Like an electron, he charged towards her, before realizing he was day dreaming at his desk. He had been reading a foreign policy book about the rise of Asia and how its soon to be more than five billion people would go on to reclaim their position as the world’s leading geo-political region, a position it had lost during the exodus of European powers; beginning from the sixteenth century, and consolidated with the industrial revolution that Great Britain brought forth in the eighteenth.
After fifty three pages, his thoughts drifted a little, and he couldn’t bring his focus back. She was on his mind, like always, and he had begun imagining them frolicking around an abandoned island, roasting freshly caught fish and dancing naked around the bonfire well into the night. Sipping the coffee that had by now become stone cold, owing to the air conditioning, he resisted the sudden urge to smoke a cigarette, and waited for the thought to subside, which duly happened around three minutes later. The coffee was strong, his fourth of the day.
She stayed on his mind and he shrugged the thought away. The past few days had been a roller coaster from a personal and professional point of view, peppered with highs and lows, and she had accounted for most of the highs, simply because, she enthralled him in a way nobody had done so before. He could still smell her perfume in the corridor, even though the smell had long evaporated. What had she done to him? His feelings weren’t unhealthy or obsessive at all, in fact they were healthy and admirable, his sheer respect for her had only increased manifold after she had told him about her principles and values of living the life that she desired with all her heart.
He was in no hurry to be with her. He was sure they would.
“Oh, its what you do to me, Oh, its what you do to me”. The lyrics hit him and he began to smile dreamily, before his senses snapped. He picked up the book and began reading the words, feeling as if he were traversing on seafaring voyages, hungry to explore the mighty seas, like the sailors of bygone eras, whose sense of curiosity and wonder about the size of the earth, whose strange lands inhabited by peoples and cultures, had led them to embark on adventures which would bring them death, abandoned at sea, or riches and glory back home. There was no in between. What a time to exist, with men and women simply accepting all kinds of suffering, pain and the joys that went along with them, simply because they didn’t understand the biosphere that housed them.
He wondered what the future held, in a decade from now. He wanted to be at the forefront of the upcoming revolution in human understanding about the way nature worked, especially the mysteries of the human mind and the human genome, which held the key to eternal bliss and youth. Would a new biologically superior species emerge whose capabilities would include shaping materials and bodies according to their thoughts? It was already a known fact that god didn’t exist and that religion was just a bundle of stories written so that masses of people could co-operate effectively to perform great feats like building the pyramids, temples, mosques, shrines, canals, bridges or establish governments and democracies and nation states by believing in the same thing.
The power of stories still held up today, when objectivity was the only truth that needed to be told, by barring the superficial, subjective details from clouding and glamouring for attention spans. Subjectivity needed to be frowned upon by seeking the specifics of each and every thing, by rejecting emotions and feelings which didn’t add up to anything other than fodder for gossip and rumour mongering. It was something which was so obvious to him that he wondered why a majority of people still tended to rely on gossip to pass the time, when the onus should be upon debating about how to learn and upgrade oneself continuously, little by little everyday, yet still finding the time to inculcate good habits like exercise and meaningful relationships, that encouraged positivity and progress rather than looking down upon anything new.
He couldn’t wait to begin. The world was his for the taking.
Marijuana Maharaj 