This year in pages

quote-book:lickystickypickyme:

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to blossom.

Anais Nin

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.”

- Dr. Seuss

Day after day, year after year, I see art being interjected with emotions. Let’s create a bookshelf with hands and eyelids, a chair with legs and confused feelings. Let’s create machines that can think. Let’s create art that lives. Let’s inject souls into the absolutely obsolete and the tranquil.

Day after day, year after year, I also see boys, girls, women with pink hair and men with purple ties, living their lives, one day after another, not questioning, nor raising their voices. Just drifting along the momentum that’s dictated by this thing called ‘fate’. Men and women and grown girls and little ones too, aspiring to be the furniture in the room. Look how shiny I am, look how rich-oak-like I appear, look how stiff I stand. We all think we are special, and yet we fail to act or revolt the norms.

I came across this amazing read a few weeks back that reiterates and reflects upon our generation: the glorious twenty-somethings. (http://www.eyeweekly.com/article/55882)
Here’s a short snippet:

“This phenomenon, known as the “Quarterlife Crisis,” is as ubiquitous as it is intangible. Unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction is reported by people in their mid-twenties to early thirties who are usually urban, middle class and well-educated; those who should be able to capitalize on their youth, unparalleled freedom and free-for-all individuation. They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.”

This read was soon followed by an enlightening movie ‘Away we go’, which amplified our stories and extended them into a 2-hour feature on displacement. We are all displaced and happy to be.

I digressed and mumbled something to my friends about the notion of displacement again and what it means now. As more and more tools for communication increase, the less human we become. We all want to become parts of the whole. Miniscule parts. Less human, more furniture.

Last night, I was at a bar and witnessed a strange incident. Bar brawls are common but I was shocked to see one involving a furious boy and a helpless girl. She was hurt and he was intoxicated. And everyone just watched, not knowing what to do or how to react. The music in the background lived on. And so did the ugly fight. Some of us stood on the side, and some continued to play with reds and greens on the pool table. I don’t remember if the DJ stopped to induce action or not but I do remember that the night went on. The victim of the fight continued to live the night as if this was just like finding a fly in the bathroom, you try to get rid of it and then you ignore it, then it just becomes a natural part of your bathroom. They all moved on. ‘That’s what you do’, my friend told me, months after I still wondered about the lost lives at the Taj, in Mumbai.

You become the furniture in the room. You witness but you don’t tell. And you definitely don’t do something about it.

As furniture and fashion aims to be more free and expressive, are we destined to be more silent and opaque?