Make Believe

We live in a make believe world and work tirelessly to devise new means to facilitate willing suspension of disbelief.

The statement above reeks of complete disdain for everything imaginary. It has a sense of longing for the tangible, a want for the absolute. It hides a fear of getting lost in the mysterious world of unknown images because it is not sure of its own connections with reality, its relationship with its surroundings. I either am or I am not. I either have it or I don’t. I will NOT make myself believe otherwise.

I read an engrossing work of fiction and start imagining myself as the protagonist – one who is wronged and one who now seeks revenge. I give way to my repressed desires of fighting everything evil in my life by juxtaposing the story of the novel in my hand with the screenplay of the drama that is unfolding in my life even as I read along. While busy achieving existential salvation through literary discourse, I tend to conveniently forget that somewhere someone is busy plotting a similar storyline that revolves around him and me – just that this time, roles have been reversed, and perspectives have been altered; because now, he is the protagonist and I, the embodiment of everything evil. Voodoo magic? Occult science? Maybe! Maybe not!!

I watch an awesome flick that takes me on a joyride through the vast seas of desperate desires and virgin lands of forbidden pleasures. The movie does many things to my being. It transforms me at many levels. It paints me in a light so colorful and colors so vibrant, that even I fail to recognize who or what I am. Overnight, I turn more reprehensibly wealthier than Gates, more prodigiously brilliant than Einstein, more outrageously powerful than Bush and more irresistibly handsome than Brosnan. Willing suspension of disbelief – an oft-used cinematic phrase that transcends the boundaries of its etymological, historical, contextual and philosophical origins, spills over into the ubiquitous reality of everyone and everything, and casts an enigmatic shadow of doubt that prevails in the impressionable minds of gullible souls long after the magic spell has been cast and be done with.

Make Believe is David Blaine’s brand of street magic. Your rational mind eggs you with your every breath to refute the claim that it is for real, for you know that down below, at some incomprehensible level, this is all but a fancy trick performed with the immaculate perfection of a seasoned professional, live, and in front of a clueless audience. And yet, every physical law that governs this universe, every law that you have ever come to comprehend over time and with experience, urges you to believe, with axiomatic justification, that what has been demonstrated before you in that indescribable moment in time is nothing but the truth – absolute and whole!!

Perhaps, what my mind, body and soul seeks in unison and with single-minded obsession is that point in space-time continuum where magic and reality blend seamlessly into an inseparable whole and begin to co-exist; where the all-comprehending rational faculty of the incomprehensible human mind breaks down and pure reason gives way to unconditional faith and unquestionable belief. It is the confluence of the believable and the unbelievable where believers voluntarily turn into non-believers, and vice versa, with an effortless swish of the invisible magical wand. It is that focal point of the universe where boundaries of reality are fudged, logic becomes fuzzy and you fail to distinguish The Real from The Imaginary.

That, to me, is Make Believe. And that, I believe, is where the world is headed, increasingly!!

Metaphor

Metaphor, I was taught, means transfer in Greek. Metaphor, I understand, is what my life is, at the end of the day – a metaphor of smoldering desire to be rich and famous; a metaphor of perpetual struggle to fulfill my desire; a metaphor of despondent desperation at learning that it is not easy to find my way through the wayward jungle of this god-forsaken world to reach my dream castle where my fairytale princess awaits me with bated breath; a metaphor of hope against hopes that despite the hopeless today, tomorrow will hopefully be a better world to live in, at least for me if not for anybody else.

And I realize that the above is not only me, but everybody else as well. We are all alike in our duties to transfer through our lives the meaning of life to other people living. Just that our varying perspectives determine our different modes of transfer. The plurality of perspectives is what lends richness to the collective consciousness of humanity.

We have amidst us art connoisseurs, war enthusiasts, culinary experts, fearless adventurers, die-hard romantics, philosopher kings, prodigious scientists, tech gurus, eco-fin pundits, and many more. What I want to be is a bit of all of them. I want to revel in the joy of carrying simultaneously, the meaning of so many of life’s diverse perspectives. I want to be a mouthpiece for these seemingly uncorrelated and incoherent voices and attempt to not get lost in the Babel of these tongues. This, I want to make my raison d’être.