Tuesday, November 9, 2010

The 420-characters Quota

Early in the morning I was trying to update my status message in Facebook. But I wasn’t allowed to publish it since the full message exceeded the limit of 420 characters. Thus I refrained myself from publishing it all together since half of it wouldn’t have made any sense.

And I wondered how important a single character – a small deed – can often become. When something in life reaches its 420 characters quota (if at all!) it’s these characters – one seminal part each that was supposed to make up the whole but somehow didn’t – that become all the more pronounced for people to judge and for us, as an individual, to criticize, treasure or infer, accordingly. And when it does happen all we are left with is a sigh which, if given words, shall read, “Wish they knew the whole. Wish I realized the whole.”

How does it matter how many pages of Life’s calendar we flip back in our heart everyday when in reality nothing can ever be flipped back, erased or corrected entirely if and when something abruptly hits the 420-characters quota.