We Are the Dominos

Every domino is a D, then an O, then an M, then an I, then an N, then an O.
And every letter is only there to maintain the flow.

D to the O to the MEAN to the O. You cannot stop at D. You cannot stop at MEAN. The word does not let you. Each letter shields the fall of the one before it by becoming the next one in sequence. The D does not stand. The D leans. The O catches it. The M catches the O. And so on until the word is done and something has been said that none of the letters could have said alone.

Look again. Right in the middle sits a MEAN. On either side, an O. Two hollow ends. And the mean holding the centre so the sides don't cave in.

The word demonstrates the thing it names.

The moment it falls, it stops being an object. It becomes an event.

We are the same. Every game we play. Every thing we are told. Every concept we are fed. Every lesson we are made to learn. Each one is a domino — placed not to stand, but to catch the one before it by falling next.

The dominos are of the future, by the future, and for the future. They deserve a remake of Back to the Future — and trust me, this one will be more than a trilogy. Steven — shall we?

The Grammar

In our code-programmed language — Enna Pascal-aaaa — it goes like this:

That is the whole grammar. Not a philosophy. A condition.

A condition rendering itself with precision to be in a better position. Still a condition. Still offering a preposition. Always pointing at the next thing. Life as a preposition — toward, before, after, because of.

WAS causes IS, and then IS is its own WILL. And WILL will cause another WAS that becomes another IS.

Phew. Wren & Martin are sharpening their red pens for my angle-ish.

Read that again. Nothing in that sentence can stand alone. The WAS needs the IS to mean anything. The IS needs the WILL to become anything. The WILL needs another WAS to prove it happened.

Anything is because Something was, and will be Another thing.

The circle of life does not stop. It is living and drilling to make another living. The wheels on the bus go round and round. Not because it wants to. Because a circle cannot exit itself.

The Species

We think we are the exception.

We are the only species who explored to survive, and now believe we can drive to thrive. We think we know what we are doing and where we are heading. We think the circle is for other things — the lion, the antelope, the grass, the rain — and that we are outside it now, operating it.

YAY!!! Way to (e)GO, wHooMans!!

We built a master zorb to absorb the fall. That is what we call progress. A giant ball of rubber around everything we care about, so that when the chain starts to go, we bounce instead of break. Insurance. Legacy. Retirement funds. Succession planning. The next book. The next child. The next anything.

To put it in a NUTS-hell — because that's what the nutshell actually is: a selfish, self-centralised, WREK-TANGULAR shaped domino preparing a following one to lean on.

We think we are the DOMINATORS, sequencing our DOMINOS to cushion our fall.

The Proof

I want to make this concrete, because abstraction is where this idea usually dies.

Last night, close to 1 AM, I was standing in front of my cupboard. Looking for something. Can't remember what. And then: four books.

Four. On one shelf. One after another.

The last one is still new. 8 October. My birthday. On that day I released a book.

And that night, for the first time, it occurred to me — I didn't gift myself anything. I placed the next domino.

Look at what each one actually argues.

Khoj Mein Khoya was first. A search. Consciousness, self, what all of this is. Neuroscience on one side, Advaita on the other, and something in the middle that neither fully held. So I started writing, and while writing, got lost.

The first domino was the search itself. And the search was the first thing to fall.

Beech Ka Aadmi was second. A voice between thought and speech. You think one thing. You say another. Between them, a man. That man — the man in the middle — is what the book is about.

That man is a domino.

Because a domino is not the hand. A domino is not the thing that pushes. A domino is the gap — the space between one thing and the next, the small leaning interval where the fall is passed. बीच का आदमी। The middle man. The gap.

Deepसीख was third. AI as a mirror. The argument: AI shows you what is irreplaceably human, because it shows you what it cannot do. What only you can do.

But a mirror is also a domino. What it shows you becomes the next thing you do. You look, and because you looked, you move. The mirror does not stand still in your life. It leans you forward.

