The Secret

(This is something I wrote for an online contest that I won nothing in. The theme was “Open Spaces” and I had 1500 words to write. I considered writing a moving piece, something high on philosophy and emotion. I chalked out a story of a prisoner serving a life sentence without much memory of his past. Then I thought, oh what the hell, lets get crazy.

What ensued was a couple of hours of unrestrained crap flow resulting in the disaster of a piece that I now present to you with utter disgust at my own shamelessness.

P.S.  To the few, maybe very few, and probably about to be fewer, admirers of my serious stuff, I am sorry. If you bear with this shit, I promise you better stuff soon.

To the others, further reading shall be at your own risk. We do not assume responsibility for your resulting intellectual numbness.)

21st July 2027

Dear Blog, 

Exactly 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years before 10 AM yesterday, the universe was filled homogeneously and isotropically with an incredibly high energy density, huge temperatures and pressures, and was expanding and cooling very rapidly. At some point, an unknown reaction called baryogenesis violated the conservation of the baryon number, leading to a very small excess of quarks and leptons over antiquarks and antileptons—of the order of one part in 30 million. This resulted in the predominance of matter over antimatter in the present Universe. 

This, was the beginning of the Big Bang, the same woefully mysterious phenomenon that gave rise to all those useless planets and stars and galaxies that have since been moving around in circles for no apparent reason. Of course, it also created the earth, on whose utility I shall politely refuse to comment. Anyway, the Big Bang did originate in open space, a lot of open space actually, by which reason one should be thankful, or vengeful, towards open spaces, depending on how happy one is with one's life. I'm quite happy, and correspondingly, quite thankful. 

Open, is the way man was always supposed to be - outdoors, accessible, ignorant, innovative. And that's the way Adam lived. But then along came Eve, who got tempted into eating from the evil, evil Tree of Knowledge and things have never been the same again. The once totally open man got covered with leaves, the forever partially open woman too got covered with leaves, and it took them both much more time than it should have, to find the open spaces that would, in time, be the source of 157 billion members of No. 986 in the top 1000 most intelligent species to ever inhabit the earth, the moon and the mars (Ranking of homo sapiens as calculated on a six-point scale by National Geographic, A.D. 2157). 

Basically then, at the heart of all life is the open space. The human race comes to life in the open space somewhere inside a woman and ends in the open space between a few planks of wood placed in the womb of the earth. Most of us, however, fail to realise the overwhelming significance, or even the inextricable presence of open spaces in our life. I did too, till not very long back, but now that I see it, I shall make it a point to enlighten at least the very few people who actually manage to make their way through this whole piece alive and awake. This whole piece, that is a collection of a few small pieces from my fairytale life.

The fairytale began two months after I was born, when the conqueror within me set out to discover the world beyond the cradle. The earliest discovery was that cradles of such brave warriors as me are usually fortresses surrounded by deep valleys on all sides, and when we decide to move out unannounced, we usually fall head first into the bottom of the valley, which in turn, is usually hard. Soon after this first war campaign of mine, God probably realised what a masterpiece he had created, and came down to whisper in my ear the one advice that would make me the all-powerful, the invincible king of the world: "Look out for open spaces."

I did. I was a toddler crawling on all fours, determined to find an open space. Soon I realised I didn't know what to do when I found one. Even as a child, open spaces didn't mean much to me. The masterpiece named me was either a joke by God, or the valley had done irreparable damage to my head. I was a dumb kid who did nothing much except eat and shit. So the only open spaces I ever encountered were two diametrically opposite points on my almost immaculately spherical anatomy. I grew up a bit and started frequenting the neighbourhood park to get bullied by the big kids. Simultaneously, open spaces added themselves in my exquisitely crafted nanoparticle sized vocabulary with another meaning : (noun) park, where I play. It took me some time to realise that "play" was supposed to mean something other than what I had in mind: (verb) fetch ball, get kicked.

A few years later, I happened to stumble upon a couple of newly manufactured nuggets of valuable knowledge. 

1. God was kind enough to create a few people dumber than me. 

2. Open space could mean more than I had previously thought possible. 

The big occasion here was a fine young man, somewhat paradoxically named Prince, falling into a manhole somewhere in the hinterlands of India, and all the major news channels unfailingly and unflailingly showcasing every moment of his pleasurable experiences down there. Now, as evidence for nugget no. 1, I had the dear boy (come on, no offence, but who falls into a manhole, really??), and if not him, I definitely did have the people running the news channels (I mean, 3 days, nothing else?? Get a life)

As for nugget no. 2, ha hah, I had found another connotation of my favourite open space.

I continued to grow. Surprisingly, so did my brain. I soon began to hear carelessly dropped words like aliens, meteors, the global warming demon. Around the same time, a certain Mr. Cameron came along with a film of the kind they say is made only once in a lifetime. Now, my skull was too well insulated to be penetrated by any modicum of deeper meaning attached to the film, nevertheless, I did understand that there is such a thing as outer space which is generally open. And the very evening I watched the movie, I came home and stared at my father's laptop for a minute. "Eureka, Eureka" ran the echo behind me as I rushed to check my sister's PC and reaffirm my finding that the space bar on keyboards is usually big, and always uncovered. This was a day of extraordinary fulfillment. I had added two extremely meaningful pieces of information to the ever-growing database of life-changing moronisms that I had inside my head. And yes, moronism is another word out of my personal dictionary that is going under the hammer at Sotheby's next month.

The growing up refused to stop, however much I cared for the limited resources and tolerance of the world. I got to high school, and girls got to me. My unwavering belief in my childhood hero Karamchand's words - "All girls are dumb", was reinforced when even I managed to get a girlfriend. In a couple of months though, she began to say she felt claustrophobic with me and needed her space. I asked her if this space she needed would be open, just to be safe. I still remember the look she gave me before walking away. It was one of confusion, of disgust, of awe. I didn't know what to make of it, so I just took it to be a yes.

I went on to study social sciences, democracy, parliament, terrorism. I was taught that a democracy was a place where everyone had the freedom to openly express their beliefs, and a parliament was a place where elected leaders did just that: express beliefs. I also learnt that terrorism was the unauthorised use of violence to express one's beliefs. I deduced from experience that both terrorists and parliamentarians expressed their beliefs in open spaces and that their methods were usually interchangeable. From simple mathematical rules that I had mastered, I went about the following derivation:

Terrorist x open space = express beliefs violently

Parliamentarian x open space = express beliefs violently

==> Terrorist x open space = Parliamentarian x open space

==> Terrorist = Parliamentarian

I gave a complete version of this discovery of mine in all my college applications, apart from an in-depth explanation of my insurmountable understanding of open spaces, confident of being flooded with offers. To this day, I wonder why the offers never came. I can't help but settle with the explanation that everybody thought I would be too good for them.

Well, I did however get into a college soon after. I had to mask my ingenuity though, but then, most extraordinary beings in the history of the world have had to make sacrifices like these to prevent an epidemic inferiority complex in the human society. I shall get through too.

I am still on the lookout for open spaces, and shall probably be for a long time to come. But I did chance upon an idea just a few days back.

That an open space is just what the name says it is: an open space, something that is full of possibilities; something that is willing to be looked through, to be looked at, from different perspectives; something that is all for new ideas and visions; something that one may immerse oneself in and come out clear; something that is nothing, but, open.

P.S.  Dear Blog,

You are an open space, and I shall do my best to harass, violate, and disgust you as often as I can. Just your luck.