There is din during the day as I walk past the traffic signal which turns red for exactly ninety seconds. In those ninety seconds, hordes of people cross over to livelihood opportunities which lie inside the expressionless glass buildings. Inside these buildings, there are machines and in those machines are algorithms which can decide the future of the economy. Humans work with those machines, straight nine hours, punching numbers. It's nine hours or more, nothing less, and you are being watched. You are scanned at the security every time you take a breather.
In those ninety seconds, a gust of wheels will blow over the downtrodden lives, towards parallel car parkings. These parkings have ensured that the streets are reclaimed from the homeless and reserved for capitalism, on both odd-even days.
Those ninety seconds happen a zillion times over, and over again. By the end of a day, the cash counters are full, all the coffee has been sold, numerous cigarettes have been stubbed on the stained walls, air conditioners have violated the atmosphere and middlemen have ensured that both the ends know minimum of each other. The day has been spent in sharpening- our skills, our minds, our tongues, our machines. Like every other day.
But there might come a point in time and space when there is no metal left on the knife. The constant sharpening has reduced the metal to nothing more than a memory. And what use of a memory when there are no persons left to dwell on it. We used to be blunt many light years ago, with enough space to make mistakes and in that process, we made memories. The day we chose perfection, focusing on being productive in ninety seconds or less, we lost the rest of the time of our lives.
There are a lot of mosquitoes at night, a lot of them. It's funny as to how we haven't been able to eradicate them. We can eliminate ourselves by detonating a hydrogen fission bomb at about 50 kms above the earth's surface but a spray is all we have for them. It is funny because we come a long way in learning the science and creating the technology that can wipe out our existence and not much of thought has been given to this insect.
I see the night filled with straight-faced skyscrapers. They keep staring into the darkness, with their bright lit eyes, sometimes flickering. They have no hands, no ears, no mouth, just long faces with eyes. For many of us, these represent the zenith of our modernisation. It represents our capability and might to touch the sky. Tons of steel, cement and glass make this structure, light up the night sky, with people on the ground looking at them in awe.
But I prefer darkness, than the purposeful artificial illumination of the night sky. These towering figures are impressive, admittedly and they are astonishing to look at, but then, even nuclear clouds are beautiful to look at. A sky full of stars is what I would prefer over these long, unimpressive faces. I would want the light of the fireflies light up my heart, than have CFLs fixtures to save on electricity. Oil lanterns hanging by the wall to guide my way, than bulbs to break the darkness. These skyscrapers and their shadows are imposing, casting a long spell on other . They hover over you, look down upon you, make you look insignificant. But the purpose of man is to unite with nature, bridge the expanse between earth and sky, and not be a barrier between them. Having a yellow-light filled skyscraper dazzling the night sky and glass facades to make it look modernistic is not the correct way to bridge that gap.
Many a time I feel we're similar to ants, except that they obey the rules of the colony. We do everything that they do, in more complex ways than any other living beings, compounding one complexity with another to make it look simple. We work to pay off debts which is a concept innovated to justify a method of living, which in turn is a summation of thoughts influenced by propaganda. Just like ant hills, we have debt hills, each debt is being used to finance another debt, so on and so forth, till we've mortgaged all of ourselves. Our body and spirit, enslaved to production, consumption and decadence.
Every evening, there's a pile of autos, a three-wheeler vehicle which look like beetles crawling on ground. Us ants and these ground beetles coexist in mayhem, feeding on each other's weakness. The autos have been in existence since historic times and carbon dating confirms that they are little younger to cockroaches. They adapt quickly to changing ground conditions and presence of other predatory vehicles. Manoeuvring it's way out of troubles and traffic is a well known characteristic of this beetle.
As ants enslaved to toil and turmoil, the beetles are also condemned to roam the ground, without stopping, till they decay and die. Maybe some day, when we both find each other heading in the same direction, it will be that elusive sunset. Little we will know that it is a mirage, and we're both are heading towards the boiling sun, to be sublimed. And that would be the final fare.
They say that the total length of optical fibre cables on earth is unknown. These are lying on sea beds, sending and receiving signals that can make communication possible between two persons sitting at opposite ends of the globe. It is possible to access high-speed internet, and you're able to read this because there are under-sea cables carrying that information in the form of light. I wonder, whether one day, we will actually communicate with another human, and not feign a conversation, over and over again. I have questions regarding our methods to bring the world closer and the distances shorter. In our effort to shorten the long routes, have we increased the length of time between two individuals?
I know that a phone call from here to US will take a seventh of a second. It feels like the availability of information within split second has made us more ignorant to knowledge gathering process. Because we can respond and react at any given instant, we either choose to not respond, or react like fly-traps. The process of carrying something from one place to another through pipes and cables has made them innocuous, and a part of our living. These things carry water, oil, data and everything in between. But what if these continue to grow like creepers, covering the earth in its mesh. Then the globe would look a ball wrapped in black thread.
And we've let ourselves be surrounded by wires/cables. Sometimes it feels like the cables are giant tentacles of the kraken, waiting for some extraterrestrial signal to be awakened. We will be slowly crushed by these cables, are the earth will be no more, just floating fragments in the universe. Well, in that case, at least there won't arise any possibility of proxy warfare or NATO forces in middle-east. But, we won't be us anymore. These cables, signify the lengths to which we've gone to, to access resources. And we're entangled in these cables, having just enough room to breathe and smoke. Any moment these cables can tighten their grip, severing us of the capability to communicate and strangle us till we become motionless. All communication links are meaningless if we don't know what to communicate and when.
I don't know to what point we will mechanize our lives and surround ourselves with technology that leaves us burdened with the responsibility to prove that our lives are worth living. Maybe we will continue to enhance, upgrade, and in that process leave the weak behind, just like Darwins said. But what is the point of being superior to our ancestors when we know nothing of a life that existed, and thrived on nature. We're dull and diseased, our mouths smell of bad breath and bad intentions, our ears are fill with wax and horror and our eyes haven't seen a flower in ages. Where does this lead to?
