Thursday, April 16, 2009

I met Me

I woke up early this morning. It was barely 5 am. I was cold. Ankit leaves the window open as its usually stuffy and hot because of two people, a refrigerator and a laptop running 24/7 in a small room made for a single person!

I could feel the cold settling on my skin, its familiar yet such a strange feeling. I was not shivering, I was warm on the bed but on my face and arms I knew I was cold. The curtain fluttered in intermittent gushes and I gazed at the ever bright street lights of Paris. Through the cover of the trees came this shimmering flash of light, periodic. Its almost the rapid eye movement sort of a feeling, you know you are awake but at any moment you would be in the dreams again! My eyes were heavy and I was cold!

Object of Curiosity! the periodic flash of light..... Got my head spinning and as it happens with 5yr olds, I couldn't sleep. I pushed myself up on the elbow, waited for the periodic period; strange as it seems, it took longer than the usual for it to appear again or was it just me observing!

A lot of things kept me thinking. I don't even remember all of them. But I clearly remember me telling myself, record yourself. I almost all of a sudden put myself into the third person's perspective. Or should I say that my consciousness was in the third person. I now saw a boy looking out of a window, tracking a changing light. I remembered the documentary on Hiroshima I saw last night, the Coldplay song "Talk" was running through my head. I thought about why was I looking, what was I waiting for. I knew it was all but an insignificant flash of light. I could feel my head grow heavy and I was cold, yet I was looking out of the window.

I asked myself, what drives you now. I was curious about the flash, I was more curious about why I was curious. Its something you most rarely, if ever, experience. A flash of light! that's all it took to get my head spinning. I've heard they say a lot of what goes around in your head is the expression of what you see around yourself. I was thinking about thinking. I was curious about curiosity. I have never concentrated this hard on this ever before.

I was driven into deeper thought. I was thinking about man's essential nature: The explorer. The curious. Had I just struck a cord with a fundamental instinct at 5am on a cold morning? Had I that gush of a feeling that had our ancestors come from being hunter gatherers to flight pioneers to space explorers to blog writers. A 10,000 year old civilizational saga all driven by this simple "What is it?"!

I was excited, again the 5yr old kid. I could feel the hair on my forearms rise. Excitement or cold. Decide for yourself! But it was so true. I was curious about the thought of the flash (it hadn't occur ed again as yet). I was as excited about myself as I was perhaps at the last ball of the T20 India Pak final or at the result site for semester results or at the climax of a thriller.

Then as smoothly as it had started, it came to an end. I was still staring at the window. That's the road next to the Stade Charlety, I realized and that I'm in my room and I'm feeling cold.


Then came the flash. It was from a advertisement scroll, that sort that roll between advertisements. That's all that took to take me into a short but I feel a remarkably beautiful journey!

Now that I think of it, I feel like did it actually happen. But that's one reason I post this so that I remember that once on a cold early morning.. I Met Myself!

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