Do you know me? I am a formless fog, a traceless and nameless entity yet it is I who comes dancing in a multitude of forms; it is my nameless stuffing which blossoms into countless names. I stream through the magical mazes of life to live it to the fullest and I revel in the deadened and withered foliage to die in the shades of death. I take birth zillions of times in a moment and I get extinct limitlessly to be born again and again in an ecstasy, unspeakable. At times, I display unconcealed curiosity in the thoughts and acts of scientists and explore the so called hidden secrets and at times I condense in glassy-eyed and vapid ascetics.

I shower in cascading ideas and innovations in the philosopher’s brain and I gambol in the images of a poet. I mature in seeds into grain and I am destined in its casing to chaff. I scale new heights in extraordinary minds and it is again my amorphous substance which takes pride in being nondescript. Often I get wonderstruck at the sight of new colorful flowers in the spring to be disenchanted at gazing the yellow leaf in the autumn. I undergo seamless metamorphosis into love and affection in nursing mothers and I grin at my greatness in the smiles of babies.

I have been here for long. I have been baptized and labeled variously in my history. When saddened, I was called a pessimist; when overzealous, an optimist; when withdrawn into myself, an ascetic; when I said I am not what my flesh enshrines, a mystic and a transcendentalist; I am also my flesh, when I said, a materialist; an agnosticist when I laid bare I have no access to the grand   proceedings of creation. Wait a moment, these are hollow words. I toy with these words, even with myself. I master my own slavery and I enslave my own supremacy.

I am beyond opposites, beyond thesis and antithesis, beyond mind and consciousness. Now I ask you the same question. Who am I? Let me break the ice. I am a human being. I have been called the crown of creation, the cream of the whirl of the creative energy. How can you limit me in colours and races, castes and creeds? I embody sanctity. I am to be put on the pedestal of boundless esteem and glory. I am the precious flower of the universe. I am to be nurtured through love and affection. I am to be understood and listened to, not given a hammering. I am not to be cornered and crushed to death.   I am not to be killed by infernal weaponry but martyred by the arrows of eternal love. I am to be given the wine of morality and tolerance.

Do not split me into exceedingly painful pieces. I love loving people irrespective of their veneers and cloaks, hues and tinges. I rapture in helping the needy, in respecting elders and patting the young on their backs. I love munching delicacies with one and all, not in jealous isolation. I invite all and sundry, my comrades and peers to nurture and water the flowers of human greatness and eternize the heavenly feeling of being human.

(The Author is a Medico)