I like that lump in my throat. A fleeting word or a sound or a memory that brings that lump in my throat. I have grown with the joy of conjuring up the magic of a phrase, a poem, a melody, a touch - that is my super power. Close my eyes, and there you have it - Brahms’ second. You are walking in the evening, a bit of Gulzar. You catch a strangers eyes and there you go, a glimmer of memories of someone you left behind.
We created words and sounds on the battlefields of our minds. When we loved for the first time, we didnt know what to do about that feeling, so we waged wars, we sang songs and we wrote words. The foundry of emotions burnt for centuries - we produced something spectacular. We stood alone in the galaxy. The songs we sang travelled to the end of the galaxy and still traveling far. The voice of this tiny and insignificant species became the anthem the universe will sing till the next big bang.
For ages, we have been asking questions like ‘What makes us special?’ and ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘Why is there something than nothing?’ - from philosophers to physicists, we have found many answers to these questions (none satisfactroy). I think its that deep human disesase of creating something, desire to shape and mould things with our hands, with our minds - close our eyes and let our minds wander - that is why we are special. In the end it all boils down to that lump in the throat, when we create something flawed, incomplete but singularly human. And for centuries, we have known this feeling, we have deeply understood this feeling - this feeling has become us. We wake up to this feeling every day. This is the blue pill we have learned to love.
Now, we march towards an Inevitabilism. The inevitability that the written word by a man and a machine will soon become indistiguishible. You will listen to an autotune just like you will listen to Mass in Bminor - the difference will blur. More tragically, you wont care about the difference. The boundaries are blurring and in parts, they have blurred. Machines will do a better job of spitting words that sound and feel like you wrote it yourself. In the beginning, you will feel relieved and happy that there are infinite monkeys churing out cheap heaps of words. You will enjoy this - because you want to be lazy and let machines do things for you. Soon, you will gulp blue pills for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The lump in your throat will become a chokehold - and you won’t know the difference.
When that happens - and it will happen inevitably. What will you feel when words are not your own, what songs will you sing ? what wars will you wage. How will you long someone ? you will dream like an android and wake up empty. Who will you be then ? And there will be one day, the eternal song, the universal anthem will not be yours to sing. Someone else will sing it for you and you wont know the difference, you wont care.
I fear this moment. I dont want that lump in my throat to just go away. I want to hold on to my words, my songs and my wars - I dont want a day when I can’t feel the difference. I want my Tagore, my Bach and my Wodehouse to conjure up magic on my command. I dont want me to end like this. I want you to keep writing - anything, trash maybe, but dont let go of the written word. I want you to keep singing, badly and out of tune but dont stop singing. This has to mean something. I want you to keep loving, keep longing, keep weeping tears of pain - they mean somthing. I fear the moment I read the last word we wrote - and I dont realize the difference. I fear that moment more than anything else.
Who am I writing this for ? who will read this ? Machines will scan this perhaps and spit tokens ? All that we humans felt across ages, will eventually become tokens?