Kid Supreme (The Soul Behind The Machine)

 

It took me a while to realise as a kid that there were other kids in the world that were obsessed with the things I was obsessed with. This thought didn’t sit well with me, I wanted to be the king of the world, I wanted to be Kid Supreme. I didn’t wanna be just another pattern, and I was probably very young at the time when all these thoughts started flooding my brain. This was one of the main reasons I never got along with other kids, I just couldn’t believe that I was born into a world full of kids just like me, or not maybe exactly like me, but I mean in the way that how we all wore the same uniforms when we went to school. 

School, I hated this word. Everything I ever knew at that young age I had learned by listening, English was the first language I ever learned, I had unintentionally developed a pretty decent vocabulary for a three year old, I had shocked my whole family apparently. I was deemed a child prodigy, I was just a kid and all that praise definitely went to my head, it shouldn’t have but it did. And that’s why I hate accepting compliments or praise, not that I receive any of those things on a daily basis, but when I do I’ve learned to ignore and shrug off.

 

A person is ever evolving, especially a person like me, and in my head I’m the only person like me, there’s no other. Last week I was a different me, this week I’m the same me as last week yet a bit more evolved, in ways I could explain, but as usual I choose not to. I consider the experience of my evolution a very personal thing, it’s only bound to bleed into the exterior walls of my existence from the interior that is my soul and that’s when they notice me. My soul as I feel it, I know has reached the final state of evolution but the human body, this complex machine of ever changing flesh and blood has to be capable enough to show off the unclogged complexity of the soul. And for that things have to be done, things I don’t wish to document, but I’m writing all this so it should mean something. 

People assume things, and as I always keep to myself they assume things about me. And I don’t mind being the means to someone’s assumptions. But what I do mind is when they assume wrongly about me in this very regard. I love keeping to myself, as I said the way I look at the world is subjective, very subjective. And I love to keep it that way, I like to wander within the walls of my mind, for my mind has no walls and is ever awake always thinking, flowing and ebbing with countless thoughts, doesn’t matter if I’m awake or otherwise, my brain is always thinking. 

Believe it or not my constantly thinking think machine got me into a ton of trouble back in school. Focusing in class was hard because my brain craved “feel good chemicals” aka dopamine in order to stop the thinking and focus on the external world, and why would my brain ever do that in something as mundane as a classroom setting? A jaded environment as I referred to it, when I got to do it every evening in front of the television. And that’s why I spent my time in class thinking about things constantly, deriving dopamine from my thoughts. Magic, magical beings, science, science fiction, Spider-Man, Iron-Man, Tinkle comics, Amar Chitra Katha, Lord Krishna, the stories of all the gods I came to love as a child, the Super Hero squad game on my Sony Playstation Portable, Chotta Bheem, Classic Ben 10, every movie Hollywood or otherwise I had ever seen, constantly replaying in my mind over and over again just because I was put in a place that simply couldn’t match the amount of dopamine my brain had derived from the aforementioned entertainment. 

There were times when classes got interesting, and that’s when I’d actually focus, but then I’d get disappointed again at the lack of fun I was experiencing and would go back into my own personal world I had constructed in the walls of my mind, an escape from reality that I very much deserved. All this got me lagging behind in my academics, and I didn’t mind, because I had my own personal television right in my head. I could listen to songs, rewatch movies re-experience my favourite books and comics. Why did I need school and classes, I had all of this. Anything I wanted to learn I could learn myself, and so I never believed in the notion that school would make me whole, the perfect student, the perfect person, and the whole system and the path laid in front of me was too conventional for me to wanna pursue, cause in my head I wanted to break conventionality. 

Conventionality is the dirtiest word in my dictionary at least, and that’s exactly why all my life I’ve done very unconventional things. A few I definitely regret, there is always a prize to pay when all you do is blindly follow intuition. It’s almost as if you listen to the group of thoughts that hit you instantly, sometimes you sit and think if what you think really has to be done, but in my case I just do. I’ve learned to reconsider recently, and nowadays I’ve understood that certain things have to be done to have the right kind of intuition. 

