Annie and the Underworld -III

As my dream about Santiniketan with all its quirks and chaos continued on one side , the one thing that has amazed me through years of my days of research at the University of Harvard is the ability of a human mind to have multiple conversations within the mind, almost like a mind within a mind within a mind, so if one part of my mind was occupied with the goings on at Santiniketan almost a quarter of a century ago another side of my mind, almost another compartment that I seem to have simultaneous and near real time access to, like so many others , pushed up an old favorite treatise of mine - that of ‘time’ and its relative control over the human mind. My fascination , not just at Harvard, even during the days at Cambridge, where I was doing my Masters, was the same ‘how a human mind was so deeply influenced by events, incidents, thoughts, feelings and inferences that were long forgotten, long, not even remembered they existed,but exist they did. Nothing that you ever did in your past is ever left unrecorded. My fascination were not about the events themselves but it was about how these incidents , those joys and fears, disappointments and regrets, rejections and acceptance ruled our life… about how they collectively played such a huge role in defining our present , they were about data belonging to such a hoary past , almost from the time that you were just out of your toddling days or sometimes even earlier, and how your adult behavior was often the resultant of a storage center that had a huge number of unknown corners that had stored data unbeknownst to you from those days (that you nearly buried) and embedded them into your personality making them so powerful that it is such data that was stored long, long while ago, from those days that were so deeply confined in some corner of your mind that controlled almost everything you did as an adult – today. Even simple actions like those ones you did just to 'mock a mock' ( those small , irreverent and funny actions to make someone laugh ) that you thought were just an aside about which you hardly cared, had more to it than what you would otherwise have given credence. I often wondered how much we were , we humans, a product of our past and how past was the only sense of real time, I marveled at how the present and the future in time simply melted like irrelevant mists and merged to define themselves in relativity with time past – ‘a human is permanently and helplessly trapped and controlled by events and incidents and feelings that were recorded deep, deep in ones past’ in fact there’s nothing called the present, nothing called future, you are what your past is - the words echoed loud in my head, my throat ached and my cheeks were wet with sweat and tears - i screamed.