Life has a Shape - Geometrically Speaking!

Yes, I believe so!

This has been a splinter in my mind for heaven knows how long but in my philosophical searches of how I define life, I guess I have found this shape that defines it.

It’s funny as to how I never understood Geometry in math classes but now I seem to be using it as a reference to represent something to tell you all :-)

Life for me… is a rhombus!

For a long time, I would say during my conversations on such topics that “life is a spectrum” and was even convinced  with that because people used the phrase “the other end of the spectrum” , which told me that there are 2 ends to a spectrum.

But reading more on Spectrum I found that it’s not a shape, wiki says, it’s a condition which is not limited to set of values. It means ‘image ‘or ‘apparition’. When white light was dispersed through a prism it emitted range of colors.

But I wasn’t wrong in my assumption either; it’s actually a combination of both, a spectrum and a rhombus and it would look something like this.

(The above is a pictorial representation which I created from other pictures I found in Google and I would like you to view the colors going till the end of the sides, you may ignore the arcs and black spots)

In human being’s existence of life I would ideally say that we move anywhere inside of this area at all times based on the experience we are facing at each time. Each color would represent the various emotional states that we are in and as the palette represents it could be combination of any of these states.

So your question could be, ‘what about it?’

More than the colours I think the ends are the most interesting part, I find the ends to be representing the extreme points of the human behavior. The good and bad, on and off, zero and one, God and devil, black and white.

This is why I feel we learn a lot about being “balanced” in life, to be in the central axis at all times in whichever colour we are in. Looking at these colours, you would be able to feel the exact state you are in at this time while you are reading this and you can pinpoint it, like on a map.

From the time we learnt about colours, one colour becomes our favorite well we might actually stay in the colour at all times, that’s our home state of existence, and that’s innate. But, imagine all of us were to stand in our favorite colour on the balanced central axis, you would see an array of all of us in all our hues but we would all be balancing our entire existence.

You know something interesting? Wiki says, the word "rhombus" comes from Greek (rhombos), meaning something that spins, which derives from the verb (rhembō), meaning "to turn round and round”. 

The word was used both by Euclid and Archimedes, who used the term "solid rhombus" for two right circular cones sharing a common base. The “spin” for me is attributed to the spinning of the world, how apt isn’t it? we are spinning inside our own rhombuses :-)

However, today we seem to be rocking this rhombus too much. I don’t think it’s going to hold for too long if all us choose to move to either sides. So let’s see if we can live a balanced life in the practical world taking some cues… sorry ‘hues’ out of this theory! Let me know your thoughts.

Intruder Alert - (Prelude to the Tail ended War)

Of the greatest movies in cinematic history, Malayalam cinema I believe has churned the most classic and critically acclaimed masterpieces. Innumerable state, national and international awards have been won by them even when other movie industries were just coming of age.

However with all due respects to the appreciation of such cinemas, it was very difficult for a large group of people to see and appreciate such movies as the underlying technical aspects of how they have been made could not  be perceived by them. This is your everyday ordinary masala movie watcher who has only one agenda in watching any movie. Kill time!

So, once during school we had this group of masala watchers who had huddled in the class as one of them was talking about how these ‘master piece’ Malayalam movies usually are;

“It’s an old tile roofed house inside of a coconut tree farm. An old man is sitting in his rocking chair in the front porch and you can hear the faint creaking sound of his chair. In the background was a very low sound of a moving pulley wheel of a well... in the backyard. His aged wife is slowly taking water from the well. The camera zooms through the front door, passing through dimly lit hall and then through the backyard door just showing the frail woman’s hands pulling the rope. Suddenly, the camera turns to the front side of the house and you can see a cow walking into the front yard to graze the long grown grass as it moos ‘Mmaaaaa’.

The camera turns around again to the backyard and the lady stops pulling the rope and slowly turns around and says ‘arriii’.

The camera runs to the front of the house as if it’s following the sound of ‘ari ‘ going through to the front of the house. The camera stops at the legs of the rocking chair and the rocking stops. The man’s face is zoomed in as he slowly opens his eyes looking straight at the camera. He inches forward from his backrest and with a suppressed emotion opens his mouth slowly and utters, ‘shoo’ ‘shoo’”

The entire group just burst out guffawing to that presentation. My sister used to enact this with her friends from the neighborhood too and would have a hearty laugh session. 

While the above scene can never be surpassed in real life, back in my school days it used to be an almost a similar scene in my house especially when the whole family used to sit together while watching DD2 on tv. The lights are off and you can see all the faces showing the nava-rasas while the flickering light of the tv screen is on their faces.

This is the time when all the well known intruders with their tails/ whiskers/ soft squeaks scurry along the edges of the wall. The only thing that you would see is all of us very slowly moving our eyes... simultaneously... towards the direction of the squeak and then very slowly moving back the line of sight...simultaneously... back to the flickering tv screen. 

This is our masterpiece of being dead ‘Alert’ for an ‘Intruder’.

- A Citizen

                    *Contd in… Tail ended War!