The name has सीख hidden inside it. Seekhna. Learning. For the machine, and for me. I thought I was being clever with the name. Now I think the name chose me.

The Fault in Default was fourth.

That book is about the joint family as a system. Six jobs — money, children, disputes, marriage, budget, relationships. Every person a domino. दादा, दादी, चाचा, चाची, माँ, पापा। Each one catching the one before, each one leaning into the next. Six jobs, six people, one system that held because everyone was in the chain.

And then women's freedom took that system apart.

Rightly. I want to say this seriously, not as a rhetorical concession. At its best, the joint family made the weight of living lighter — shared, spread, held by many hands. At its worst, it put that weight on specific people. Mostly women. Whose freedom was the price. It held because nobody had a way out. What came was freedom, and I will not say a single word against it.

But something was missing.

Replacement.

Six jobs existed. Six people did them. Now six jobs exist, and nobody does them. Or one person does them. Alone. And that one person is falling.

The default had a fault in it. And the default was itself a domino. The system that held everything up was one domino. When it fell, there was nothing behind it.

Four books. And I remember the reason for the first one only faintly.

That is what a domino looks like when it has a name and a date.

The Tower

The books are the dominos I can point at. There are others I can't.

My son was stacking blocks a few weeks ago. Seven, maybe eight. He looked at the tower. He looked at me. Then he knocked it down with one finger.

I laughed. Because it was funny.

Then I stopped laughing. Because I remembered doing the exact same thing. And I remembered my father watching me. And I remembered him laughing the same way.

Three generations laughing at the same fall. Nobody planned it. Nobody wrote it down. The laugh just moved down the line.

I don't know if that is a domino or a haunting.

The Narrators

Even the voices that explained us to ourselves are dominos.

Attenborough showed us the circle of life. The lion. The antelope. The grass. The rain. Round and round. He was the naturalist. He showed us that the circle exists.

Then Freeman took the microphone as GOD-man. Asked us to look Through the Wormhole. Asked why the circle exists at all. He was the philosopher of the cosmos. He took what Attenborough showed and pushed it one step further.

One voice leaned on the other. One narrator became the domino for the next.

Planet Earth did not lose its planet. It lost its narrator — to a freeman. And the chain kept falling.

Even the joke has a predecessor. I didn't invent Attenborough or Freeman. I picked them up. They were already lying around. I just put them next to each other. New thing. Not from nothing.

Even that. Even them. Just the next in sequence.

From Myself to Everyone Else

Now let me move from myself to everyone else.

Because the books are only my version. The concept is bigger than any shelf.

Whatever is, is because something was. And someone's will will cause another whatever. That is the operating condition of a life. Every choice you make is a WAS that will become someone else's IS. Every sentence you say is a domino. Every silence too.

We think we are the hand. We are the fall.
We think we are the dominators. We are the dominos.
We think we are building the master zorb. We are the reason the next one needs a zorb.

The Question

So I have to ask myself, plainly: Am I creating a domino behind me?

Yes.

Every game I play. Every thing I am told. Every concept I am fed. Every lesson I am made to learn. Each one is a domino I place — of the future, by the future, and for the future.

And if I am placing dominos behind me, then someone placed me. That is not a rhetorical question. That is a structural fact of being in the chain.

That is karma. Karma, stripped of its mystical bookkeeping. The real machinery. कर्म जो घूम के वापस आता है और गिरा जाता है। It comes around and it falls.

I told this line to a friend once. He put his coffee down and said:
— तू फिलॉसफी मत कर। तू बस लिख।

So I am writing.

But the line has sat inside me since. Which karma am I waiting for? Which domino? And when it comes — will I fall, or will I be fallen on?

I still don't know if I am the domino or the hand.

But I know this. On 8 October, I placed another one. On the day someone else placed me.

Next year, 8 October — what will I do? I don't know. Maybe I'll write. Maybe I won't. But if I do — that will be the fifth. And I will again wonder why I wrote it.