Tempest

Saturday, 26 May 2007

A city and A dam(n)

In the ancient world there was a city by the sea. It was on land lower than most lands and year by year the sea grew larger and taller than the city. It had been enconsed by great walls of massive stone and hardened silt and clay. The wall extended around the whole city and the sea was just its thickness away. Over the years, the walls painstakingly were built thousands of feet high. Over the years, the sea steadily kept growing taller in hope of leaping over those walls and claiming its citizens as its own.

Decades later, the sea stopped growing tall and reached almost the top but not quite. With constant observation, the citizens came to be convinced that the sea would not devour them unless…

The fear persisted…what if there came to be a hole in the wall? And so the citizens would scout the entire city day in and day out and bolster and foster its strength. You see, even when a tiny hole is made on the walls of a humungous tank, water collects itself around that hole and pushes through it with tremendous force. And so the citizens tirelessly worked on their wall.

The city is no more. I do not know the exact reason of its extinction…maybe the citizens tired…maybe the sea had fooled them and lied low for a while before leaping on them like a mythical monster…maybe they psychologically over the years had begun to think that the sea was after all their true home.

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Such a hole in such a tank creates a powerful waterfall. It is heavy and loud and the water gushes down in a fatal torrent. Dams are made on this principle and megawatts of energy is generated in this day and age. Some of it productive, some of it volatile and fatal. But sometimes there is no tank. It’s as if the walls of the water tank have suddenly disappeared and there is no tiny hole either. Just a wide open space and nothing to hold the water in. It gushes out smooth and whole and massive, directionless and unbound in energy, in a freefall.

Thus, you can be damned in and you can be damned out.

For now, very carefully the hole has been crudely cemented. Will it create stagnation? Will it generate more patient static energy in the form of this stagnant water? Or will it just remain…the effort fruitless and pointless?

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Its funny isn’t it? Most of us associate water with free. Any water body; simply the waves, the ebbing, the free flow it looks like the embodiment of free. But it’s the most bound natural element. From the smallest to the largest…why even the sea is covered by land mass on all four of its vast extremes. Since time immemorial there have been tides…high tides and low tides. Maybe it’s the sea forever pushing against the land to be let out. Relentlessly and willfully.

So maybe free isn’t quite free. Maybe free is equivalent to effort of will.

To follow the will…not because it has been willed but because you will it.

Posted by Pavitra :: 12:18 :: 6 comments