Words...

All the things you need.
Everything you want.
In her garden it waits.
A million miles away.

(paraphrasing from a movie I watched recently)

So what does that mean. And Why do words touch us sometimes even when we don't immediately know what they mean. Do we ever really know what they mean. Are they even supposed to mean a specific thing? These words I am writing now, why am I writing them? Coz I need to express something? Coz I need to organize my thoughts? Coz I have a point to make? But to whom? My words are never gonna mean the same to someone else. They are mine. They originate in my mind are written through my fingers and are fulfilling the foremost purpose of expression for me. But, I also feel the words I have paraphrased above are as much mine as the authors. They are a part of me once I have read them and they have created an effect in me. The author cannot claim to take that from me. He can't say, "Hey, that was not what I meant. Your interpretation is incorrect. Give it back. You have no right to write about it."

So, what was the question...???@#%@!*^

Yeah- what the hell does that mean? Why does it provoke me when I don't exactly know what it means. Well, aren't words just the most limited form of expression. I have so much in me, I could never get out on this piece of writing even if I was Rushdie. Yet, words seem to have something about them, something very important. What is that?

Every person has at sometime wanted to write poetry. Those who say its homosexual (reference to VB here) to write poetry know it is only because they have failed in doing so. Everybody has been influenced by a Ghalib or a Dinkar or a Voltaire or Wordsworth. But is there any guarantee that anyone has really ever understood what they were saying. Sure Wordsworth sounded beautiful and Dinkar's essays were provoking, but how can you be sure you understood it exactly the way it was intended. Did anyone?
Even a piece of writing which is not adulterated by the effects of time and the imperfections of language- can it ever communicate the state of the mind.
I wish to contend that it need not, it does something even better. nOW LETS HOPE i AM ABLE TO GET THIS ACROSS...

Ideas can be shared. But the mental states they arose from can never be recreated in the reader. A reader might say, "What a precise idea. I understand what the author means." He can hardly say, "I feel what he feels." He may say "This idea makes me feel such and such way."
The thing is if he felt the same way, that would be as far as the idea would go. But the idea in this
new mental environment creates a new idea thus creating a new state... and so the story continues. [If ideas could ever be formed and established uniformly in all minds, that would be the end of the human race. It is only the continuous cycling that ensures we always have somewhere new to go to, to ask new questions]

p.s. Another proposition since I have already wandered off so much-
This venturing to newer places, newer ideas sometimes lands the lucky ones to the Ultimate Truth as they say(If there is a Truth, someone knows it), but the best thing is that they can never really TELL anyone this Truth, coz the don't have a perfect medium. How beautiful is this construction...eh? :)

Do tell through mail/chat/comments what you think the above four lines mean :)