Lost

As a part of the induction program at IIMB, we were required to take a Psychology test in which we were given a picture and were asked to write two different stories about it, within an hour or so. I got a picture of a small boy clutching his forehead in apparent frustration, with a fiddle by his side. This was the first one that I wrote. As for the second one, if I were to describe it in one word, it would be "corny". Hence, it shall not see the code of the blog...

He knew that he could play it - he rememebered doing so, as clearly as he could remember doing everything else. Yet, he stared blankly at his fiddle. He hadn't touched it for a while, but he had vivid memories of using it. He thought back to the times when, with a tweak of the string, he would make people dance, sing, make merry, kill each other; he remembered how he could pluck the chords of their souls by one pass of his bow, of how he could make them love, make them hate, make them laugh and cry, as if there was no tomorrow. "How long has it been since I touched it?", he wondered...

He picked up his fiddle and elicited a note, and it all came back to him in a rush. It made him smile. He felt them, and thought "Oh! How they rejoice!", for he had struck a happy note. He didn't see them, but then, he didn't have to. His brow creased in puzzlement. Something wasn't right. Those who rejoiced were too few in number, and those who did, seemed to dance to a different tune altogether. "What could be wrong?". He plucked another note, this time, one of hatred, for he wanted to test the diametrically opposite one to the one he had just tried, and he reasoned that hatred would always erase happiness. As always, he thought from his heart, the poor fool. He couldn't tell the difference, for the hatred, now that he looked for it, was so much that even he couldn't fathom its magnitude.

There was definitely something amiss. He had selected a few apprentices and ensuring that each of them had learnt to play his or her tunes, had left them to sing the songs that he had taught them and make diverse music, and had gone to sleep. He wanted to wake up and conduct an orchestra of the various timbres and genres that he had created. He had been looking forward to it. But now, he felt none of the tunes he had tought. He had deliberately made up some to contradict each other, just to add to the flavor. He wished to see if opposites could attract in this musical of his. But now, he sensed that they still hadn't come to see how they could add to the beauty. He couldn't recognize His tunes. There was music, people were dancing. But it wasn't His music. They weren't dancing how He remembered.

It was time to go out and see for Himself what had gone wrong . He got up and jumped down from His seat on the roof, and the blast hit Him. There was no music left in the world. It was noise. There were no songs being sung. People who thought they were dancing were just moving as if they were a part of a synchronized performance. He didn't feel the love anymore. Moreover, the noise was deafening and blinding. He tried to shut it out by clasping hands over his ears. It didn't help. He tried to back away, He stumbled. He fell into the crowd. The Fiddler on the Roof was lost...