Silhouettes of a Wild Dream

Dream! For all your life you spend on earth, call those hours you spent on living and reliving your wild imaginations the time you have spent in best contemplation as there is nothing like dreaming that can drive forward the wheels of time, justifying your existence as His most ‘superior creation’. Man scaled his genealogical order not by his strength to jump branches and roots faster than his predator but by foreseeing and preparing for what beseeches him to attain a state he understands as ‘comfort’. And what cements the gap between foreseeing and attaining ‘comfort’ is a dream, an undying spirit to which man adds flesh and bone to reckon what he sees as ‘comfort’.


Harrap was a commoner in a time when stones and dry leaf meant fire and food. While cowering under his leaf-mail in his flooding cave during a storm, Harrap dreamt of an unshakable abode to serve him shelter when he returns from a hunt. The dawn brought him new hope in the form of uprooted trees and strewn foliage and soon Harraps dream took the shape of a hut. His erudite generations put nature to use continuously and soon Harraps kind was gaining dominion over his fellow-creations by simply preparing to face adversity of any kind. Years fled by. Harraps kind was a forty million strong. Each had a lifestyle that was a cumulative image of the dreams of H. and his lineage. Vinci and Carnot were born into such a world demanding immense quantities of almost everything that nature had to offer on a growingly larger scale. They realized that a thick dark fluid substance they called oleum, when sparked produced enough force to drive large wheels; which could bring down large trees, clear large spaces of land and haul large patches of greenery. Man occupied these lands; dreamt of attaining comforts the other Harraps could have evolved and set out in search of his dream. Soon he found that he could make new worlds by simply razing down the existing world and building up as Harrap taught him. Loads of oleum were burnt and mankind flourished as never before.
But most unfortunately, Harrap did not hand down his lineage a sense of knowing the limit of using what one had in store. And another secret man failed to unravel was that of independency from his own creations. As man multiplied, growing over dependant on what he built, two ills cropped and assumed monstrous proportions within quick periods. Shortage and Disease. To combat Disease he created engineered cells and to combat Shortage he engineered Creations cells! Yet man depended on how and what he used and what he used was soon being consumed out of existence.


Not long ago, Dravidarya, Sinoo, Yankee and Rossu; all successes and fiascos of Harraps dream, confessed overtly their inability to face diversity any longer. Dravidarya felled too many trees, drying his biosphere reserves to nothing , while Sinoo’s engineered Cells no longer stalled disease at bay. The disease grew stronger than the Cell. Yankee consumed excessive oleum, running short of which was close to placing him in the times of Harraps discomfortiture. Rossu pointed out that his engineered Creations didn’t give the strength Harrap derived from his hunt. Each
blamed the other of driving their comity of nature out of existence. Yankee cribbed about his handicap in the face of motionless machines while Sinoo ailed over disease
resistant to control. All avoided the thought of a crippled offspring with much ‘material’ around him but little energy to drive neither them nor their own self.
Hamun shook awake from a feverish nightmare. The images of Dravidarya, Rossu et al. pining for life shivered him to his senses and Hamun couldn’t help but despair. But again despair is to the soul what revolution is to the society. It leaves a distinctive dent but provides enough depth to rebound on life’s trampoline inflexions. He looked out of his window. A fresh day ready to be scathed by his puffing engines filled his eyes. The radiant sun shone bright among the clouds. His garden of sunflowers looked at the sun in earnest anticipation. A load of plastic waste awaited disposal at his courtyard entrance. His milkman collected the heifers refuse and drained it into the lawn. Hamun thought of the silhouettes of his wild dream that kept flashing before him. Will the worlds engines run out of steam as they imagined or will he be able to find energy in any of what he just saw outside. Perhaps the sun? Or the extracts from his sunflowers? Perhaps his cows refuse could be the answer or can he light a lamp by burning differently the plastic he was about to discard? Harrap will always have a rightful place in the pantheon of human evolution and was not wrong in felling his trees; neither did Vinci and Carnot blunder by burning oleum. But Hamun cannot afford to err in over felling trees or over burning oleum; neither can he afford to throw his mornings sightings out of hand. It’s time Hamun ‘dreams’ of sources alternate to Harraps!


[Written as an editors’ article for “Signature”, souvenir of “ALCHEMY", Symposium of the Dept. of Chemical Engg. NIT Trichy.]