stories retold

go lightly down your darker way, go lightly underground... i'll be down there in another day, i won't rest until you're found...

let me love you, let me rescue you... let me bring you where two roads meet... come back above... where there is only love

- the ground beneath her feet, salman rushdie/u2

some of the greatest stories in the history of humanity are the ones that defy all contexts of space and time.

instances: shakespeare and the greek myths.

one of my favourites of which i've seen/read in several versions is that of the song of orpheus.

reverse the gender and we have the tale of savitri from mahabharata.

while details and outcomes may vary, the basic tenet of both stories remains the same; death takes away the significant other and our protaganist follows him/her into the depths of hell. manages to negotiate taking back significant other on one condition- no looking back until higher ground has been reached.

the hopelessly romantic adage of love conquers all is the underlying theme of both these tales. nonetheless, it's a story we see all around us even in this day and age where love has been pronounced dead.

people are constantly trying to rescue their significant other from various personal hells.

it's the matter of looking back that makes all the difference...

universally speaking..

there are things that cut across time, cultures, economic status, place and individual psyches... death is one such phenomenon, dreams another... of course, experiences surrounding death and dreams vary but every human has experienced the two...

some people claim that they don't dream so i'll make a counter-claim to this regard:
1. dreams are a way to deal with the discrepencies between your existence as you are living it and your existence as you'd like to live it. thus, though, there are people who manage to bridge the two, at some point in life, every human has dreamed.
2. it is entirely possible that you've dreamed and not remembered the dream(s).

the existence of these universal phenomena make me briefly wonder if there is such a thing as The Universal Truth... however, my interest lies less in similarities and a grand theory of everything and more in differences and the root causes thereof...

the other day, a young lady who was born and brought up in rural madhya pradesh was talking about how dreaming of weddings or food or wells was an indicator of something "bad" while dreaming of dead people was an indicator of "good" things... the wedding dream, in particular, interested me... i have always assumed dreaming of weddings was an indicator of a person's own desire for committment... and not of "bad news".

it was then that i realised that our cultural conditioning affects us in far deeper ways than mere conscious thought processes... i wonder if migrants continue to interpret their dreams the way they used to even if the context and the elements of their dreams change with the culture... however, i do believe that while dreaming is universal, dream interpretations are culturally rooted... economically too, perhaps...

studying dreams and dream interpretations as a cultural exercise could have some pretty interesting social implications... for one, it could lead to a deeper insight on what is socially acceptable to communities... another implication, of course, would be to understand what issues concern the community in question...

as for how to define the community, feel free to group people any way you want... the identity standpoint assures you that monotony and boredom will be kept at bay...