I Found Solace in the West...

The vagabond instincts of mine have been long suppressed but found their unleashing vigor recently when I trekked through the streets of Paris. The city described as the city of lights… Sure it does have lights but a lot more… Within those crooked small streets, those tightly packed buildings, the choked parking spaces and to some eyes – dirt filled pavements lie a spirit. The pages of history could run out of numbers, but the stories underlying every stone paving the paths would go untold.

When I first walked through… I did not get atoned by the megalomania of the cathedrals nor did I feel the élan of the serene scenic surroundings. They come with every other countryside. What strikes you is the way the city talks to your inner spirit. Those who look for freedom, for art, for challenges, for passion, for complexity, for free thinking, for philosophy – I present you – Paris.

Yes you do see the babes parading the streets flaunting their fashion sense, but so does u see people with free thought, the ability to penetrate through the plagued societal mendacities, the women smoking with a rare mix of courage and intelligence. Men armed with curiosity and sharp heads to dig the unending well of knowledge and wisdom. Art accepted and appreciated for its latitudinarian eloquence. The emanation of revelatory symbolism dictates the need to free your mind.

Young minds not echoing the rhetoric chores thrown at them but breaking the barnacles to breed polemical yet poetic philosophies. The imbroglios accusations through theatre, the satirical medicament through canvas, a rationalisation of irrationalism in living, classicalism marinated with cultural concoctions – that’s a very little of much more libertarian labyrinth called Paris.

At one end you find the Seine soliloquising with the gothic gospels of Notre Dame while Eiffel’s iron mickle emancipating as a metonymy and encomia of mans liberation and emanation from Iron Age to the iron acropolis. With Museums chiselling minds to walk complex and indecipherable directions and posters calling for challenging the philosophical ardour of earlier enchantments of Voltiare and Vivaldi.

The mind with its mundane materialism acting as gangrene will feel the lucid language of art and intelligence heal the prison bound thinking we have been forced to do with societal structure built around desolate deliberations.

The subtle monologue that the city oozes out could be heard though the silence of the green carpets near busy streets or in the deserted side walks between stuck apartments. The small Bastille of today embedding a mammoth storm of the revolution… What you see in the city is not just an urge to create but also a mellowed melodrama of alternatives to the way one lives.

The city of lights enlightens and lightens your mind…