When I was a kid,
I wanted to be a pilot.
I wanted to fly all kinds of planes
Fast plane, big plane, small plane,
I also wanted to fly the jets, and the HUGE cargo planes,
and then the gliders, hot air balloons, from the classic indian the pushpak vimaan to those double winged old airplanes, as seen on encyclopedias !
And ahh..
The fighter jets too
but a fighter jet would not have seats for a family picnic,
so may be I’d fly the passenger jets.
A Boeing 777 perhaps-
but all of this, my air plane fanaticism, was because I had a special place that I wanted to fly.
In one of my dad’s many stories, he once told me about a special plane.
It was called Moment 001- The first and the last of it’s kind.
Now, Moment 001 was the best kind of plane,
It was colored like the rain, it was faster than the human brain
It was lighter than a car, and it’s speed – INSANE !
So fast that not even time could catch up,
Moment 001 was a time machine.
But with wings and blinks and pretty little things.
A machine that goes so fast it can escape the grip of time.
When I was a kid, I could not wait to grow up !
And it was confusing,
The plant that I planted in grade 3 by the time I was in grade 4
was taller than me, and I would be the same.
I wanted to grow older faster,
in order to fly airplanes
and may be- just may be
get my hands on Moment 001.
And then it happened,
slowly, but it happened.
Growing up I realized time is a funny thing.
You can’t turn the clock arms around and go back to yesterday,
and then realizing that time and space are both quantities,
and then again some theoretical physicist say-
that time is not really timeless.
Basically,
We humans have not figured time out.
No time machines !
Moment 001 was an airplanes that did not exist.
But where science failed me, art found me.
Airplanes were replaced by poetry,
and I was fascinated by words.
I wanted to fly words.
All kinds of words,
Strong words, Science words,
some right words, some wrong words,
used up words, and some left over words,
rap words and pop words-
And it turns out,
They have invented time machine in poetry
A long long time ago
And no, I did not grow up to be a pilot,
but that does not stop me from flying-
my paper planes.
