Kamal Ghorui
A playback song from Chak De! India goes: “Baadal par paanv hain, ya chhoota gaon hai, ab toh bhai chal padi, apni yeh naav hai – our feet rest on clouds, or perhaps it’s a village left behind; our little boat has finally set sail.” The song creates imagery of freedom, of soaring high, of breaking boundaries, of leaving behind trauma and weight of the world. No wonder, then, that surrealist painter Dalí uses cutouts of two lovers with their heads in clouds against a stark landscape to depict dreams and fantasies, and two separate worlds colliding and overlapping. The lovers meet, yet they are cocooned in their individualisms.
Besides artists, many brands use imagery of clouds and air to connect with this inherent desire to feel free, weightless and at ease. Brands such as Nike Air, On Cloud shoes, iPad Air, Airbnb use words such as ‘air’ and ‘cloud’ to imply a sense of lightness. Beyond brands, internet is depicted with a cloud icon to mask the complexity of telecommunication systems, which, for a layperson, can feel like rocket science.
To explain why we link complex ideas with relatable metaphors, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson proposed a Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) in Metaphors We Live By , which posits that we prefer to think of abstract concepts in terms of physical experiences, such as height, weight, movement, and balance. Hence, up is good, and down is associated with negative/bad sentiment – rising success/falling into depression. In this contextual framework, skies, clouds, and horizons suggest expansiveness, scalability, and, more importantly, a need for transcendence, to experience bliss.
TOI caters to this need; its pages provide an overview of what’s going on in the world along with methodology of transcendence. One of the oldest newspapers in the country does both – neatly organises news and promotes the idea of neutrality, allowing a reader to step back and calibrate her response as she navigates information related to wars, economic uncertainty, humanitarian crises, speciesism and environmental deprivation.
The reader must know that wisdom lies in understanding that our world is ephemeral, and both good and bad things that may give us joy momentarily or plunge us into depths of despair – do not last. They pass, just like thunderclouds part to make way for sunshine, for every dark cloud has a silver lining. The life that we live and seeds of our future lie in this very moment, pregnant with potential of us being on cloud nine.
Advait Vedanta says that observer and observed are not different. The reader and the read do not have separate existence. We exist in Brahmn, the effulgent Self that creates this world and everything else. Brahmn is the underlying substratum of all that exists, yet It is not dependent on it. For is it not that worshipper and worshipped unite in the grand scheme of things? Just like lovers who meet and become one – Mira and Krishn, Andal and Vishnu, Tukaram and Vithoba, Jayadev and Radha Shyam.
Kena Upanishad begs the question: “By whom missioned falls the mind shot to its mark? By whom yoked moves the first life-breath forward on its paths? By whom impelled is this word that men speak? What God set eye and ear to their workings?” The Upanishad defines, “That which is hearing of our hearing, mind of our mind, speech of our speech, that too is life of our life-breath and sight of our sight. The wise are released beyond and they pass from this world and become immortal.”
In Kalidas’s Meghaduta, Cloud Messenger, yaksha releases the cloud after using it as his messenger to his beloved, “Now roam wherever you please in your glory, and may you not suffer even a moment apart from the light of your life.”
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