Imagination is unpredictable. It is a heady feeling, a dizzying moment, a triumph, an unbearable loss, a caress, a glance, and sometimes an overdose of carbon monoxide in a closed room. ‘Pretty skilled,’ you might say. Yes, it is. It is Asterix, Tintin, Phantom, Mandrake, Chahcha Chaudhary, Superman, Frankenstein, Dracula, and Archie rushing towards you from different directions, so to say. If this makes you squirm restlessly, I’m fine if you want to believe that imagination is a converging rendezvous where RAW, ISI, MI6, CIA, Mossad, KGB and a few other agencies meet to create a new world for you. Or maybe it is just a tailor, a doctor, an engineer, an artist, a poet, a politician, a sweeper, a milkman, a grocer, a beautician and a few others trying to build the best community for you. Imagination, believe me, is unimaginably out-of-the-world and, as I have said earlier, unpredictable.
I’ve always believed that imagination is the only thing alive in the universe. Without it, there would neither be Gods nor demons.
‘I guess there would be no boundaries as well. No fences and no trenches ether,’ you say.
‘Ah! Imagination is unpredictable. It makes impossibilities happen and makes possibilities disappear.’
‘So, is it an evil force?’
‘No idea.’
Only one thing is a certainty. It oversees the creation of all sorts of possibilities all around. You know, things like friends drifting apart or time creating a story where everything ends well. Imagination, by the way, is not a coincidence but its creator. Imagination is the axis on which a planet rotates… an imaginary line that controls more than most of us would care to imagine. It is like gravity or relativity, preferring a theoretical existence at best.
Some people believe that everything – the animate as well as the inanimate – are made up of atoms and appear different because of the way these atoms are stacked and packed. A rock too, therefore, is me… and when I kick it I am kicking myself in some way.
‘Rather imaginative,’ you might say.
‘Well, atoms stacked in a certain way can imagine better than those stacked in another way.’
To my mind there is nothing that is impossible. I mean, if you say that I am hanging upside down inside a mirror that I am holding in front of me, I’d believe you. I might even push the glass hard enough to crack it, come out – unless you imagine I am oozing out – to give you a piece of my mind.
‘That’s not possible,’ you might say.
Imagination is unpredictable, buddy. Until you accept that expecting the unexpected is as normal as normal can ever be.
‘Yes, that’s possible,’ you say with a terrified tremor.
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Arvind Passey
05 March 2019
