Home » Reflections » A Lifetime Captured in a Cupboard

One of my favourite things to do in life is to open the cupboard kept in our bedroom and look into it. My cherished cupboard of books!

The cupboard is in a bedroom of our beautiful apartment that overlooks two lovely coconut trees on which birds plonk and chirp throughout the day. The bedroom enjoys sunshine, breeze and the balcony is open to the sky. Another of my favourite settings. Wind, sun, open spaces and stars!

Holding a book in my hand, feeling the paper, smelling its pages and reading is an experience that is unbeatable. The sound of paper turning between the fingers lingers on. It must be the age of the book or the concoction of chemicals used in printing. Or maybe it is the energy that the books collect over time. Reading is the ultimate fulfilling activity.

Way back, when I was in college, a favourite English lecturer asked during a class, “Is it not painful to read on a computer screen?” 20 years since, reading text on a computer screen is still painful and worse on a smart phone. Also, the world around is consumed in sloppy words and gibberish language. Reading text on digital screens hurts the eye. It steals away the joy of making discoveries through the love of words. We become restless and impatient.

Well, the cupboard reminds me of everything that my life has been. It tells me that I have found everything I seeked. Yet, you see, reading and truly living what one discovers are two different things. Morpheus quips to Neo, “I can only show you the door. You’re the one that has to walk through it,” in the remarkable film The Matrix.

The cupboard also houses my fetish for stationery. There are diaries, post-its, notepads of different sizes, pens and beautiful pictures preserved from old calendars. There are also plenty of cutouts from newspapers, articles that drew my attention.

There are music CDs of soulful U2. REM, whose lyrics did help me define my own religion. Religion not as how we are familiar with the labels of hindu, muslim, christian, and so on; but religion as my own way of life. There are audio cassettes of Metallica, Tracy Chapman, Phil Collins, German Kraftwerk, Michael Jackson and many more.

When you have time, do listen to the pioneering music of German Kraftwerk. Call them the Daft Punk of the 80s or the forerunners of electronic music, their work is fantastic. Their deep notes have never stopped captivating my imagination. How did they manage to make electronic music so melodious and rhythmic? All the things that make an impression on us are timeless. Just like music, books and movies.

When I was in school, my family and neighbours were accustomed to watching every single film that was aired in the local ITI theatre. We lived near the huge green campus of ITI (Indian Telephone Industries). If you observe, ITI telephones appear in many old films. Of course, this name has become passe now due to various reasons.

In the ITI theatre, they would play numbers from German Kraftwerk‘s music before the films were aired. I remember The Man-Machine, We are the Robots, Spacelab and the nostalgic Neon Lights.

“Neon Lights, shimmering neon lights, and at the fall of night, this city’s made of lights.”

This brings me to U2’s …“Oh you look so beautiful tonight. In the city of blinding lights.”

The rock music band U2 experimented aplenty with electronic and techno influences in the early 90s. The music was catchy with heady lyrics and intoxicating guitar strums played by The Edge (David Howell Evans) who is well known for his distinctive style. Lead singer Bono dressed up as many characters during their Zoo tours, including the red devil MacPhisto and called it his alter ego.

Here’s the concluding part of lyrics from their song Kite which was released in 2000.
“Life should be fragrant
Roof top to the basement
The last of the rock stars
When hip hop drove the big cars
In the time when new media
Was the big idea
That was the big idea”

You see, Bono is making a point here. They had experimented with all the then big ideas of the world, but returned back to their real selves. SnapChat, Viber, Instagram, AI, Industry 4.0,… whatever are the big ideas of today, the world still needs a soul.

The cupboard also has movie DVDs of Shawshank Redemption, What the Bleep do we Know?, Chameli ki Shaadi, Jaane bhi do Yaaro, and more.

Here’s a favourite line from the cult film Shawshank Redemption, “Some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild.”

There is also the printed script of the brilliant technospiritual film The Matrix. Since then, it was Christopher Nolan’s Inception that caught my imagination. Nolan’s passion for creating larger-than-life movies with holograms that inter-weave human feelings with lofty concepts; and his perception of non-linear time are my favourites.

For a long time, mountains were part of my psyche. They still continue to be. The many books on Buddhism in the cupboard take me to mountains and peaks. However, I have moved on. There are books by Jiddu Krishnamurti, Shri Ramana Maharshi, Erich Fromm, Holger Kersten, Sidney Sheldon, Rahul Sankrityayan, Dr. Brian Weiss, etc.

My cupboard also contains random notes that I used to prepare by downloading content of my interests from the internet and printing them on sheets which had been printed on one side and discarded. I will always collect such sheets.

Well, let’s get back to the cupboard. The small cupboard of only about 3 feet wide and 4 feet tall houses my entire lifetime! Another cupboard in another residence houses half of my other books.

The cupboard reminds me that my life is fulfilled. If there is one thing that I will have trouble parting with when I leave my body on Mother Earth, it will probably be the cupboard. It is the one visual that will stare at me.

The cupboard haunts me. “Did I become the mage I sought to be?”
—————————————————————————————————–
(This article was first published in TallyGraph, the newsletter of Tally Solutions when I was employed there.)