What's in a . ?

The figure "." creates a paranoid as to how it is to be named. Some say it is dimensionless; some call it a dot, while others are flooded with weird names such as point, centre, full stop etc. for something that is next to invisible.

My little brother calls the little thing a ‘taalshaans’. Before I explain further, let me tell you, that my brother Nik is an unusually good looking kid. He has, what is called a beauty spot on his chin. And this beauty spot is the same figure(as mentioned above); wearing a black color. When asked,’ What is that black mark on your chin?’ , he says, ‘It is a taalshaans.’ ‘Taalshaans’ or ‘Jolbhora’ is one of the most popular Bengali sweets, and undoubtedly, Nik’s favorite. And he is privileged to have right on his chin. And lick it whenever he wants to.

For convenience, let’s call the figure ‘Anonymous’. In the beginning, I ignored the taalshaans situation and went on pondering over nomenclature of Anonymous. Days later, Nik saw a pimple on my face, which resembled Anonymous. This time, he call it ‘Anuswar’. I stared at him awe-struck. Before I realized what happened, he exclaimed,’ I like the bindis on our shirt!!’ He was referring to the bunch of Anonymouses printed on my birthday dress. The goose bumps popping up on my skin pricked my brain. Not pricked , it provided an acupressure therapy for my brain to heal its pain of failure to identify anonymous. I started discovering its mysteries.

A black Anonymous to the chin of a beautiful child is what ‘taalshaans’ is to our tongues-a sweet and pleasant essence. ‘Anuswar’ in Hindi and Bengali languages provides a nasal distortion in the pronunciation of a word. So does the Anonymous to one’s face when it wears the garments of a pimple. A woman wears bindi between her eyebrows to look beautiful. Being another incarnation of Anonymous, it plays the same role on a shirt.

This is the truth of both life and the lifeless. Everyone is born anonymous and is identified by what he does. Like Anonymous, a person is called a child when he plays around, a student when he studies, a doctor, teacher, or engineer when in society, a parent by his own children and so on. But like the appearance of Anonymous, man’s soul is eternal.

Now ‘ . ‘ reminds me of Shakespeare’s famous saying,

“What’s in a name? That, if you call a rose by any other name smells as sweet!”

In spite of being dimensionless, it is the beginning of all dimensions. Everything that exists is a collection of .’s misplaced haphazardly. And we articulately join several such lifeless .’s to shape our lives…………