Change being the only Constant.

How many people do you know at this moment? How many people are there right now, that you’ve talked to, listened to, and smiled at? How many people have touched your lives, and how many lives do you think you have touched?

Is there a way to keep track?

If I say the last two years of my life were the best of my eighteen years of existence, would it be glorifying or exaggerating a few flickers of good luck mixed with the mere greater occurrence of positive moments as compared to the negative ones?

Does the realization that the best moments of your life actually lie ahead of you give you chills of happiness like it does to me?

Is it mere optimism that suffices which we name faith and believe in God?

If you can’t count the number of people you’ve loved, there’s no way to know how many people have loved you. But with every moment of movement, every moment you live and then move on to the next, does it not matter how not every person stays a constant, not always?

School to college can be such a small transition to some, it would be a pleasant memory for some, recent past for others. Before we know it, our seniors have ended their one year of college life, and now they themselves are moving on, subsequently making space for us to step up.

I have about one thousand and three hundred friends on my Facebook account, certain odd three hundred or so followers on Instagram, and about thirty two on Twitter, but that’s because I’m not very active on Twitter. But how many of these would move from constant to variable as life drives us away and apart?

A girl I would have considered an acquaintance called me up today, and she told me how I was almost one of her best friends now. She told me that she loved the way I answered her quips with snarky retorts, she enjoyed dancing with me, and she couldn’t wait to see me again. It brought again into perspective, how mutual relations can be so different sometimes. Maybe to one person you’re just somebody, and to you, that person is everything. It happens that you tend to take your family for granted, you believe that just because they’re related to you, they’ll have to stick with you, so you can give them the slip on their birthday parties, or easily forget to get them something too when you return from a trip out with your friends. But does having a common genetic pool ensure them having a constant value in your life, and vice versa?

In this moment of transmission, something inside me is overjoyed to embrace whoever and whatever comes my way in the future. People I’m going to love, people I’m going to hate, enemies, friends, frienemies, can anybody wait for the next level?

What feelings engulf you when you pick up you phone and notice a missed call of a person you long ago forgot existed. What do you feel when you press ‘call back’, and the phone rings thrice before he or she picks up? What goes through your mind when you hear their familiar voice – familiar but not in a distant memory, what does your heart do when you hear the laughter you had once shared so much it had become molded in your own?

The feeling of reminiscing love is not something most people have the opportunity to embrace. A missed call of someone that you used to know could have many hidden reasons behind it. Some people you leave behind, some people leave you behind. Finding an acquaintance from school – a classmate you borrowed a pen from for an exam and then forgot to return it to her – turning up at the same college you’re applying to, and then her becoming one of your closest friends only to drop out of your life once you decide to go abroad to study?

I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?

Just look outside your window on a busy Friday night evening. If you live high enough, maybe you’ll be rewarded with a look of a dozen or so lights coming from a dozen or so houses, and you will be aware of a dozen or so lives. A dozen or so lives that might have nothing to do with yours, each life filled with events and happenings, celebrations and grievances, each so vibrant, so beautiful, busy, buzzing, just like yours. Each life marked by their own beliefs, their own gods, their own views and their own relationships.

Have you ever looked at someone across a room and just observed them? Have you ever seen the way they look away when somebody praises them, or bite their lip when they say something they think they shouldn’t have, or blink when they’re nervous? Have you ever observed and admired a person for what they believe in, what they think about, without for once, comparing them to yourself, comparing them to others?

A girl who would have remained an acquaintance to me until she called me up and told me who I was to her. A girl who then, I thought about, thought about enough to realize how she too, was filled with traits that made her beautiful and admirable.

If you were to live life alone one day, just drop out of society and enjoy solidarity, who do you think would miss you the most? Who do you suppose would look for you first? Who would try hard till the end?

