Dark folks

It’s 2.30 am. I, once again, sit to write something for my dear magazine, about my dear theme and on my dear laptop. I utterly cherish these dear trios as they come as a rarity, especially in the lives of people like me whose default mindset is some form of mental instability. Anyway, today I’m going to be a bit cryptic and travel another ‘less explored’ road as usual.

What is dark, darkness or black? For a scientific brain, it’s the subtraction of all colours. For a small kid, it’s the quintessential reason of fear. For a common man, it is something to be kept away from. But for some people, it is a way of life!

Normally, there are two types of people - those who are scared of darkness and those who can fight it. But what if there exist some who love it? There are people who have completely outgrown the stage of being scared of the darkness or even the stage of bothering to have the courage to keep themselves away from it. They share a friendly relationship with darkness. A normal man would like to keep away from any sort of darkness (now, you need not take the meaning literally) and live happily; but what about those who have outgrown the whole idea of happiness itself? Cynicism, criticism, pessimism are all causes as well as the effects of what I mean by the word ‘dark’. Everyone has them in some amount. But what if there are people whose emotions are purely based on these characteristics? What about the fate of the people who will have nothing left if these characteristics are taken out? Well, life comes rather cruelly at them.

These people are so tired of the unfruitful search for happiness that they start getting frightened of happiness itself. They are habitual to melancholy. Luminance comes so rarely to them that they get habitual to the dark. They dream at night, they imagine at night and they live at night. Their dreams, too, exude relentless negativity, restless fears and a sarcastic approach toward the way other people analyze things. They love the sunset way more than the sunrise. They love the moon (which signifies lunacy) more than the sun (which signifies strength and hope). They love the ‘bad’ more than the ‘good’. They simply love everything about the night and they, genuinely, hate everything about the day.

These ‘dark folks’, as I would love to call them, are generally in disguise. You would never know if a few of them are around you. Someday, you might as well catch a glimpse of such a person in the mirror. You never know! Many of the dark folks, themselves, don’t know when they surrender themselves to the world of darkness and become a part of a group, which no school text book will ever advise you to involve yourself in. Many of them simply walk around with their thoughts in the seemingly infinite territory of darkness. Some of them gradually start expressing themselves. A few of them start writing and share a word with those, whom they consider fortunate enough not to be along with them in the dark walks. Even fewer of them start a blogazine. ‘Normal’ people visit the site and kindly lend them a pair of beautiful eyes. Probably, just as you did today.



(Note: ‘Dark’ or ‘darkness’ holds a quaint significance in my life. It has always thrilled me with a remarkable consistency for various reasons. Actually speaking, it’s one of the fundamental reasons of my writing. Please excuse me if I could not do justice to the theme.)



- Mihir Chitre
mihirmumbaikar@gmail.com