A Nostalgic Fast-Forward

Yedu Bose
Yedu Bose
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

While wading through the dreadlocks of our earliest memories, can’t we still see hazy images of little Mary skipping along with her lamb that had a fleece that was as white as snow? At that time we probably marvelled at our own mental dexterity by imagining a lamb that was simply blanketed in snow and relished at the technical accuracy of that misappropriation. Eventually though, we grew up to become such utter bastards who would rather find joy in accusing Mary of being sanguinely racist due to her constant association with a lamb that had the potential fur tone to be the brand logo for the Klu Klux Klan. Even worse, over time most of us simply grew up to be such bland bastards whose only defining interest in Mary’s prized lamb extended to the poor animal steaming on a plate and marinated in soy sauce.

Remember how Kamala Das made us feel a deep sadness we did not even know we were capable of by comparing her mother’s face to that of the late winter’s moon? It was tremendous how an aura of dryness that hinted of impending death lingered throughout the poem even when she was describing passing trees or playing children. When we look at “My mother at sixty six” now, the astounding power of the poem can be easily blunted down through personal associations and comparisons to better works. It goes on to say that we were much more complex as juveniles than adults because we took those nursery similes and high school metaphors and projected mental images that were bound by fewer prejudices and more of raw emotions. Having said this, it is certainly a very feeble sort of oversimplification to say that growing up and garnering maturity has rendered most of us mentally destitute. That’s like saying Sachin Tendulkar’s years of extensive training in Cricket doomed him to become a really substandard Quidditch player.

Half hashed analogies aside, when was the last time we looked out at the world with such an overwhelming sense of stupendous wonder that we ended up gaping open mouthed a tad too long to the mild olfactory discomfort of the unfortunates who happened to be in our proximity? Truth is for most of us, life has come to resemble a series of low intensity events that are loosely spread apart and whatever comes in the middle of these events can be easily fast forwarded with our headphones or FIFA 15. The modern day Smart phone is a wonderful time machine of such glorious effectiveness. It has transformed us into spectacle mongering apes who are very vocally gibbering down a road of low patience and emotional desensitization. Again, simply blaming technology for this scenario is not only marvellously ignorant but consciously irresponsible. We are what we are because of our own choice to conform to an existing idea of collective standardization that ascribed mediocrity to most things that happens between selfies.

The innocent childhood delight of being privy to an unknown Mary’s lifestyle pattern has warped into corrupted ventures of casual Facebook stalking of known Mary’s who on a sad note can only dream of being bad-ass enough to have their own pet lambs. There was something about us as children, an ambitious open-mindedness to being ideologically wrong as well as a lack of strong filters to sieve out pure emotional trauma. Of course, this isn’t a protracted argument that is trying to mainstream a particular “way to be”. Just saying it as it is.

Yedu Bose

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Yedu Bose

A grandiose abundance in pedestrian prodigy. Will eat just to write.