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regular-article-logo Saturday, 11 May 2024

Are you so sure you are?

All the people, of course, generation after generation of them, but people seldom get written about, so let that just be

Sankarshan Thakur Published 01.05.22, 02:36 AM
All that would take is an eraser — or rubber as we used to call them in them times when NothingHappened was happening — and the will to use it or a writ to command it to go to work.

All that would take is an eraser — or rubber as we used to call them in them times when NothingHappened was happening — and the will to use it or a writ to command it to go to work. Anon

Check again. Things change. Things are no longer what they used to be. Or things that were things become not things anymore. They become NotThings. Or what you always believed happened did not happen. That’s happening. Things that happened have become NothingHappened.

Just like that — a wish, a whim and bazinga!!! Big Bang Theory put to practice. You’re gone. What happened around you is gone. What you think happened, or read happened, or believed happened, is gone. Who you think, or have read, or have believed to have been there, sometime, in some era, in some century, in some era before and after the ways in which we divide eras, are all gone.

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Kaput! Gilli-gilly chhoo! Do not mistake it as onomatopoeia for magic. It is one of the ways hard truth is being stated and made to bear. One moment you are, the next you may be not. You will cease to figure. Things will cease to figure. Eras will cease to figure. Emperors and Queens, princes and princesses and their palaces and courts and retinues. Their kingdoms and their subjects. Their campaigns, their conquests, their losses and victories. The rebels and revolutionaries, the philosophers and brigadiers of new ideas, the crafting of reality out of them.

All of it that you’ve been told and have heard or read and probably even studied. All the people, of course, generation after generation of them, but people seldom get written about, so let that just be. But do understand that should the need arise they too can be undone, rendered non-existent or off the record.

All that would take is an eraser — or rubber as we used to call them in them times when NothingHappened was happening — and the will to use it or a writ to command it to go to work. And there! With a simple but firm rub what is sought to be no more is no more. What is not palatable or inconvenient is gone. Pfffffft!

Parchments. Tomes. The notes of court scribes, engraved onto stone. Or secured in bundles in crypts or buried capsules. Books. Files. Gazettes. Histories. Counter histories. Records, well-kept records. Like the record that certified your birth. At such and such place. On such and such date. At such and such time. In such and such year. That sort of record. It can all change or be gone, all of it. So you may merely become a disputed claim of your being, nothing more. Imagine. And go have a good look at yourself.

When we are done

You won’t be here

But have no fear

It may just be fun.

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