For a people who wish to be loved, and are too afraid to show too much love, we sure can be hypocrites. We pretend it doesn’t hurt us when somebody else ignores us, yet find it in ourselves sometimes to just ignore somebody’s existence if it’s convenient to us. Yes, maybe what I’m saying is just random teenage mood swings, but maybe it’s a lack of maturity we’re not too afraid to indulge in sometimes.

So many people you know till this point of time, and you’re just reaching the stage where you get to meet so, so many. New life, new friends, and you cannot even wait. Whether it is someone like me, leaving school and entering college, or someone who finished their third year and would soon go abroad to study more, or someone who’s just decided to move in with their boyfriend, change is truly the only constant. Maybe this change in front of you is the only one you can see right now, but maybe this change is only the beginning.

So now that you’re in a stage of life which is so unlike the one you just exited, what do you do with the ones who loved you in the previous one? What do you do with the ones you loved so dearly, but cannot find the time to call, forget to invite and ignore if you find them in a busy market? How do you cope with change when you want to embrace it and are so afraid of it altogether?

Change is the only constant, they say. An oxymoron of the most beautiful type.

With a dreading eagerness we all wait.

For all we can wish for, is that the next batch of people who launch themselves in our life are as beautiful, as loving as the last one was. For all we can hope, is that the ones who can perhaps endure our weeks of silence, our erratic phone calls and our infrequent messages, choose to stay whenever we find time for them. For all we can think about, is what is coming, who all are arriving, with feelings of positivity and optimism.

For all we can do, is eagerly dread the next phase of life.

MYOPIA

Myopic

I drive a car into the night
Darkness all around, unfamiliarity,
The headlights show me a few feet in front,
I take pleasure in what life gives me.

I close my eyes, a moment’s break,
Open them to face the challenges,
Myopia haunts me, affects me,
No glasses ever made can cure me.

Infinity, a big ball of complexities,
A hundred decisions, a thousand miles
A thousand miles to cross in the car,
All I can see is a few miles in front of me.

Myopic, a near point to my eyes

Cannot see beyond that point,
Try as I might, it gets all blurry,
All I can depend upon is goals, aspirations, imaginations.

A few yards lightened by the headlight of my car,
My vessel, and the gravel and bumps those few yards
Offer me, I cross them as they come,
Hopefully, faithfully, that the next bump will be smaller.

A few miles of clarity, with no glasses to aid me,
I can only see infinity, in my inward eye,
Of all the hopes and dreams I weave,
For that perfect infinity.

For I can brace myself, in hope to redeem myself,
For the infinity in front of me is boundless,
A few miles, a few feet is what life offers me,
And for now, that, is enough.

Fred and George and the Order of the Phoenix

I just finished the fifth book of this marvelous Harry Potter series, entitled Order of the Phoenix. Now, some people call the Harry Potter books as a children’s series, and sure, some parts of it, like the ardent belief in a different world, a different school, where magic and supernatural prevails and life is a battle between the good and the bad, seems like a childlike fairytale. How is it not a fairytale, I ask you? There is a good guy, our baby Harry Potter, whom we follow through his eventful school years, an eleven year old adolescent to a seventeen year old man, prematurely aged because of the tragedies that befall him. There are those several numerous friends around him – whether it is Fred and George Weasley – my personal favorites, or Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, his preferred sidekicks.

Let me take this moment to dwell on – or rather, as my best friend would put it, obsess over – Fred and George Weasley. From the first book that I read, I’ve been in love with these two boys. In the first book they are portrayed as cheerful thirteen year old boys, their debut appearance in the first movie shows them as mocking their mother for forgetting who was who again – as identical twins, J K Rowling seems to be the only one who can actually distinguish one from another.

But that’s not why I love them. J K Rowling, as an omnipresent observer in Potter’s life, has truly never described any boy to be astonishingly good-looking or handsome, not truly. She has, yes, described a younger Sirius Black and a younger James Potter, as well as a now-decaying and old Remus Lupin as handsome, true. But in the case of my beloved characters, she has not once described them as handsome.

