The Backpacker

There are things and some more. Now, ‘things’ really don’t mean ‘stuff’ we must have to live on Mother Earth. But, these things are around us and grow with passion everyday till you start believing in their importance over your own.

Look carefully around you. The ‘things’ the world is made of today is technology personified. When electricity was invented years ago and subsequent master thinkers designed computers and technology little did they know that their innovative idea would be put on chips the size of a marble that would eat into decent peoples’ savings and give rise to feelings of inferiority complex among those who have never heard of the ‘chips’.

Sigh, gone are the days when the mention of ‘chips’ brought smiles on our faces and raised in our hearts and mind immense possibilities of an evening well spent. But mention ‘chips’ today and you will at once find youngsters launch into animated, garbled conversations that in our time was achieved as a result of mixing sounds in studios for voice-overs. Times have changed and for no good reason.

Take the iPod, or even the iRiver. For one, they even don’t stand the Basic English grammar test and come up with red lines under them. What good is a ‘thing’ that is not even qualified to fit into a scheme of English grammar? No good of course. But they have been given a use, for Gods sake. They have been designed in a manner as to aid you in your musical quest.

Now, in our times we swayed and danced to music just as well as people do today. Only we knew where the music came from, we saw a source more than feeling it on our shirt sleeve or as a bulge in the tie and we were not ashamed to display giant boxes that belted out sounds through even bigger speakers placed strategically around the room. Heck, music, we believed, was for everyone to listen. We did not skimp on music and never kept it to ourselves. Can you say that about the iPods and the even tinier products of today’s technology? Why, music suddenly has become everyone’s secret affair.

Heck it’s not even that easy. Take me. I can write till my blood ran dry but give me an iPod and I am lost, completely and totally lost. It does not help that it comes with an instruction manual or an even smaller installation CD which if you don’t look disappears in the palm of your hand. I must admit that I have technologically assaulted. First I was gifted an iRiver and close on hand, an iPod. People have, I suppose, keenly misunderstood my love for music and handed me complicated gadgets to pamper myself with. But, pray how do you indulge in something the eyes can barely see or the mind comprehend? How do I get to listen to all my favorite songs from a 1.6 inches piece of metal? No, the manual does not say that, however even without having said it, it has made me feel quite inadequate because I have been unable to find (after reading the manual), an easy way to put music into it!

Life is a long drawn process of living and the iPods (read technology) have made that process a tad bit more complicated. The more technology gets fashionable the more it gives rise to shudders. One cannot, at least it applies to me, run abreast of technology however fast you run. It is, I have decided, a thousand headed hydra.

No, I can do without the reducing size of music players that insist on converting everything into a pre-determined format? Now, what is an MP3? And how many actually know that another devious format is making the rounds? MP4! Cannot music simply be ‘La la la’ and not MP3? Why must they be compressed and pressed or burned onto a micro-chip? Why must they not be shared? I think technology is isolating one from the other. Besides being a fashion statement (remember fashion changes fast), it is becoming a nuisance for normal people who cannot afford to spare time on ‘downloads’ and ‘uploads’ on unseeing objects.

Till the next in the ‘i’ series does more harm, I must get this one going.

What is this my eyes see
Stretching ahead endlessly
Pray where does it lead?
Why I see on it
No trodden feet?
Perhaps abandoned
Perhaps ignored
But am glad,
It’s my very own road...

I love the feel of the brown leaves
The pebbles, the dirt
And old fallen trees
No milestones to mark progress
Nothing to call it my own
At once snaking at times breaking
Into deep potholes
But gratefully this unfriendly stretch
Is my very own road

On it I will walk
Till my sunshine I find
Never giving in, never turning back
To run into the arms
Of love, I never had
Failures are far behind
And success chases me
Down these brown ruts
I call my very own road

....Just maybe, it is time to go. I thank the good god for memories and thoughts that are not restricted to a place alone. I am glad I will be able to carry the thoughts and memories where ever I go, far far away from an uncaring soul. I will be glad that when I think back I would know, what ever I did not achieve, this would go down in history, as a chapter that remained unread, maybe I have lost, maybe, just maybe I have gained soemthing. The realisation that love never holds down another.

Am glad for this wonderful creation called the mind, dreams and hope for they dont let you forget but goad you into a deeper sense of fulfilment. Love. Where ever I go, they will be with me. Thank god for the heart that only thinks of giving Love unconditionally... and for the ability to go down on my knees before the almighty and pray for him. These cannot be taken away from me.

Who says, I would be lonely?