I was obsessed with Spidey as a kid, and then the Incredible Hulk came out and somehow I understood the deep meaning behind the Incredible Hulk. I intuitively knew that Bruce banner had an Alter ego, in his case a split personality that he had in a way unintentionally manifested through ptsd. And so I began creating an alter ego myself, not intentionally, but I was definitely influenced, or maybe this alter ego was always there and the movie just made me accept it, making me unleash him once a while. I know all this sounds like I’m making it up, but trust me I’m not. Spider-Man 3 had come out in 2007 and I was just five at the time, and I somehow knew that the venom Symbiote had in a way influenced Peter wrongly making him unintentionally unleash what was already inside him, a bipolarity. Peter Parker, knowing his back story all the trauma he had endured, no one would be surprised if he had a dark side to him. I’m no Peter Parker, but me being who I am and having my own unique experiences felt the need to unleash this pent up basket of emotions, bundle of energy, call it whatever, it is all synonymous to the concept of an alter ego. And that’s right, I coexist with this other personality of mine. I don’t know what to call him, he’s an exaggeration of me, he’s more than me, he’s me waiting for me to unlock more of me to be able to be me, he’s my saviour, he’s my guardian angel, my inner voice, my dark passenger, my inner ego waiting to be expressed at all the right times and the wrong ones, the perfect judge to this imperfect world, the mirror to undeserving people, the defender of my soul, in a way I believe that he’s God, the inner manifestation of my soul, the karma bringer to other people, the pain resolver for other people, the one who silently watches through the eyes of this Kaushik Ravindran, always waiting for the perfect and precise time to show himself to the world. And I get that it can confuse people sometimes, cause people are normal and there are people out there half as complex as I am, and they just couldn’t understand, as everyone’s got a darker side to them, but their other guy is never my other guy and vice versa, and I mean that my other guy as I described him to be is unique. 

So it always makes me wonder how he’d manifest if I were to ever take the super soldier serum. I wonder everyday, cause the only thing that is stopping him from being his true authentic self having to cover behind this inferior personality is this mortal body, that he also lives and cares for deeply. But to make it indestructible that’s when he’d truly manifest. Did I just define the concept of a super hero? Tony stark had to build a suit of armour to transform himself into his alter ego, Rogers took the super human serum, Banner became the hulk, although that’s a split personality type of thing that I don’t relate with. For me I think I found music, cause music or more specifically being a guitar player is the closest thing to being a super hero. 

John Mayer wasn’t always John Mayer, Eddie Van Halen wasn’t always Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai wasn’t always Steve Vai, Stevie Ray Vaughan wasn’t always Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix wasn’t always Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson wasn’t always Robert Johnson, BB King wasn’t always BB King, Yngwie Malmsteen wasn’t always Yngwie Malmsteen, Guthrie Govan wasn’t always Guthrie Govan, Jeff Back wasn’t always Jeff Beck and so on. They all had a baseline personality but the minute they got on that stage, plugged in their Guitars, they manifested into something else, their actual personality, their souls were bleeding into reality through the Guitar, the guitar became this supposed super soldier serum, and this is exactly why I picked up the guitar.

I am a Guitar player for this same exact reason, to learn and learn and jam and unlock newer and newer ideas and techniques and expressions having in mind that someday I’ll know what to do with this shape or this colour or this geometry or this set of numbers, or this lick through this shape, or this other transposition, or this chromatic pattern, or this repeating shape and pattern on a different part of the fretboard, and someday I’d sound like me, and people would hear a random note sound through their speakers and know that it is me, the actual me, my soul bleeding and manifesting through the muscle memory/technical ability of my fingers driven by the intuitive tapestry of the sheer puppetry that is being done by the man above, the controller of my soul, the man with the joystick to my soul, the actual me, and all I’m doing at this moment and all I’m trying to constantly unlock is a path for him to fully be able to control me. It’s a vice versa kinda thing, the intuition of my improvisation would match the instructions being fed through the strings connected to his fingers that I dance on.