Neurons

I closed my eyes…I dived into a world unknown..it was green, shimmery..everything seemed to be floating around me..there were thousands of neurons and nerve like structures..delicate feline, just about to break if you had the audacity to touch them..they seemed to be floating..gently..I raised a finger to touch them, but they swayed back, as if in the fear that their dreams would be broken..and then suddenly I had wings..my body seemed to sway without knowing that it was gravitating towards any particular creature or substance..suddenly I had this urge to visit one crevice that seemed to be isolated..it had little nerve like ends..they were red in color..through the haze of bluish green color..I watched the nerves tingling..as if they had been touched..felt shy and retreated back into their own worlds of dreams..I floated past some of the red tendril like creatures arms flung in longing they seemed and yet I knew if I touched them they would retreat into their lost world….I looked up, there seemed to be thousands of little children there playing ping pong throwing up their dreams, their conversations and their fears in some bizarre mad juggle and amazingly so not a single dream nor a single wish, nor conversation fell out of rhythm..I saw then an six year old, shaking her little brother it seemed she wanted to know something, the little brother only had a mysterious smile about him..I felt like slipping into the six year olds mind..just for a bit I thought, I was sure she wouldn’t mind….I slided in pretty smoothly..her neurons were different, they waved into the air with dream like majesty too..but they were happy neurons or so I thought..they didn’t feel threatened, instead they seemed to be happy to see me and welcome me without judgment of who I was and why I had come . I put my ears against one of those soft red tendrils to hear what she was thinking..At first I couldn’t hear much..hear with happiness, hear without malice, hear without thoughts of taking from another..someone seemed to whisper..I smiled..I closed my eyes and leaned again..this time I heard a soft music like voice say to her brother..” I want to feel God once more..will you help me..will you tell me how he looked like..I seem to be forgetting fast”

I felt blotches of water on my face..I opened my eyes, it was raining all around me, while I lay on the grass in my garden, My book of ‘How to explore the brain’ lay open at page 85, wet, real and a mesh of papyrus..Little fireflies laughed.

( Image courtesy Google)

Traffic jams & day dreaming

I am sitting in a car, in one of Bangalore's many traffic infested roads. The traffic has been stand still for the past 40 minutes. I see the lights from a distance, turning Green..looking pretty and cheerful and then turning somber Red again..all the while when the car is at a standstill. There's a bridge overhead, I tilt my head and look up..I can almost see myself sitting on the top of the bridge, my legs dangling, looking down at the traffic standstill, looking at me ..my own patience and my ultimate resignation to what I think is everyday fate. As I peer down at myself..I am angered at this tremendous resilience, the loss of impatience, the resistance to protest against the stupidities of life taking them as if they were a part of our destiny when it is not so. And yet it was not as if the person in me had not tried. There have been numerous occasions when the wish to fly over a traffic situation like this has resulted in me getting down from the car and try to control traffic in small ways along with the policeman in charge. This works incredibly well in small town and in city corners where the mayhem has been created by zealous drivers who want to break rules at the drop of a hat, thinking it would give them that inch of a headway.

But somewhere today even that zeal to get down from the car and see if things could be rectified has gone..I see myself dreamlike, as if in a trance rather wanting to glide my wheels over all other cars and make a smart exit, a la 007, when a few years back the thought of jumping on top of car bonnets would have filled me with glee. I am broken from my reverie by the honking on all sides. The traffic jam has finally been cleared..everyone seems to be excited. The smart looking IT professional on the left of my car has just finished a long and winding argument with his wife, the teenage couple on the right have let go of each other and their long kiss, letting out a 'damm those traffic lights..why can't they make it longer'..I take a peek at the girl on the top of the bridge with dangling legs..she's gone..in her place a tree has grown suddenly out of nowhere..it seems to say..I am the hope...Life is beautiful still!

( Image courtesy Google)

Day dreams

I day dream a lot. Sometimes I day dream so much that I begin dreaming about what I might day dream too....that I'm flying into people's minds, checking out what their thoughts are.. titillate the good thoughts and the the pious .. & make them wicked ..and confuse the hell out of those who plan A B C & C B A...I day dream of ruffling a techies hair..pulling at his tie..make him see ghosts in the stifled corridors that he moves in..and when I see a techie next zombying past me..I laugh loud so much so that I'm broken from my own dreams and disturb the computer like march of the zombie in question..I day dream of burning the syllabi of every university, school and college and dance on the orange- red bonfire that burns..I daydream of two pine trees from childhood, the oranges I ate on top of them, the peels I threw that made the grass beneath organic.. I'm awakened by the stench of plastic burning in a dustbin nearby, where I have been walking while dreaming..I dream of exams I need not give..sitting on the little chair next to the hostel bed and falling asleep..waking up to the reality of falling off the chair & being laughed at by room mates..I dream of a world full of ethics..where I can see the joy of not following them..becoming alive & going back to them..realizing what drunkenness is all about..I day dream of falling in love at 80 and being as silly about it as in the twenty s...and wake up to the realities of a mature institution called Marriage ...I day dream about a world full of love, where Peter Brooks, Hitler and Himesh Reshamiya sing the same songs...I wake up to the low buzz of the 'How to live' channel on television which is beaming the platonic details and vital statistic of the bombing of Pearl Harbor an- educational feature on 'how to eradicate dreams for centuries'

© 2011 Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury

( Image courtesy Google)