Bottling Joy

Fairy dust. A preserve of children’s books. Synonymous with all things magical and all things make believe. It held value in a different chapter. It sparked adventure and intrigue through bright colourful illustrations on bound paper. Always made up but it held the greatest value when we knew nothing about its origins.

Our ignorance shielded us from the complex of evil authors. They were in cahoots with the makers of paper and the jesters of binding pages. Their deception fueled our imagination. This subterfuge led us along the garden path till we ran into a stone wall. No visible indentations. The path behind receded in the shrubbery and there stood the stoneface expressionless.

We broke through this illusion as we grew up and learned to turn the page. Misinformed about magic, we were waylaid by characters that grew from the conical nib of ink pens. These enveloped entire universes and were only threatened by the sporadic shortfall of ink reserves. This was how joy was packaged for children too young to write their first words.

This joy is now sporadically revealed to those who can write words and bundle them into sentences. It demands a lot from us to submit to the serendipity and buy into the delusion. Joy is concealed under the black mark of art and detached from commercial enterprises. It has no place in a boardroom or a center of profit.

We search for artisans because every other practitioner falls flat. Art and joy are strange bedfellows. Joy is packaged like cookie-cutter products on an assembly line. Its essence leaks as it is diminished to conserve consistency. Stripped of variations, it appears next to a checkbox on the menu for the day. It has no soul, nothing left to distinguish it from everything else.

We can make anything today and we still choose perfection. We admire bold sharp lines and unerring discipline in colour swatches in life. The lines should not cross and the colours should not seep out. We detest surprise and examine joy with a microscope in a permanent frown.

You cannot put a $ value on joy. We know this and have never let up in our efforts to do just that. Like with youth and cravings, we endeavour to stopper joy in a portable test tube. It should reach everyone all at once. That is the only way it sustains.

We have deluded ourselves that joy requires patrons of art. That it cannot prosper in the dark, in fledgling fields and in disheveled homes. It must submit to formulas tested against the laws of physics. Anything beyond the explainable, and it is a lost cause. 

We are a lost cause. We try to reason everything and forget that we are children praying for fairies on nights of overwhelming darkness. We fail when we try to bottle joy for ourselves. As always, it’s meant for everyone else, everywhere, all the time.

Arjun’s note: I hope you enjoyed Edition 21. Please share the newsletter (linked here) with your OG Whatsapp group chat and ask them to subscribe.