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Sunday 12 February 2012

Romancing tomorrow

Tomorrow is a concept, a beautiful concept, but not a reality. It is at best a presumptive or prospective or plausible reality but not an absolute reality. It is true that bards and bandits have woven ballads and bizarre poems around it. That does not in any way bestow on it a currency as for example, today.
Tomorrow! I love you with all my heart and soul. Today is dull and drab. What is today? It is a grind, it is horrifying and scurrying. Running from pillar to post. Tomorrow, ha my beloved! How much I miss you. Your unjustly labelled procrastination. Even if you are that, I will say, that you are the life and soul of all that is and that will be. Everybody loves you; the whole world adores you. My life companion is jealous of you, I hold you so tightly that she feels that I am flirting with you and that that hug is rightly hers.
Saints and savants, poets and pugilists, philosophers and pedagogues, pagans and purists, meek and the mighty, lowly and the lost and pugnacious and obnoxious all sing paeans about you. They lie at your threshold to have a glance of you or to be glanced at by you. 
Regular shoppers will be aware of a slogan engineered by clever traders. They promise things on credit for tomorrow which never comes. Even such ordinary folk know the value and beauty of tomorrow. Chasing tomorrow is an elusive pursuit. As the saying goes, tomorrow never comes.  You can say today is yesterday's tomorrow, but you cannot say that it is tomorrow. Who has seen tomorrow? Not any living being, I reckon. Even though some astrologers and soothsayers claim that they can see tomorrow, after all what is prediction about, nobody can verify this claim because it is at best a conjecture or a science of possibilities and presumptions.


The invention of 'tomorrow' is a boon to many of the weak-hearted, and of course to procrastinators. If it is entertainment, I want it now at this very moment. If it is work, the first question that comes to mind is whether I can postpone it for tomorrow. Our work piles up like this because tomorrow never comes. Then we fret and fume and complain that we are overworked. Having said so, you cannot still ignore the concept of tomorrow. As distance lends charm, tomorrow sheds its charm all around.We make detailed plans for 'tomorrow' as we cannot do that planning tomorrow, since tomorrow is still in the stage of imagination if not hallucination.
Rightly or wrongly, justifiably or unjustifiably, in certain quarters tomorrow is equated with procrastination and delaying tactics. The truth is that there is some truth in this belief. A large segment of the populace either because of inertia or difficulty in grappling with a problem or situation puts off things for the morrow.
Stigmatized with procrastination, ruin and rumination will be their repast with hardly any scope for reparation or respite and often resulting in rumpus situations. Even though subsequent alacrity may, to some extent, mitigate the damage, most of what is obliterated will be irretrievable and irreconcilable. Such a situation may devastate a man's equipoise and cause severe mental disquietude. Procrastination is the commander of evil and feeble forces. Procrastination is also known as the virtue of the wise. If this enemy within is not routed in a straight battle of non-reticence and rectitude, recurrence and recrudescence will be the result which in one mighty sweep can wash away all that is achieved with valiant efforts.   
Let us view tomorrow in its proper perspective and discharge all possible functions of the fabled tomorrow today itself. This is the lesson that we have inherited from the past and should be bequeathed to the succeeding generations.