Finding The Fifth Dimension

We see what we want or perhaps need to see in cinema, in music, in the books we read, the people we meet. On days we are open to life, we see even the yellow butterfly flitting past the auto, the way a pink bloom falls on a car bonnet from a neglected tree, how sunshine filters through green leaves and makes patterns on a busy street, how a sheath of yellow flowers covers an asbestos roof, how pink bougainvillea petals laugh in the wind, leaning against a white wall.

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Sometimes what we see can change us forever. When architect AR Jaism read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, he did not dwell upon the capitalist plugs or the philosophy of selfishness but on Rand’s passionate advocacy of organic architecture.  He became an architect and named his firm Jaisim Fountainhead and has been building organic buildings for decades. Naseeruddin Shah became fascinated with the craft of acting when he saw a folk theatre performance. Though there were others in the audience, only he connected with something that changed the course of his life and made him the actor he is today. There are so many others whose lives were changed because of moments that would have gone unnoticed by others.

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Pakistani folk artiste Sain Zahoor Ahmad who is now a world music celebrity was the youngest child in a rural peasant family and often dreamt of a hand beckoning him towards a shrine. Something drove him to leave his home at the age of ten and visit the Sufi shrines of Sindh, Punjab and then one day as he was walking past a small shrine in Uch Sharif, someone waved at him  with his hand, inviting him in. And suddenly he realised that it was this hand which he had seen in his dream. He went on to study music under Raunka Ali of Patiala Gharana, whom he met at Bulleh Shah’s dargah and learnt music with other Uch Sharif musicians.

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The magical part of this journey is not just that Zahoor dreamt of it before it began but also that although not literate, he remembers and sings the complex Sufi compositions, effortlessly. It is hard to say just where the clues leading to  a full life destined for us are hiding. Maybe they are not hiding at all and are at the traffic signal you pass by everyday. In the persistent dream you have. In the songs that chase you everywhere you go. Remember the recent space opus Interstellar where Cooper, an erstwhile pilot and now a farmer is somehow.. mysteriously brought to a space facility by `them,’ the mysterious five dimensional beings that are watching over the human race?

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There is then that point in the film where he finds that ‘them’ are infact ‘us,’ or more evolved versions of us. He free falls through a black hole to understand that unless we leave behind all that we know to be familiar, we cannot find the new. We cannot find the fifth dimension of our life. We cannot grow beyond our limitations..beyond what we believe to be the barriers of time and space. The film is a spiritual allegory and contemplates the choice to stay in a space where nothing grows anymore, where nothing moves except dust…dust that will slowly choke you to death. And the choice to risk everything and go in search of a new existence we can imagine but cannot believe to be true.

As a minor character says in the film, “now is not the time for caution.” Maybe at some point in our lives, we all need to be less cautious and stop resisting the unknown or like Nemo, say out aloud, “I want to taste the ocean.”

with The New Indian Express