Honey - and the meaning of life

She was just a maid. He had big beautiful eyes. She had seen him grow up into a handsome young prince. The queen couldn’t care less about her children. When he was a child, she used to feed him, bathe him, everything. He didn’t really know his mother. She was all he cared about.

Honey. She called him Honey.

Although she was considerably older, this feeling was as alien to her as it was to him. Love? She couldn’t be sure. What did she know about love? She was not meant to. He would someday be married off to a princess of some other state, someone of equal stature. She could never have him. But it was okay, she never had a choice. She was used to reconciling herself to her mundane life.

He thought he had gone crazy. To fall in love with a maid is the kind of thing for which the word ‘preposterous’ was invented. He never thought this would happen to him, but it did. He was the prince, the heir apparent, the cynosure of all eyes and all that jazz. Eyes. She had beautiful tiny eyes. He could marry any princess of any state across the country. Then why did he have to fall in love with such a lowly, insignificant life form? That’s what his mother told him about their ‘kind’. Oh Lord, thine ways are mysterious, and also bloody sick.

She was there when the dacoits attacked. She died defending him.
He was married to the princess of the neighboring state. She poisoned him on his wedding night and became the queen.

Epilogue

It all started with a desperate attempt at profundity on my part when I fired a simple query at the Madhabhushi (it doesn’t sound too good this way. Also, it’s a terrible comeback, I agree). What exactly is the motivation of worker bees? It may be noted that I had watched (re-watched, actually) Fight Club the previous day and the whole we are the middle children of history commentary had yet again managed to rattle the beehive in my head. Also, there’s a haiku in the movie that goes

Worker bees can leave
Even drones fly away
The queen is their slave

I spent the entire next day reading up on honeybees. Worker bees fascinated me the most. Their lives are kind of a throwback to the Sisyphus theme of doing meaningless tasks without any apparent motivation. And then I looked around me, at all the worker bees sitting in their tiny cells, working hard at nothing of any particular significance to anyone. As Chandler Bing puts it,

“If I don’t input those numbers….nothing much would happen.”

It’s an old analogy. We’re all worker bees, working without any sense of purpose is what we’re meant to do. Of course, actual worker bees accomplish a much more critical task than most of us – that of sustaining the hive. Sure, queen bee lays the eggs, and is critical for the survival of the species in a much more real sense. But worker bees do everything else. But then again, motivation is not so much about the meaningfulness of their tasks as that of their lives as a whole. Or maybe there really is no difference. Queens will lay eggs, drones will fuck around (literally), and worker bees will do everything else, including feeding the larvae, cleaning and guarding the beehive, collecting nectar, optimizing the hive temperature, attending to the queen et al. At first glance, workers may come across as the most important class among honeybees. The reason I thought of the worker bees in particular was that they don’t do the one thing that seems to be the only true purpose of the lives of most, if not all living beings – reproduction. Well, at least not normally. What probably helps their case is that they’re not genetically engineered to think about the meaningfulness of their tasks, or the lack of it. I don’t think the bees need to dwell on the question of hope or denial dude. That’s obviously a very specie-ist remark, and should the bees gain perspective – or maybe voting privileges – in the near future, I may be forced to withdraw it. Unfortunately, humans already have those things, and hence their case is more complex. So as much as Camus insists that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, it’s not as simple as that. It’s probably the best to not ever let the question enter your mind, but once it has, how do you get rid of it? Skepticism is not a choice, it is an affliction. You can go on pretending that you believe in everything.
But in the end, you can only pretend. (aila poem!)

I personally believe that you can only hope for something better if you keep convincing yourself that the current situation sucks. And I’m pretty damn good that way. I tend to run away from perfect scenarios so that I can at least look forward to those. If there’s no reason to be depressed, life just seems to stand still. I guess I’m actually an optimist after all, albeit in a very sick, twisted way.

Anyway, for those you who know me, this is all old hat, and I’m as bored of myself as you are.