It is like holding your hands up in a prayer and devouring whatever divine insight you get with the ferocity of a jaguar. There is a hope to get hold of that single fragment of the fiber that would connect you to the umbilical chord of truth itself. There is fervor, and then, there is silence that follows.
Bright and loud silence. So quiet that it would fret through your cognition itself and awaken the awareness of the not-so-real world. The gray-shaded blurred space that fills-up the gap between your finger and your thoughts. Ideas take shape but the shivering fingers won't put them on paper. They get etched in your consciousness and yet they won't appear in ink. Ah! Elusive thoughts!

We always wish to catch hold of one of those and put them to task. Whispering to us as if that would persuade the ink to take some comprehensible shapes. Conjuring words out of thin air and then losing their tail just when you think that you have them caged. Then you turn to negotiations! "At least half of it." "A quarter?" Thoughts as it would seem are not very open to conversations. Neither are they open to consultation or contract!

Then you finally give up. Lay down your arms and leisure yourself to the luxury of an afternoon nap. Or should we say that you try to do that. Not long before you realize that thoughts are sadist beings. Like a sneaky mouse, they would run and hide when you are looking for them and just when you tell yourself, "Let it be," they reappear, gnawing at something at the corner of your vision. As if throwing out a challenge. Showing little signboards that read, "Come get me."

You think for a moment and sulk again. You talk to yourself, "I'll let that pass," but just as your lips close around that consonant's hissing tone you realize that the gnawing is getting louder. The thought now stands up on two feet and waves at you. Mockery infact is such an understatement for that dismal display. You wish to yourself to have a mundane moment. A thoughtless minute. Is there at least a possibility to just shut the doors of your mind-vision and let that grating rodent haunt itself with loneliness? Yes, you know answer, which ironically is a "No".

You feel your toes twitch and you pounce over the bed-rails to that doormat. You almost got it this time. Almost. Just like last time? It's gone! No more sounds. No echoes even in the retrospect of the previous second. Blunt little silent moments. How ruthless can they get? "Very."

Finally your mind starts to pulsate with dreams of actually having that thought dance to an entrancing tune and laying itself prone and low before you. Helplessly marking itself on white handmade paper. The dormouse thought actually manifesting itself in ink... And you very well know what happens next...

You wake up with the same pen lying cross on the blank sheet of paper that you started with. Did you actually fancy capturing a thought on paper???

Concluded.

* Anubhav Kushwaha is engineering graduate from IIIT-Calcutta, and is currently employed in Microsoft at Hyderabad.