Metamorphosis of a Bookworm
Books
Those black round letters in white or aged brown chests
Enticed me
I wanted to devour the thing inside it
Memorizing it
Reading more and more
Until all the books in the village got exhausted
Soon the alphabets changed their shape
Changed their inherent meanings
And became colored
And decorated with pictures
Black and white
And then really colorful.
Books
Became my bosom buddies
I read when I walked
When I ate
And when I got up from sleep
And before I slept.
Those wise people who wrote the books
Let me drink from the fountain of knowledge
To fill me in with information
Knowledge and may be even wisdom.
Then I discovered libraries
First dark and dusty with wrinkled pages
Then to museum of books in selves
‘Noise annoys’
I can sit there for hours
Like a bee in a garden full of flowers.
Soon
Books became only part time friends
As I delve into hands on experience
Finding myself instead of consuming
Someone else’s finding.
Experiments, analyses, publications
The interpretation of God’ ingenuity
According me
Ha ha
Then I saw the world outside
Beyond books
Beyond micropipettes and PCR machines
And also inside me
The real flowers are so more wonderful
Than the article on mechanism of flowering
Real people are so intriguing
Than their descriptions in psychology books
The real singers are so mesmerizing
Than the presentations in meetings
The digital invasion
The ease of getting information
Without spending hours in a library
No more going from self to self, article to article
Now my fingers do the walking
Bringing me not wisdom
But data and inferences
From seven million blind people
For me to put together their findings
By meta-analysis
To perceive an elephant
Beyond the allurement of lab and laptop
Lies the vast book of nature
People included
Primitives, ultra-moderns
Different shapes, sizes, dresses
Brains, languages, voices
Their lives on the ground
In the deep sea
On the tree tops and under microscopes
So fascinating.
Their messages
Their expressions
In form of movements,
Symbols, dances and melodies
Their pace of feeding and breeding
And bringing up the babies
As sleep walkers.
There lies the vast span of plants
Decorated with flowers of wild varieties
Drugging bees with pollens
Giving food
Asking nothing in return
Never angry or not forgiving
To all of us
The exploiters.
And then inside all of those
Shapes, sized, positions and races
The ever working genes and proteins
That make up what I can see
And can’t
And could not
And may be shall not.
My book became so big now
So astounding
Each shape, each word has a spell on me
Each move triggers me to read it more
More and more
To experience in full
The meaning of my existence
With my closed eyes.
((*|*))
Babru
September 19, 2010 |