Thursday 5 January 2017

Of Alices in their Wonderland..

This one's another 'Short', a really small one, perfect for an FB or WhatsApp direct post rather than an individual piece for a blog. But then because my Blog is my partner-in-literary-crime, I think it's dutybound to abide with me through all kinds of writing, small and big, tall and thin, good and bad.....! And therefore, I will definitely post this piece on the Blog, even if it's just a 'small'!

The other day, I was watching an old Agatha Christie film on YouTube called the Seven Dials Mystery. A typical BBC production, slickly made and quite charming, it had one of its characters quote 'Alice in Wonderland':
'You must learn to believe in a minimum of six impossible things before breakfast!'
Later it turned out that this fellow himself was the villain and the murderer, an unfortunate anticlimax, not only because he quoted Alice, but also because he was rather good looking. Anyway, this handsome villain's words served to transport me back to 'Alice in Wonderland' after a very, very long time.
How I had loved that book as a child, reading it voraciously, sketching and colouring its characters, memorising its evergreen dialogues for school plays......................

Not having a hard copy, I now hunted through the World Wide Web and sure enough, found a site with the complete, unedited version in html (and thankfully not as a PDF which take ages to download on my forever ailing 2G network).I spent the next two hours going through the beloved book once again, page by page, line by line, stealing a read whenever possible in between my boring old office work. And I'm quite sure my office boys on finding the usually grumpy me giggling and grinning all to myself, were convinced that I had finally gone bonkers. As I read enthralled, the book somehow seemed even better than before, the humour not just humorous but subtly profound and much more relevant to me now as an adult.

And of course, this re-read also set me off inundating my long suffering WhatsApp contacts with early morning sleep-breaking quotes from the book, thieved from the Internet. Thankfully, while all of them bore the deluge politely (read 'did not block me off ' ), a few, good naturedly even talked back to me of the book, reiterating what I've mentioned before, about how it was even more relevant to us now as adults.

And then suddenly, an acquaintance wrote back,
"You know, in school, my teacher used to tell me that I was an 'Alice'!"

I know exactly what she meant.

For I too am an Alice, just like her; caught in a Wonderland that only I can see. This Quantum Theory obeying, geometric, trigonometric, algebraic, achievment-centric, much-too-practical world is not mine. We Alices, we live on it, that's true but that's about all. This living that we do, eating, sleeping, talking, working...are all just to make you believe we are living alongside you. It's a diversionary tactic. While it's true that we do dwell in your world, the fact is that this is only on the physical plane. On the plane of the mind, we dwell elsewhere, as Lewis Carroll, a fellow Alice described,
'In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die....'

We live amongst you, but because we do not fully belong to your world, I think we are pretty rare. Of course, I maybe wrong; there may be more of us but because we camouflage ourselves even from others like our own, we often miss identifying a fellow Alice.

But we are there, very much there. You might even spot us if you knew that we exist and were dreamy enough: we're the madcaps that stare up at the sky while crossing a busy highway, we're the nuts that see castles and dragons and ice-creams in clouds, we're the basket-cases that talk to stray dogs and cats at street corners, we're those crazies who like a chap just because his dog has kind eyes, we're the demented who set alarms for midnight on Christmas Eve just in case Santa did climb down a nonexistent chimney and leave a present for us, we're those oxymorons that covertly step out in the middle of a winter night to catch aliens land in their flying saucers on that deserted meadow outside, we're the psychotics that lift up wild toadstools on monsoon evenings to see if a forest pixie is sheltering there, we're the schizophrenics that take a peek into your eyes and catch a glimpse of your soul.............!

Because we live with our heads in air and our minds in a perpetual dream-world and also, maybe because we are only part denizens of this world, we have little or no ambition in the way 'ambition' is defined in this world; and hence little or no drive to achieve anything much. In fact, some of us are so incorrigible that in case, rushing down the lane of your ambition, you bump into us, we'd quickly step aside, flustered and let you pass. It is good that we are so rare on this planet. Imagine a world overrun with the likes of us ...... it would surely never get anywhere at all!

Lost thus in our Wonderland, its no surprise that we Alices do not achieve anything too earthshaking in this life; but then, there's this one thing: see, if ever you find your earth shaking in a not-so-great way, you can count on us to put out our hands to hold yours till these 'shakings' go away. And as we do that, hold your hands that is, we would also tell you a wondrous fairy tale, a tale that'll give you a moment's escape from your nasty 'earthshakes', a bit of a much needed respite and a bit of a longed-for rest!

And it's in this little thing that our worth to you lies, ours, the Alices of this world.....!

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