very shrill sound, and the boy got up from his dream”.
It was a classic scene from a 1992 Classic movie ‘Abhayam’
.Although more than twenty years have passed; movie buffs still remember it with
nostalgia.
Now, we live in an era of ‘too many’. There is excess of
information everywhere but we can’t remember anything from anywhere, be it
music, book, events, cinema, serial or event called life. We forget a movie; we
forget the song we were singing along, we forget the name of next door neighbor
or colleagues soon after they leave the place and so on and on. Where is the
problem? Is there a dearth of real talent today? Or it’s a mass amnesia that is
affecting all of us.
Few days ago while interacting with a eight year old kid
I got to know that this guy has never observed that there are thorns in the roses
(roses that he see sometime in the park and mostly in fathers laptop). And when
his mother tried to explain what rose are all about the boy exclaimed ‘So,
roses smell like our bathing soap? Boy, Boy! That’s not the end, his father
said that last fortnight the boy had argument with his father when he said that
cow gives us milk, to the boy it is the supermarket salesmen that gives us
milk!
We
laughed and lectured about where these new generations are heading for? (Denial and Projection the very basic human nature) and tended to forgot everything
soon after.
After
that when I observed my own relationship with nature, I have to admit that even
I have not been close enough with the rose that blossoms on my balcony tub
every season. I have been busy with my office work, tv shows, Smartphone,
social networking, I pad, traffic jam, family and social responsibility en all
in such a way that I never got any time to be intimate with the basic feeling
of a human being.
Not
only me, most of today’s so called modern men are having the same problem. We
are so busy and preoccupied every time, As a result we read but forgot what it
is about, we see movie but don’t remember anything, and we listen to music but
could not understand the lyrics and melody. So in short we have transformed
into a virtual generation without feelings.
In this
year’s April fool day Google launched an application just to laugh at our
helplessness of our virtual situation: Google nose: an application that
promises online smell!
We may
laugh out and ignore these examples of ‘Supermarket
salesmen giving us milk’ or April fool Joke of ‘Google nose’ but we tend to forget this are slap on our so called modern
grandeur.
Most of
us are celebrating this sans feeling nectarous state as a mark of modern time
and those who are complaining like me are as helpless like the child
protagonist of movie I was referring to in the very beginning.
Traumatized
with the pressure of every contemporary child’s life-home work, school stress,
parental expectation the boy doesn’t want the night to finish .Hence nightmare
haunts the poor chap each and every night.
The boy
as worried as all of us with this speed of modern life trying to halt this
clock of mechanical motion.