And yet, there is something so handsome about these two. There is something that really attracted me to their characters. Their mischief, maybe, the way they caused mayhem – not actual mayhem, as George pointed out. They knew when to draw the line, explained Fred, and they never crossed it, stepped over it occasionally, yes, but never got expelled, said George. And what makes them such wonderful – and much needed – men in the make-believe world of Harry Potter is that they are, yes, they are, a relief.

That’s how I would describe Fred and George Weasley. A relief.

Although this book is clearly fiction – most of us Potterheads would hope, hope against hope that it wasn’t, that yes, our Hogwarts letters were truly lost in the mail, we are actually Muggle-born witches and wizards, but let’s be, brutally yes, but honest. If this wizarding world existed, nobody would have let J K Rowling write about it so publically and allow the Muggle world to become aware of their existence. She would have been subject to various curses by now, for I’m certain there would be some Decree or Law in the Ministry of Magic that wouldn’t allow any Muggle – or witch, if Joanne would like to push this point – to write so freely about their secret world.

Anyway, what is visible in this fictional universe is that somewhere, it rings true to us. How is it that we believe so much in this world? Why do we believe it so much? Because like the Dark Lord, there are dark forces here too. Not everybody in this world we inhabit are good people, though it is my belief that, just like Severus Snape and Draco Malfoy, there is some good in everybody. Lord Voldemort might be a bad person – putting it mildly – but not thoroughly so….

Um, he’s a creation of the mind, so even if he is all dark, it’s not because there are people in this world who are all dark.

And Fred and George Weasley light up this world that is darkened by Voldemort with their jokes and their humor, their pranks and their mischief. And although Fred dies in the end, a tragic, sad, but beautiful death as he dies with his last laugh still etched upon his face – the intensity and the uproar of emotions I feel, any reader feels, is remarkable. It’s remarkable the number of feelings this story has made me feel. It touches one’s heart in all the right places. You feel the bravery, you feel the love, the utmost devotion, the humor and the laugh, friendship so strong, relationships that can actually stand the tests of time.

And oh, how beautiful is this all. Whether it is the relationship between Harry and his Godfather, or the emotions that you can see between Lupin, Sirius and Harry – the depth of it is spellbinding. Imagine how it is. These two are men who watched their best friend die at the hands of another of their friends. Peter was obviously just a hanger-on, but keeping him in their midst turned out to be a fatal flaw. Yet, with Harry they see a regular glimpse of James – James, who was handsome and majestic and cool, popular and wonderful, just like his two friends, and in the end, dead for a noble cause.

The love of a father for his son, the love of a mother for her son, as Lily Potter dies to save him and leaves a special protection over Harry, which actually enables him to fight off Voldemort later. What part of this can we not understand, can we not empathize with? Don’t we see this love in our own lives? Don’t we see this protection, and know it from our own experience?

What, I believe J K Rowling did, was add magic to the ordinary happenings of our days. She did it in such a beautiful manner however, that it took the world by storm. She does not go into depth of what the characters feel – she doesn’t need to. You just need to search Harry Potter posts on Tumblr or Pinterest to see how every other Potterhead – yes, like you and me – have analyzed and re-analyzed and understood and written and felt what she wanted to convey.

Not just the love between friends, love that could be brotherhood, as these two men try to save and be there for the son of their fallen friend, but a love that sprouts between families. Sirius himself never belonged much to his family of Blacks, he was not like them. He tells Harry in the fifth book that he would, many times escape to the Potter’s house, and although there is as of yet no mention of James’s family, and Harry’s paternal grandparents, it shows a love of an entirely different level, of family that accepts a friend as one of their own.

Just look at how welcomed Harry feels in The Burrow, amidst Ron’s family. Mrs. Weasley accepts both Harry and Hermione, not knowing, of course, that these two would later marry into her family and truly become her children. She is a woman of such strength and love, she witness horror and tragedy, loss and fear, yet she stands strong amidst a crowd of sons way taller than she is, yet looking at her for support and comfort. The image of a Mama Bear comes to mind, and yet when I watch her tears when Fred dies, the tragedy drives home.

