Dear Deserted Colleague of Mine
Dear Deserted Colleague of Mine
from the first floor of our castle,
You, or your predicament, sickened us in the early weeks of March … turned the campus into a nauseating goof-site for a few weeks until horror arrived from the edges of the villages and the capital, a horror which was more gut-wrenching, but lesser ridiculous. You don’t deserve a post; but a log of the times we live in cannot ignore the sickness that assails, and I am deeply concerned. Yep, the horrors of this age lie in the trivial, in the scrawls that embellish few papers, meant for your eyes only; and I am not concerned about who scrawled …
Let me be sympathetic: why did you feel so cornered? Well, bunch of rich kids whose daddies earn more than you? People who feel that you pronounce the Queen’s lingo like a moron and look like a simpleton? Girls who hurt your mind’s eyes? Ostentatious and snooty, snobby, holier-than-thou’s? Sympathetic, that’s what I am; irascible, that’s what these words taste like, when I am keying in words that don’t deserve to exist. What did you think man, you have already won the game, when you ascended the stairs to the second floor? Forgetting that it is just the begining of the war? That you need to claim a lot, prove a lot, achieve a lot? You thought you are the claim, the proof, the achievement embodied. You ascended, became lighter, you floated in the fleeting breeze; forgetting, that your feet still smells of the earthy clay. Forgetting, that you still bear a second name which stinks to a few, you still wear features which few abhor, and even if they don’t travel down the corridors of the second floor, even if they don’t exist, they habitat your psyche and your history. Yes man, you disowned history, washed your feet and thought the mud is gone, sublimated in some corners of oblivion called the times and you are an entity smelling like deodorants. Your fall is stupendous ‘coz your rise was stupid; your denouement ridiculous ‘coz your peripetia was a reeking figment of your sicker brain. A man who forgets is a man doomed, a man who floats is a man who is bound to flounder, and flounder so foolishly.
Because you forgot, or you never knew that in this war of yours, as a weapon in the arsenal lies Love (oh the word peeping so much in those seething scrawls!). Love was your only arm, man, and how can I forgive you, brother, for smearing this precious word? A word which is already squeezed beyond its healing powers in this tabloid-age, and the word which we need to redeem each day, rescue each day from being just a four-letter-word which sells oh-so-well? Those kids whom you tarnished, who were they, your enemies out there, not your brothers or sisters? How can I forgive you, moron, when I saw you parading their names in the screens, when I saw my sisters and brothers being hung? Hey you, did you know what your vocation means? What were you doing here, selling education to richer buyers? Do you sell your words, man, in the classroom? I don’t sell mine.
Wherever you are, even if these words don’t reach you, you should reach these words if you wish to continue in your vocation. Okay, they are rotten brats: no sense of history or responsibilities, giggle-girls with memories of the size of a T-shirt, boys confused about the configurations of their facial hair, but they were your kids. And listen to me: kids of these age might be wrong, but they can never be evil. And you sold them to the channels as evils. There they are: my kids, described as depraved in print and in screens, until the better depraveds arrive one bloody Wednesday morning, slaughtering innocents to face-lift few acres of land so that it smells like deodorants, exactly the way you thought you smelt. You reek developmentality man, not those kids. No one can choose their birth, they didn’t choose rich houses to be born in. Considered: they acted likewise; what do you do then, run to the circus with your claim of catching few goldfishes or get worried that they are not in sound mental health, they need help, and you should be the first one to reach out with it?
Ah, I am blogging! Increasing few bytes of webshits afterall … but you know where the horror lies? I don’t think I am living in a paradise, but those 50 – 100 minutes, when I speak about things I love, I feel redeemed. Those are the minutes I become, the rest in a day are nothing but a certain compromise called existence. And when you speak of things you love, you speak to souls you love. The words are laced with the addresses to those hearts. Vain and foolish, you might consider me to be, you litigating lizard, but love, that should have been your wand in the war, whoever you were fighting with. These kids would have been standing by you, shielding you against all possible odds, and when you deserted them you deserted yourself. And the horror lies in the fact that much before that muck of yours, something went horribly wrong: when you saw my angels you saw slanderers; your words and your gaze turned them into something else; you despised them into sniggers; you made them what they never intended to be, and then you pedalled to the circus! The horror lies in a certain staining of a relation which I believe in. Man, you wear more degrees than them, you earn more than they do, and how gleefully you played the subaltern while you were skillfully climbing up the ladders of academic ascent! And how you displayed oh-so-well again that you are just another brick in the wall when I was trying to be a patch of green moss over it, at least moist to touch in a noon of scorch. Pity man, the bytes end here, and here I am shivering in a sick nightmare that I am, like you, skinning all my angels to be sold at the butcher’s, to be chewed by scandal-mongers during some page-three morning-hours of this metropolis …
