Life is a fun-loving sentence that doesn’t follow any rules of sublime grammar. No rules of nouns and pronouns or conjunctions and prepositions asking words to follow a specified pattern. I have seen full-stops popping up even before pauses have existed. There are times when adjectives pile up in comic sequences without even attempting to be sensible. Families go on adding members without bothering about the economics of living which is like one ‘and’ following another breathlessly throwing grammar into a bin. Life is definitely not a grammar Nazi and loves to play with rules if there are any. The obvious conclusion then would be to not take it seriously.

There have been times when I have felt that life was more like a maverick trapped in a body wondering why things were not going as they should. I mean, look at the mind that strays the moment it is time to focus. Or feet that grumpily complain the moment they know it is time to get up and go out for a morning walk. So I asked my mind and my feet, my hands, my eyes and every other body part the reason for their disobedient stances.

‘We are not disobedient,’ they chorused.

‘Really?’ I asked, ‘But didn’t the feet pretend to be grumpy and the mind thought it was right to play truant the moment it was time to do some serious work? How can you guys say you are innocent?’

‘We are,’ they chorused, ‘We love following orders because this is why we were created. But you give all the wrong… and sometimes funny orders…’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. You are life.’

‘Ah! I am life,’ I said, ‘I guess this explains a lot.’

However implausible this may sound, life is the real maverick that makes all the physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, physiology and every other such complex basis of functionality go and take missteps. Science is invariably sedate and composed… but life enters and brings in clumsiness rather chirpily. Frankly, this is what gives living moments the bounce that they rightly deserve. Left to the art of science and the science of art, life would go on and keep doing all the right things at the right time in the right way and… wouldn’t everything then be simply exasperatingly boring?

I wouldn’t want life to conform to rules that all the wonderful tools of existence talk about. No one would then be fat and obese. There would then be no one running late and shouting, ‘Alexa didn’t wake me up on time!’ Every dosa will be just perfect and food bloggers will have nothing to rant about. There would then be no litter on our roads and obviously no swachch bharat app to stir up action. No rat race and no cat and mouse chases anywhere. I shudder whenever I think of life suddenly losing its maverick gene and becoming insanely sane.

‘No,’ I remind myself, ‘you remain the detractor that you are, buddy. I love all these transgressions and digressions. I love exclamation marks upside-down. I love the punctuation playing havoc with meanings. Please remain the maverick that you are.’

Life is a poem that lends just that bit of insanity to all the mundane sanity that existence really is. It is what every surprising turn and shocking twist is made up of. Life for me is certainly that utterly loveable as well as deplorably despicable maverick busy transforming the dreary technological symmetry of moments into vibrant logic-defying artworks that deserve to be immortal. Life is not just any maverick… it is too important a grammar terminator and must, therefore, be taken seriously if being #FullyHumanFullyAlive is what interests you.

‘What? You’re asking me to take a grammar terminator seriously?’

‘Yes.’

‘A force that introduces clumsy missteps jauntily must be taken seriously?’

‘Yes.’

‘Something that defies the scientific regulations of the universe to be taken seriously?’

‘Yes.’

‘I guess I need to read your post again.’

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Life is a maverick trapped in a body. #FullyhUmanFullyAlive #indispire

Life is a maverick trapped in a body. #FullyhUmanFullyAlive #indispire

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Arvind Passey
04 January 2019