The "Agent Smith" cycle

Human beings are fascinated by things that are out of ordinary. Things like miracles, extra terrestrial beings, things that can be termed as "odd news", things that we don't want to beileve in - are actually the things that we tend to look for. Likewise we are fascinated by people who are different from us. People who do not share our habits. People who take interest in things that we do not enjoy. The general belief is that we befriend people who are like us, people who can enjoy the same things that we do. I will not disagree to that but what I am talking is about being fascinated.

It is the surprise of finding someone living a life that is different from ours when we thought ours was the only way of living that initiates it all. A general curiosity to know more about the difference is instigated because it is something we cannot explain or understand. It is the unknown that beckons us and we proceed.

With time, however, the fascination fades and after the initial curiosity is quenched, one comes back to reality. It is no more the unknown. We look at things as they are, without the cosmetics of either surprise or interest. It is then that we tend to realise that the paths actually fork. The initial interest changes to irritation and finally to indifference.

We are appalled at the idea of how someone can dislike or like so and so. We mock their enthusiasm for something and reprimand their indifference to something else. Their ideals that we listened with inquisitiveness a few days ago seem like a monotonous blabber and make no sense whatsoever. We never could relate to it, we were just reading. Now the book is over, we don't want to read again. In course of time we try to infuse our ideals in them, our likes, our dislikes, our enthusiasm and our indifference. In short we make them our replicas. Some resist and move on and some give in, lose themselves and stay. Once that is done, we are back on track to seek a new face.

I used to wonder how is it, that the exact same things that once fascinated, were the also the ones that were altered. How is it that the activities that amazed us were also the ones that irritated us!

It was when I saw Agent Smith in Matrix III, that it started to make a little sense. We sought the distinct to alter, not to appreciate. Not to preserve but to destroy. That to find a person who was like us had no novelty in it but to find someone and alter him could be a challenge, even if a small one.

PS: The above case may not be real because, since forces from both sides work, there comes a time when they could cancel each other. It can be called the point of equilibrium. By that time some of the characteristics of both the persons have already changed. One could call this adaptation, adjustment, compromise or the like. In terms of society, such a thing is beneficial and even necessary but in terms of an individual, it is just alteration, plain and simple.

On setting them free

No one can re-live a feeling. One can only remember and assume what it had felt like.
You can remember that fall you had when you started riding a bicycle, that bruise on your elbow, that cut on the knee, the drop of blood trickling from the cut, the stream of tears that washed your face and how you wanted to run home but could not. Why? Because it hurt. How much was the pain? You don't remember, but it made you cry so it must have been a great deal. You wouldn't cry for nothing. That is were assumption works, imagination comes and in our mind we try to reconstruct a feeling that we don't remember. Yet if you had to go through the same situation today, you would not even wince. Worse still you would probably laugh at the whole thing!
Memories trick us. Through them we live those feelings which are nothing but gross exaggerations of reality.

Old feelings are all like old wounds. You don't remember how much it had hurt, likewise you don't remember how deep you had felt.

One such ancient feeling haunts me.. no, 'haunt' will be a wrong, it doesn't frighten me.
So, one such ancient feeling looms over me for no reason. Actually, there is a reason. If it would not have been for the reason, the feeling would have died in some locked corner of my mind. Of course it would have left its traces on the pages of my diary that was noted down in a form of a poem some 2 years back.


So this ancient feeling, it was more than a decade back. The town where I lived had a common big(don't go on the adjectives I use, since they all come from memory) market. Just at the entrance there was this man who used to sell birds. You know, small colourful birds, the sight of which is bound to make you smile. Birds that never got tired of chirping, birds kept in cages, birds that seemed to shout for freedom. I often thought how much would it cost to buy them all. And if my pocket money would be enough to set them free. I never quite got to ask my parents in fear that I would not be able to explain why I wanted to buy and then set them free. So this fancy somehow never made to reality.

I left the town pursued my studies and then landed here.

There is a shop here on the main road where my house is. The same kind. And as I cross it, that feeling comes back or rather the memory of that feeling comes back. And probably memory has magnified that feeling to an extent that I deliberately brood over it now and then. I could put an end to this brooding thing by simply going there, buying them and setting them free. Why spend so much time thinking about it, why write a blog entry on it!

Do you think their wings are clipped? Do you think they will be able to fly? Do think if I set them free, they will come back to that man? Is that not their home? Were they caught or were they bred? Have they ever been in the sky, known the world for which they are meant? If I take them out of their secured cages, do you think they will be able to survive? Having been fed all their life, will they be able to find food for themselves? Will they adapt to the vastness of sky after they limits of the cage? And what about predators? Can they save themselves from them? And if they die after being set free, would you say this life was better than that death? At least they were not dead, or were they?

I do not know or rather I know that I cannot know.