The death of Fred Weasley was tragic, not just for me, for other Potterheads who love the Weasley Twins, but for J K Rowling herself. She has admitted Fred was one of her favorite characters, and she too cried when he died. Many readers like me have taken his story forward, the story of the Weasley twins, both so cheerful, dauntless and rebellious, both so brave and courageous in their foolhardy tricks, and yet, so poetically tragic.

On their graves placed next to each other, Fred’s has the word ‘MISCHIEF’ written on it, for he died when he was just twenty, he died when he was yet in the mischievous days of his youth. On the grave next to his is the word ‘MANAGED’ written under George’s name, for he lived till the ripe age of eighty, for he, managed to live his life without his twin, his other half, his brother. Fred lived in mischief, George managed. Fred died laughing, George died crying. There are so many posts I can find about Fred that make me so emotional, at first I blamed my own hormones wreaking havoc and then reasoned that, it must have been something else that made me cry over this fictional death so much.

I grieved Fred Weasley like the next reader, but I grieved the loss also of a significant yet innocent life in a war that had nothing to do with him personally. Why does this realization make it even more difficult for us to part ways with this boy? Because, although we ourselves might not know a Fred Weasley, but his story is not uncommon in our Muggle world either. For in every war, there is a boy, a man, a child, who dies an unwarranted death.

After every war, there is a family that grieves the untimely death of their son.

There are friends, who suffer the loss of their mate.

We all know it. Thankfully, many of us have not experienced this, but we know it. 

That’s why this haunts us.

Fred Weasley, as a character Rowling created, along with his twin George Weasley, are perfect examples of brothers, troublemakers, and sons. They care for their family, they are the perfect big brothers to Ron and to Ginny. When Ron makes it on the Gryffindor team and performs miserably, these brothers make sure he never forgets his abysmal performance. When Ginny is nearly killed by Lord Voldemort, these brothers are, like any other elder brother, as worried as could be. There is a scene in the fifth movie of the Harry Potter saga, where the twins are shown to be comforting a young kid who is crying because Umbridge’s punishment is giving him pain. That was one scene I really liked, because it showed that, at the end of the day, these two are brothers, elder brothers, and they know how to act like them.

These boys are shown not to complete their education. They leave without giving their N.E.W.T.S (I propose) and they leave Hogwarts as champions, legends, as two men who had the guts to stand up against something they didn’t like, and follow through. Once leaving school they do not return, they do not regret, they mark their destiny in the occupation they desire. They show that academic excellence does not equate to achievement and success, they show that you don’t always have to take things lying down. They were in Gryffindor for they were brave, their courage and wit might not have been portrayed in ways similar to that of Harry and Hermione, but yes.  

In a world where being sad is so easy, it is actually really difficult to be, and remain, happy. Fred and George showed us how to bring light into the darkness, in more ways than one. They brought laughter, cheer and happiness, they made us chuckle, giggle, and smile, not just in the book, but even in the movies, as portrayed by the handsome James and Oliver Phelps. Many, like me have harbored crushes on them from book one, and many, like me, will not forget them even after Fred takes his last breath, even after the end of the last page of Deathly Hallows.

Rowling said that whenever we want it, Hogwarts will be waiting for us. Hogwarts has become home to so many of us, home of our imagination, home of people we have loved and followed and looked after in our own ways. We thank Rowling for the beautiful journey she enabled us to experience, but most importantly, we thank Rowling for the characters she gifted us, none of whom we’ll ever forget or ever love less.

As for me, I’ll always imagine Fred and George Weasley living till a ripe old again, even today, sitting somewhere together with their children and their grandchildren, tricking them, playing with them, yet the heroes of every child’s childhood.