How can you even begin to describe a person whose writing you admire immensely? I can’t. But what I CAN do is refer to 2 of my all time favorite posts on his blog: A Tragic Art and Mystic Meander to give you an idea of how beautifully he writes.
Presenting to you the third guest post on Conversations: Parallel Universe by Rajagopalan Ratnaraj whose blog name is A Beautiful Mind. Read on!
Almost every one of us has a thing for legacy! We dream of seeing our names in tabloids & billboards; our heart pulses up on every mention of our name. We all like to outlive our time in this world in some philosophical form unless your idea of mortality is to store a few of your skin cells in a Petri dish inside a robot programmed to live forever. But half way through our lives, we are smart (or foolish) enough to realize that greatness is destined to a select few who go on to change this world for good (or bad) & thrust their legacy into history books & their neighbors alike. Then we watch our favorite movie star who starts out as a son of a farmer, goes to the best college in the nation, romances the most beautiful girl, fights 20 baddies while smoking a cigarette, turns a millionaire in the course of a 5 minute song & lives happily ever after in the hearts of his people. And then we watch him do just about the same thing in his next movie: this time as a factory laborer’s son. I see one difference between him & me: he has me in his audience & I've me as my audience. Well, heck, who cares! A parallel universe is thus born!
We might or might not learn about the concept of a parallel universe in the inter-twined realms of physics and philosophy but we are certainly introduced to its more conceivable form by the various larger-than-life characters we see around us. Our parallel universe, when formed is a very crude one. It starts out as an inner world where we rehearse our future without the risk of failure. We start out longing to be someone famous, notorious, strong or intelligent. Our thoughts are someone else’s opinions and our passions are borrowed quotations. But slowly literature, science, philosophy, music: all make their way into our universe & we cease to be someone else’s shadow. We create a world that is magical & has the potential to create, give & most importantly make us truly immortal!
A parallel universe has no rules & no bounds. And certainly endless possibilities! A child might dream of being like his father one day while the father might be ready to give anything to be a child once again. Almost every one of us who read Ayn Rand in college would have dreamt of stopping the motor of this world, living out of the fantasy pages of Atlas Shrugged’s Objectivism.
But alas at some point, we are battered so much in our real lives that we resign & seek solace in our parallel world. It ceases to be that missile destined to launch you to glory & ends up as a luxury vehicle that takes you on an exotic holiday. It fuels your ambition no more; it just feeds your hurt ego. We come home, play the guitar, solve the Global Economic Crisis in an hour, write a book & get it published in the meantime. By the way, you do all this while you're partying in
Parallel universe means different things to different people. It is eventually up to you to decide what you want to do with it. You can look at it as your book of enlightenment or as your evening entertainment channel. To me, it is an incredible philosophical paradox. If you work on it as a dream, it eventually becomes a reality. And if you imagine it as a reality, it stays as a dream. Well, If Beethoven could compose music without hearing; we can try to live a dream without dreaming!
Imagine you just painted your best work of art! You can sell it for a fortune. You can hang it above your bed & keep gazing at it for the rest of your life. You can gift it to the person you love the most. You can burn it down so that no one else ever has the single moment of ecstasy. The choice is yours. But don’t just imagine it: paint it! It would be a shame to imagine but not feel such a precious moment. Go ahead and create your own parallel universe. Who knows one day you might actually get to live in it! A parallel universe exists in the realms of every human mind. The question is: Do you want to be materialistic or not? Do you want it to work wonders for the world or just for yourself? The choice is yours!
