The Birth Of Tragedy

Don’t know why but today I feel like writing my story. So I will. Pardon the Grammar.

No human story is ever single dimensional. there are always multiple reasons that prompt your action and that action causes multiple effects. Whenever I have new mood or new type of person in front of me (that is, in my psyche), I see my life from a different angle. I personally like the curiosity angle and have most respect for spirituality angle. Social angle is the most ugly. I might at times mix them with one another, because ultimately they are one and the same.

(I like to recall things according to my classes in school and semesters in college. so I’m providing the time frame:
Birth: 11th December 1991
My age in 5th class = 11 yrs
My age in 10th class = 16 yrs
My age in 12th class = 18 yrs
4 years of college straight after, from August 2010 to June 2014, having 8 semesters each of 6 months. So my age in Ist semester = 18
in IInd and IIIrd semester = 19
in IVth and Vth semester = 20
in VIth and VIIth semester = 21
in VIIIth semester = 22
Now I’m 23.)

I was a normal kid. one of the herds. you know, like, going like everyone else is going, having same type of views about popular people as everyone else has, trying to look cool. though i always had social awkwardness and curiosity. I think where it all began, where seeds of guilt were sown, was when in 7th class I and my family went for tour to various states of India (my country). and after coming back from it when my parents used to ask me what was the place where this and this temple was situated, i couldn’t recall. i didn’t have a map of places we visited in my mind. and whenever i wouldn’t, they used to take me on a guilt trip. i used to blame myself for my inability to recall. this, in addition with my inability to recall names of distant only-once-met relatives + bullying at school, used to make me feel so, so guilty. i used to weep in night and think out solutions. you see i was highly self-conscious and sensitive even at that age (I don’t know how it is with others. I’m saying it from my own frame of reference only. maybe it’s same with everybody and i’m just exaggerating). I also had problem understanding relatives. i couldn’t understand them and why they wanted me to act in ways which used to seem to me as pretty redundant/unnecessary. and whenever i would question, my mother used to take me on guilt trip and tell me how stupid i am for questioning it. so i used to think that it is I who is wrong and i should not think this way. but i couldn’t change even upon wanting to and thus the guilt. it went on till 10th, with at peak in 9th.

Now i’ll tell you a funny story. In my country 10th is an important class academically because admission in colleges after school is partly based on one’s performance in this class. atleast that’s what i was told.  so i was fully dedicated to perform best in it. Now, one superstition that’s present in virtually every student of this country is that if you drop a notebook or put leg on it, the goddess of knowledge will get angry and you’ll perform bad in studies. so whenever someone accidentally does that, he touches that notebook on his forehead and asks for forgiveness. I had my own style of doing that (and i was proud of it). i used to first touch that notebook with hand, then used to place that hand on forehead, bottom bone of face and lips successively (kinda like how christians do), 3 times. Now, since it was 10th class and i wanted to perform better, i started doing that process 8 times instead of 3, to please goddess of knowledge. this desperation turned into obsession. now even if it’s someone else who puts leg on notebook, i touch 8 times; even if i am lying on bed and the book is far away but is in the same perspective as my legs, i touch 8 times; and many more things like this. even i became sick of it, but couldn’t stop out of fear of displeasing the goddess. i waited till the exams, and after they were over, the first thing i wanted to do was to stop all this non-sense.

But now i found myself in an awkward situation. what explanation am i going to give to god — that i did all that to extract more marks out of you, and now that exams are over, now that you can’t do anything, i am undoing all that? won’t god detect my selfishness this way?

So it was going for some time. it was summer time so i used to sleep on roof of the house. one of those nights i wasn’t sleeping but just looking at the stars. At that big black universe between them. i must have looked continuously for two hours. same thing happened the next night. And to this day i believe that something got into me in those two nights. The universe that i was staring at transferred something into me. Intelligence.

In those two nights i contemplated the God question. This was the first time in my life that i explicitly thought something. Thinking – as a process – was born in me. and God was the first subject i thought about (because of whatever i wrote in third last and second last para). After this, timeline is a bit blurry. i don’t know what i was thinking or what was going in me in next few weeks, but after some 15 days or 1 month i took a decision – I Am Going To Become Atheist. for 1 week, as an experiment. You see how funny it is. I took this decision because i was tired of that 8 times notebook touching ritual and wanted to stop it, but couldn’t because of fear of god, so i decided to test god himself! I planned that for one week i will stop believing god and see what happens. Gentlemen, don’t judge this decision from your matured eyes. I was a fully integrated being. I was naive, childish, innocent – and thus integrated. My this decision was not just a decision of mind — my entire being was becoming atheist when i executed it. Oh! what a week that was. Only Neo of Matrix can understand what i saw in that week. Layers of society opening up. Lies opening like a flower of lotus to show the inside. Everything was shedding its deceptive layer. So simply, so beautifully. Everything I put my eyes upon was turning into gold, so to say. It was only a matter of my turning my awareness towards it and it would shed its lies. like literally; i could kind of see the whole process happening. At the end of the week I was clear. I was changed entirely (I even did a self survey and found that i’m 80% changed!). who could have thought what started as a childish experiment would end like this. I was actually doing many experiments at that time, scientifically, existentially, socially… in all fields. they were products of that newly-acquired intelligence. and this one was just one of them. but strangely it produced an effect of such magnitude. Everything that I appreciate in myself begins here.

(A secret: my uncle, my mother’s brother, died that week. He… committed suicide. First unnatural death in family since i was born. First suicide in my entire family history from either side. But somehow, i did not see that connected with my decision of becoming atheist. I actually challenged god to show me if you are, show me if you can do anything when i reject your existence. But somehow, to this day i don’t know how, i skipped this event. I did not tell my mother though when i later realized.)

To be continued…