Wonderboy

There was a time when there was wonder. There were tales of Jules Verne and voyages and adventures, there was H. G. Wells, there were weird tales from H. P. Lovecraft. The world of today is too on the face for wonder to exist but then wonder like many other things is a state of mind. I had suffered a severe psychological trauma in my teens, for a very trivial thing but trauma is trauma, and due to that I became averse to surprises. Call it anticipatory anxiety or just anticipation, but when you try to anticipate and predict the future way too often, more often than not, you become good at it. For a long time I thought that the said psychological trauma had made me bitter, but when I paused and looked at my life in retrospect, the truth was far from it. I had not become bitter. What I had become was cautious. I escaped situations that would trigger the trauma, and I escaped them a lot. Though, whether or not by external help, the trauma generalised, and then still I used the best defences I could possibly use. And then came the time when I had to choose between the world and my sacrifice and I chose sacrifice. I'm happy with myself. It's like a multiple choice question, you have to make one choice and no one is there to tell you which choice is right and which is wrong. 90s were and are my favourite era. But I have conflict with that culture due to personal and very delusional reasons. I, if carry on with my old belief, wouldn't have been able to survive the 90s, or so I had thought, but then you never know, it's all about choices in the end, who knows what choices I would have made if it was the 90s, no pop culture and no internet. I amaze myself sometimes. I compensated for the idea of not being able to survive the 90s if not for a few factors. I was grateful for those factors for a long time. Being thankful is great until you start getting exploited for it. The structure and the individuals consisting of that structure have belief in my weakness and inferiority, while my weakness was such that it became the sole chink in my armour, which might be a good or bad thing. The issue is socio-cultural, the issue is also linguistic, and I didn't solve it like that, in fact when shit went south, I let the issue be. The issue was a problem once, and not now. What was exploited in me as weakness wasn't weakness at all. It was obedience. And here I realised about the mindlessly exploiting machine that exploits one and all, except some. If this country had to grow on the mental plane it didn't even have to look outside for it's itself rich in philosophy, spirituality, scriptures and knowledge, but gaining knowledge was never the priority, deriving pleasure from the pain of others was and it could be done because complete, and unbreakable control had already been established. Did pop culture and the internet save a guy? Probably it did, though there are several doubts on that. Is he thankful for that? Well he was, for a long time. But then even his thankfulness was exploited. The wonder that was present in childhood was lost, though it kept showing itself at regular intervals, but why would it continue if the whole Earth can be visualised from a website including its street level view. The guy was tortured for his wonder. For his wonder of the deep sea, for his wonder of the space, for his wonder of the universe, for his wonder of the nature. It was the 90s that encouraged him to wonder and come the 21st century, wonder became a crime. Is he thankful for surviving what he probably couldn't have in the 90s? Should he be thankful for surviving as a slave? Depends.