To know is different from wanting to know

‘I’m sorry. How do I know you?’
‘Do I know you?’
Have we met before?’
‘Who are you?’
Questions that are oft asked on any of the social networking sites… and they’re all valid, no doubt. These questions do serve the purpose of keeping away undesirable elements that stalk the super highway… same as they do in the real world. However, these are the sort of questions that have also bothered me for quite a while now.

Do I ever walk into a book store and picking up a book, ask: ‘Do I know you, dear?’ No. Even though I may never have read a review somewhere, I still may want to pick it up and read the blurb or simply turn over a few pages and read a paragraph here and a paragraph there… and then decide if the book was a stalker out to take my guts out for a few rupees or not. Truth is, I’d buy that book if I really felt that the book would jump and attempt to paint graffiti on my heart. But then when were books like humans?

We humans are a race apart. We are far superior to mere books. Just try and walk out of your haloed circle to strike a new friendship and you’ll know what I mean. We go out of the way to hide information, disguise ourselves, and pretend we have all the friends we ever needed… and that we love the island that we’re on. Sure, solitude is a wonderful thing. Even as I am punching these words on my PC, there is some unknown person working on a stone drilling machine in an apartment in the block next to where I stay… and I know how jarring any sound other than the sounds I love, can be.

<Caption: Would you always want all the pencils in your box to be the same in all respects?>

But then, I’m not recommending going out and including only jarring sounds in your circle of friends, to use a metaphysical metaphor. And I wouldn’t want to have a circle of friends where everyone likes the same colour, speaks of the same likes and dislikes, and there is a sickening similarity everywhere. Coming back to that jarring sound that is coming through my shut window… actually it has stopped now, and I’m already missing it. I have included it in this article and have, therefore, made a new friend.

This jarring sound simply floated through the air to my ears and I accepted it. And as I accepted it, did I ask this jarring sound: ‘I’m sorry. How do I know you?’ Come on, one needn’t feel sorry for not knowing anyone or anything… truth is, if someone asks me the same question (and a lot of people do ask me this and some similar sounding questions), barring a few thousand nobody really knows me. But then, the truth is that even I do not completely know or understand myself.

We need to understand that there is a difference between ‘know’ and to ‘want to know’… imagine what I’d have become had I never ‘wanted to know’ the alphabet or the numbers…! On a radical scale, I’d probably have been better off had I asked the knowledge world to bugger off and had had gone to a secluded place to spend my time growling, yowling, and mewing!

To all those friendly and unfriendly souls who keep dithering between ‘to know or not to know’ when they meet a stranger, I’d like to recommend a poem ‘Don’t say NO to making new friends!’ that I had written a few days back:

“You open any page
of any book and you’ll find
something yet undiscovered by you
something that you always wanted
but never knew what

until you stumbled upon that book
and just opened it.

Unlock secrets,
climb up to ecstatic revelations
walk into cellars of truth

unafraid, pick up an unknown book
and step into a new world…”

Well, if you’ve actually read the poem above, you’ve just struck a new friendship with a ‘stranger’ creation. And if you’ve liked it, you may just want to extend a hand of friendship to the one who wrote it, that is, me. As I know me, I’d never turn back and ask: ‘Do I know you?’

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An article by Arvind Passey
15 September 2010