A Burning Desire

In my childhood days, I liked to burn things. I liked to take a piece of paper and burn it in my balcony, watching the ashes fly away with the wind from the third floor, dreading the possibility that they might land in the balcony below and lead to an investigation that trailed back to me. I liked to drown ants in a mug of water, picking them from the floor and keep them underwater for a minute or more. And then I used to take them out and dry them on my sleeve, blow hot air on them from my mouth and watch them resuscitate. I might have killed scores of ants in my depravity yet the hundreds that lived are what I choose to remember after all these years. Am I a person who can make things? Or am I one of those who cant do anything on their own and choose to shine in someone else's limelight? Or am I gonna be one of those dull stones that just gather green goo on their surface, never rising to be anything of any consequence.

I have had two major fights in the last two days. One was the insane drive to A's place at 3.30 am that ended in something that will haunt me for ages. The other was a relatively minor one but quite disturbing owing to its baseless reason. There are things to be thought about in this corner.

'The corner theory: A person's life is a collection of corners. Each corner has its own kind of people, its own circumstances, its own rules, its own paths and decisions. Its good to keep the corners away from each other and it would be prudent not to spend an entire lifetime stuck in one corner. Glide effortlessly from one corner to another, manage them so that they dont interfere with each other. If by chance, two corners have to meet, make it as brief and pleasant as possible. Humanity by nature is destructive, it will find a way to make a good thing bad. Collectivism destroys the joy of life, degenerates the free mind, degrades the body of the strong, denudes a healthy spirit, hacks creativity to death... Be an individual, take a stand, make something work, be good, be free.'

That desire to make something burn, watch its remnants violently carted away by the frail summer wind, to see the flames twitch, as the sun shines indifferently, as seven billion humans go about their life, a third of them asleep any given moment, as the 20 percent corrupt of the world suck on the lifeblood of the remaining 80 percent as birds chirp, as a dog with a bloodied neck stares vacantly into a decaying wall where a tramp high on smack lays with a begging bowl carelessly placed across the floor, as children wait for their school bus at 7 in the crisp, frilly morning to go to school, as a wife kisses her husband goodbye, as... as life goes on, that desire to watch something transform, watching something burn, believing that the ashes could one day be made back into paper, believing one day the world would be a stage, and words would play director as seven billion people play second fiddle to the boy who burnt those papers, drowned those ants, dreamt of a world that would sway to his tune, to his whistle...