sUbLiMiNaL...

“I have heard when it hits you, you feel very light”

As I uttered this, all of a sudden the whole world around me started floating before my eyes. The air became so thick that I was feeling so much lighter in the comparison. The horizon was seeming wobbly, sometimes too far, sometimes too close by…my every single muscle seemed to be paragliding open in the heavens. While walking, I felt there was no force by the surface against my feet, it was just I was walking in free air with invisible support. My steps were becoming reckless and track aimless, and so were my talks. My imaginations had left all the bounds at that time. I started imagining the campus of IMT – bricked and brick red lobbies and lush green flora as the set of Super Mario ( a video game, I think most of us in my generation must have played) where everything was looking as pretty as picture, painted so very perfectly by an artist. I started feeling unusual silkiness of air against my face and started enjoying its scintillating touch. It was quite sunny at that time, but I felt as if harsh rays of sun are not touching me, but they are getting reflected back to the infinity. My thought process has become like Hariwansh Rai Bachchan's poetry, I was imagining things in different way deliberately and sometimes, spontaneously but I was enjoying the process at the same time because I never felt so childlike and creative, never felt like enjoying my being so much.

But at the same time, life around me started feeling like conundrum, every thread of the connection of thoughts, speech and actions so much entangled with one other that I was not able to decipher which one I did, which one I spoke and which thing, I merely thought. I knew I was floating in the ‘Highs’, I knew I am becoming extra verbose, I knew that this is not the way I generally behave, but I wasn’t able to control my whims and speech. My vocabulary in Hindi as well as English had become so restricted that though my mind was taking plunges in the depth and breadth of philosophy and imagination, but I was not able to articulate properly, I was finding it intricate to find words even for the elementary language. Though I never lost the track of ‘morally’ right and wrong things to do and I could easily judge, what will be a complete outrageous action to do and thing to utter, but at the same time, I wasn’t sure at which level this ‘High’ will lead to. I already had spoken few funny things on Mess Table like ‘ Are, koi bhukhe ko khana do’, which I realized just after I spoke was not a very right thing to say. Every sequence seemed dreamlike, when you don’t know what you are doing is in real or in the dream.

The pace of time had become very slow. The extreme ‘High’, which I experienced for about 1 and ½ hour seemed like half a day. And then, I just wanted to feel normal and leveled. It was becoming so very complicated for me to remember things just after few minutes passed. When I went back to take a bathe, my general pace of doing things had become so slow or felt so slow and disjoint that after every 1-2 minutes, I had to remind myself purposefully that I have to take a bathe. With every splash of water, I was imagining like I was in an ocean, unbound and relentless … and trying to survive from choking into water. I was feeling so very exhausted and so very suffocated with myself… I felt like being perished in the nauseated sensation. After taking rest for 2-3 hours, the sensation went back as suddenly as it came. It was as if my brain and senses have been kept in the simulated heavy air filled balloon and suddenly, I am taken out of the balloon to normal air. The unusual effect went down gradually with time, it took around one and half day for me to come back to the realm. And I am so glad that I am here back to self.

I never felt that way in real till the day of this Holi, when I tried out ‘Bhang’ for the first time. They say it hits harder on the teetotaler, who has never tried out any form of addiction. Perhaps, it is true as I was perhaps only one of the lots who didn’t have any prior rendezvous with any sort of the addictive material. And God, it was such a chaos for me that it became too messy to handle. When I was set, though I could experience unbound joys of the other world while being in the same, I also imagined the imaginary gases emanating from the ‘bhang’ and hitting my brain cells and making them slow and conditioned!!! (It may sound weird!). I felt that time as if I am never going to regain consciousness.

And I would never like to experience it again though I don’t repent experimenting with it once. After all, I got to know why being ‘High’ is called being ‘high’, not anything else! It was not good as an experience, but nevertheless not bad as experiment (just for once) either!