Yearning for a story

It's weird that I woke up in the morning thinking about my childhood, specifically about all those stories my grandfather used to tell me as I snuggled beside him in a warm blanket with a white cotton cover on a cold winter evening. With the reassuring knowledge of mother busy in the kitchen and father too occupied to pester me with any more mathematics, and with the ever so imaginative beginnings to entranced escapes which went, "once upon a time", I would look into his bespectacled eyes, old and wearied but fixated somewhere in the distance, continually brimming with excitement as he recounted, for the 100th time, how the prince killed the monster. Once in a while, he would look at the boy, who by this time was completely bewitched, and he would smile ever so gently and pat his head and say, "do you know what happened next". Of course I knew, but it was a million times sweeter if he told me once again. And he would. In the sweet white light of a warm cozy room with the muffled sound of an electric heater in the background, the slightly cold touch of a freshly cleaned pillow, and the assurance that the only person in the world who could save me from doing chores and studying and general parental bullying was sitting right beside me recounting stories: it hardly gets any better.

I woke up in the morning not just with these sweet memories. Sweet memories hardly ever wake you up. I woke up thinking about our, as in our generation's, apparent lack of imagination and creativity. I was wondering, if we are ever called upon to do so, would we have a good story to tell ? It is human to hark upon imagination when our experiences are not good enough. But imagination needs a foundation to grow upon. While my grandfather's generation had religion and social boundaries and superstitions to provide them with a framework within which their imagination could thrive, hardly anything is left to imagination now. Whatever is left is hardly innocent and mostly drab. In the tech savvy world of today, incredibility is associated with the next big thing in mobile communication. And since we have learned to be skeptical about our own incredulity, it's just not good enough. Social and economic freedom have made cynics out of us. In a huge sense it's obviously good, but in a small way it's bad.

It's bad in the eyes of the boy who sat entranced when the 32 statuettes enlivened to dance in the royal courts of Vikramaditya. It's slightly sad that the ponds of yesteryear which supplied an endless stream of wicked witches and haunted trees has gone dry. It's sad that the castles which beheld the most opulent of dances and the arenas which hosted the most brilliant of wars and the daring knights and the stately beautiful princesses and the conniving stepmothers and the obedient sons and the innocent daughters and the helpful dwarfs, they have all withered against the onslaught of time. I distinctly remember this line my grandfather beat to death: "Din beete, hafte beete, mahine beete, saal beet gaye" (days and weeks and months and years went past). And I realize it only now.