Kinga In Oz

Last minute struggle is a popular trend among the Bhutanese but having a child around is quite often an added woe. Few weeks ago, I was running late for a submission but my little one would not understand. She would climb on my back and stretch my hair or squeeze onto my lap and demand to watch cartoons on my computer or croon to her like she was a baby. As a last minute attempt, I locked myself into the room and turned a deaf ear to her whimsical calls. Suddenly she shrieked and said there was a cockroach out there. Cockroaches are something I do not tolerate and I fast forward their The End pleasurably. I quickly opened the door and asked her where the damned thing was. She quickly wrapped her arms around my neck and wouldn’t let go.  The little smartass had tricked me into opening my door.

 “That’s Chicken” I said

“Nooo! That is doma” she retorted.                                                   

Then she pointed at the mini-bottle of apple juice infront of her and asked me what that was.

“That’s apple juice” I replied.

“Nooo! That’s wine” she flashed back.

I was amazed then – at the way her memory was functioning. Many many months after leaving home, she still remembers doma. Kids are getting more cerebral now. They can do a lot more than what we could at their stage.  

A funny remark by a lecturer yesterday gave wheels to my imagination. What if our brains functioned like hard disks?  Our home based computers have 40 or 80 GBs of memory but that isn’t all. External drives worth hundreds of gigabytes of data storage are now popular in the market. A modern day man owns atleast one external hard disk and maybe several thumb drives. An advantage to these disks is that unwanted data can be deleted and storage space freed for future use. Perhaps our brain works the same way – that a lot of our experiences get deleted by the influx of new experiences. God is a genius!!! He designed nature in such a way that things took care of themselves. Imagine our brains had no automatic deleting function and our cerebrum grew with the increase in data. At one point, when we grow upto be a sixty or an eighty year old and had stored all the sights and sounds we experienced along the journey of our lives,  our heads would grow so tall for our bodies to balance them and perhaps we would all look like the city of Hongkong with moving skyscrapers. Or who knows – perhaps Steve Jobs would come handy then and create MacHuman Air as he did with MacBook Air – afterall small is powerful. 

Perhaps that is why we should learn not to begrudge and to forget and forgive – delete them the bad memoirs and move on...by freeing storage space in our minds to welcome the worlds beyond the horizon.

Now imagine this. We use gadgets that are going wireless all the more; mobile phones, internet connections, printers and in less than 10 years, the connected cars. Everything functions on wireless signals – that which is invisible to the naked eye. What if these signals were visible? Wouldn’t our towns look so meshed and messy? Even better – what if they could be felt? Wouldn’t we all be pierced through until we resembled the dead porcupines? This reminds me of a snippet in Gyelsa Lalen whereby a version of hell is depicted as a jungle where the leaves were daggers and the winds would blow them until the dagger aka the leaves would painfully rip through our bodies.  Maybe this is the modern hell. Think about it – the ills of modernization. 

More wheels on imagination next time...stay put!