Thursday Night

Tomorrow is the first of Ramadan and the faithful will be short-tempered as they rush to get home before the break of the fast. In a month that is supposed to teach patience, impatience will rule. Each year, we have to wonder what Ramadan teaches us and how, we practice and abide by it.

The air outside is still as if it awaits the unfolding of the future, with a sense of dread. There is a silence, which was only understood in books before and now, having experienced it; gives way to caution. There is a change in the air, but the weather has not changed that drastically. There is a change in the way the light reflects off objects and the objects themselves look different. Everything looks the same, but yet feels different. It hard to identify the change itself, but the sense that there is something amiss is undeniable.

This nation is slowly changing as if it has woken up from a long slumber and is still lumbering its way about, but each day gives impression that yesterday will never be the same. It is not a linear chronology of the calender, but it that intangible look in the eyes of the people; that cautionary look of expection, which offer glimpses into a silent volcano that seems to be seething, with a potential burst of enegry. There is a listlessness to the spirit and though the instincts of a revolutionary zeal are absent, the ambiance of a revolution wraps the senses with a foreshadowing that is both stimulating and addictive.

The Belgian author, who wrote the lines that simply captured the mood of his generation in the post-First World War, would have understood the sentiments on the streets. It is hard to say; really hard to decide, whether the country has changed or I have changed since those distant events, which flowed like a reckless torrent from the events of April 2007. How many barricades were swept aside by that emotional rush of controlled anger that broke free from the dams of political status-quo, which had contained the politics of this nation.

The images of confrontation and the nights of quiet reflection still linger on in the memory and though the smile is ever present, the mirth is sadly missing. Emil Verhofen was right; I wistfully miss the "the man I used to be...". Life has taken strange and unexpected twists and it all started from that innocent evening watching television and in boredom of channel surfings to have almost missed that epochal event in 2001 that changed our lives.

The ghosts of the old come back and the demons invite them into my reveries and the incredulity of the absurd and the pedestrian merge into a surrealism of life. Polite conversations and embittered passions and still the fact remains that history hinges on the banality of the most trival inconsequences. The numberologies of the centuries cannot hold a candle to the truth that it is the acts of defiance, which benchmark the separations between the centuries and make us aware of the difference from one age to another.

The march of the years passes us by and we, like so many disinterested spectors to the game of memory, we sometimes do not even credit the signifiance of what we have witnessed. Our only consolation is the hindsight, which tells us that our lives have changed and pinpoints that invisible year as the fulcrum of change and we like so many devotees of a cult, ritualistically, unthinkingly, immortalize that year in the daily ceremonies and rememberances of our lives.

O' most noble and pious irony, allow me to count the ways, I love thee!

I am too much caught up in the routine and tedium of existence to fully acknowledge the Hegelian impact of the ideas, which I have lived through these past years. Time to come and the generations that will write the narrative of the past in the future, will give the hindsight for us to understand the events we lived. History changes and nations alter their destinies, when the thought contained within the human mind; that divine spark of orginality, itself, changes.

Thoughts and mindsets change, when the old conventions of the accepted believes are shattered and what shatters them into dust is the discovery of the unknown.

The ungainly nature of my thoughts and their directionless meanders makes me surmise that the world, which I experience, changed in that bright September sunshine and the nation, which I live in changed one day in April.

It flatters me to think that I am living in the midst of history, and in the years to come, when the tales of the past would have been weaved and interwoven into countless explantions, that I would scarcely believe that I actually lived the events, which my own intellect would prompt me to accept as improbable.

Again, like that old sojourner of the fables, I stand before horizon and I gaze into that imaginary line, where the earth and sky extroploate to create my vision of the future and I rhetorically ask - Quo Vadis?