Rainbow Times

There is a beautiful land
Where all your dreams come true

Minutes mosey past me. Life looks like a compact rainbow. Or like a kind ice cream topped with brutish chocolate. It feels so varicolored. Fast and fake. A heavy moth comes and plops down on my heart. It takes off, circles around and sits again. Cars lumber. Along gravity. Another day is gone.

How stupid modern mankind must be? I oft ask myself. How mercilessly we strive to work and get ourselves occupied with random stuff only to let all our dreams -- with so much of beauty in them -- just slip by. We live a short life, after all. They say the doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.

Silly mechanical lives – laden with doors that open to cards and not to the gentle push. Windows that have free enterprise intaglioned across their broadness, clocks that give us time zones of faraway latitudes. We are internationalized, globalized. And tend to forget ourselves, our identity. Most of my friends talk in English. I miss the sound of Kashmiri words.

A lovely poem I chanced across last night might make it a little axiomatic.

Red is the color of a lot of lollipops,
Orange is any orange on a tree.
Yellow's the color of a bag of lemon drops,
Green is a piece of seaweed in the sea.

Blue is the color of the sky in summertime
Indigo is a Siamese cat's eyes.
Violet's the color of a flow'r in wintertime.
These are the colors of the rainbow skies.

There is a beautiful land
Where all your dreams come true;
It's all tied up in a rainbow,
All shiny and new;
But it's not easy to find
No matter what you do.

It's not on top of a mountain
Or beneath the deep blue sea
Or in London zoo or in Timbuktoo,
Or in Timbuckthree.

And if you traveled the world
From China to Peru,
There's no beautiful land on the chart.
An explorer could not begin
To discover its origin
For the beautiful land is in your heart.

Sameer