Some things change you like many things can’t. When Sapir and Whorf said language dictates thought, I did could not sleep for 2 nights. I kept wondering what I would call this color if not ‘greenish blue but more to the blue side’. Then they went ahead and said that some ‘greenish but more to the blue side’ will just seem blue to my mind because my language only provided me with a ‘green’ and a ‘blue’ for what my eye sees when it sees it. Now, what do I do about the things that people see but that my mind refuses to process or even notice because my language has no provision for it?
Which means also that people don’t just look different, like different things and have different thoughts, they have different mental capabilities. Do you realize the implications of this? There are words you will never know the correct pronunciation for. Your language does not have the capacity to explain some words in their complete essence, some ideas. Some poems will not make sense to you, won’t move you just as much.
Then how will you save yourself from wondering..what if you had a different body, a different mind? What if that mind did not like mulberries and hot chocolate. And if that mind was good at remembering numbers but experienced emotions with less valence?
My mind keeps going to a Kashmiri girl I saw in Sri Nagar, wearing a white school dress, walking somewhere after school. How would it feel to be her? In her social circumstances, her family, her secrets.
This thought drives me crazy. This ever-engulfing awareness of all the lives I am not living. Of the limited capabilities of my mind I see the world through. How I interpret each story through the conditioned eyes of Prachi who studied Psychology, like mulberries, thinks pillows are the best. Who is disgustingly limited.
Who wonders often: People carry their stories on their skin, but how are you going to see it?
