Guys! Greetings from a middle-aged hybrid person!

A hybrid person in his early fifties from the East with a somewhat immersive experience of, but fuller cognitive development in, the West, I would like to share what I think are insights with you. 

Guys! This may sound a tad paternalistic, patronizing, and even presumptuous. But I am sure you will overlook my insouciant insolence. 

I come from a generation that still thinks cumulative experience leads to some degree of wisdom and learning, and that this learning must be passed on. 

Folks, I beg you, forgive me then. All I ask in the attention economy is a few moments of your time and, at the risk of sounding repetitive, attention.

Guys! Serendipity, that beautiful word, ah, that word which tells a lot without explaining much by making a mockery of cause and effect, made me make contact with the Western world. 

This, folks, was the mid-90s of the 20th century, a happening one, as you may call it.

I had a fractured self then. 

It was in Australia, toward the fag end of what I think was more a sojourn than anything else, that I healed. I picked up the fragments of myself and became somewhat whole. 

But it was not my quest to become a man of reason that made me somewhat whole. It was, well, I blush here, a bold and a beautiful one that helped. 

The woman, who still resides in my heart in an elevated state, had, maybe not consciously, gone beyond the known, reason, into the unknown, the world of the spiritual and romanticism.

Guys, you know what, I am a Muslim and I should have known. But it was this bold and beautiful woman who introduced me to the great Mawlana Jalaaluddin Rumi, the poet of Islam. I also came to know about Omar Khayyaam of Iran and his famous romantic quatrains. 

I still find this embarrassing, but I stand indebted to the fab woman. It was, guys, the best of times and the worst of times for me. 

In the interstices of these, I healed and became somewhat whole. It was a sense of being, as that great German Heidegger would have called Dasein, where romance and romanticism became servants to reason and rationality. 

My conscious self had been maneuvered into going to Australia for........

© Kashmir Observer