My love for languages

The thoughts are organized with metaphors. We could metaphorize everything but we draw boundaries around some to form units that can be used generically enough over our other observations. That is how words get formed. There are prefixes, suffixes and prepositions that we use to play with these. Our constructs are logical but our mind transcends them. Languages evolve by letting themselves challenged by the human mind. The language tries to bound all thought and the thoughts keep expanding the language.

A stale and dead language is where people have stopped thinking in; the thriving language is where people are thinking new ideas in.

Languages to me is an imprint of a society - a sink and exigesis of all the thoughts put in to the former by the latter. Lanuage of an era is a snapshot in time of the society. Knowing the language is like reading the blue-print of a society.

Brahman Varanasi

Brahman Varanasi
Oiginally uploaded by shawshots

One of the most captivating portraits I have come across on the internet browsing the photos of the ghats of Ganga.

Journey to past

A land that I hadn't known about - amidst the remains of an ancient civilization - a civilization that still continues to exist but has lost all connection with its past. It retains these remains in the false hope of a kind of revival. But it all never made any sense to anyone. People in this land keep doing their rituals the way they once did in their heydays. But in this time neither the glory nor the faith exists. I was made to walk through these lands and I had fallen in love with its history. The history was fascinating but there was nothing in the present that I could have embraced. It is true that I did absorb a lot from its present with all the time I spent there. But I also knew that there was nothing that would have come out of this love affair with an ancient probably non-existent city. I knew that it would only lead me to perdition and misery if I kept myself connected to the place. There was nothing in this place that I wanted myself to associate with. Still, on that day, a revelation told me that my future is limited (if not determined) by my past in the city. I can't run away from all what I had learned having lived in this abandoned city. I can influence others and be influenced by them, but there is that part of me which is totally owned by my past, that which would always be untouched by anything. My father led this trip to the place that I had never known, the place that holds the key to my future. I want to know about that place much as I want to know about the limits of my own world and my ambitions. My dad started the trip from a familiar place - near a ghat where I was asked to wait for some preparations to happen just like I used to be in the days of my childhood. The hustle-bustle of the city was never pleasant to me but I had learned to sense a kind of music arising out of it. I had actually started missing it from all these years I had been away from this world of antiquity. The next stage of the trip is hard to remember - I was sitting on the back-set of a two-wheeled vehicle - could've been the scooter that my dad used to have. The surroundings seemed bizarre and didn't appear very clear the way my dad was driving this green vehicle. After some time the surroundings started sounding familiar - may be my mind wasn't able to recollect things so fast. But it all sounded familiar now, like it all was known to me, like I was destined to be on this ride. But I still didn't know where I was heading to even though surroundings were all very familiar now - the old temple, the pan-shop, the binding services store, the drawing emporium, the book store, the muslim school, another temple. It all was coming back to me.

The last few miles of this ride were to be more bizarre. There was a steep hill, the one like Kamakhya in Gauhati except that there are no tantrics here. There is no much noise here which makes me believe that there are no sacrifices being done here. My dad still thinks looking at animals being killed is not good for me or anyone. If there were to be sacrifices in this place I wouldn't have been taken here. There is a steep slope and it only becomes steeper as we go further. At some point I wonder if we are still approachable with gravity. But my mind is not occupied by the centripetal and frictional forces right now, I am just thinking about the outcome of this journey. We are in a tunnel of some kind and I have completely lost the sense of direction. I feel weightless and I wonder if I am still limited by the space or the time. I still long for the past, the city even though nothing would've existed if there was no space or time. My dad has not shut down the vehicle and its probably in the neutral gear with its engine still on. That usually means I don't have a lot of time to spend here. I gaze at the walls of the tunnel. I now think its a cave because tunnels are not made of stone any more. I think this must be the end of the tunnel even though I don't see it. This place is so lit up after all. I can now see something written on the wall. It takes time to get used to light when you've been in darkness so long. There was my future inscribed for me, an result from astrology that was lost when I was young. My knowledge of sanskrit and math made me understand that the earlier calculations were all wrong but there was one pundit who had got it right, one who didn't live too long to communicate my future to anyone. It was through some mystical experience that my dad told me that I only I could've uncoded my future. And now I could find it written here in the classic script as if it has been there forever, undiscovered by any one. I can say for sure that it is for me because it spells my mom's and my dad's name right; it mentions the place and time of my birth to reasonable accuracy. It mentions the positions of nakshatras very descriptively. I now realize how fortunate I have been, to have known what millions before me had aspired to know. I came here to know my limits and I have all the answers now. My cynicism would die out like once all hopes died for me. I would die peacefully in an unconscious state. There might be much pain inside of me, but I would never be conscious to feel it. It is hard to say everything that I feel at this point. But it is strange indeed that I am so happy to know about my death. It is much stranger that I feel more optimistic after having known my limits.