The Insanity Within

The snow softly piled on, layer upon layer, as the day waned into the evening and my thoughts turned to the past. Out of the ruminations of the mind, the past brought up a bunch of memories that rarely come to me. One such memory was of the instance when we went to a Buddhist temple in Dadar, Mumbai when I was about 7-8 years old. Our entire family, including the cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents (the whole lot!) went together and us children were enjoying a game of indulging in plain silliness (what that was I can’t seem to recollect) which might have been observed by some of the monks there. When we were about to leave, we went to get blessings from the monks and dropped some money into the donation box. That is when one of the monks inquired my father, ‘’Is your son not sound of mind!?” My father, trying to smother his spurt of laughter, simply said ‘’No’’. I looked at the monk with a snide glance full of malice and hatred, as even then I understood the man implied I perhaps was residing somewhere on the autistic spectrum. I hated him more because he implied that autism was ‘’madness’’ and not a mental disability, rather than hating him for calling me a mad child. But, now I understand why he might have thought so.

Maybe, I do have a certain ‘’madness’’ within me that I like to think of something inherently wild that can never be subdued by the inane and mundane mediocrity of life. At the danger of sounding incredibly pretentious, perhaps the monk was terrified that he could never obtain that sense of madness. Some of the best things in life are rippling with a madness that makes us realize the true depths and serene wonders of the universe. Our species’ mightiest thinkers, scientists, leaders, both men and women, have possessed this madness for life that perhaps pervaded them and made them extraordinary. The madness of taking risks, the madness of not caring what others think or conforming to society’s absurd standards. Isn’t that a madness too, that makes the ‘’them’’ separate from the ‘’us’’. Isn’t that what we resort to everyday to find that wall of security where life is all wondrously boring and calm. Shunning that madness that fills you everyday is the way we die slowly, until the breath escapes our bodies and the thumping of the heart stops. I revel in my madness, for I contain this spark and wish to walk upon the road to greatness and perhaps … empathy and kindness. For there is no magic and there is no madness as great as kindness.

I want to revel in it all…

Fellow 'madman', although of another calibre of genius altogether!