In the same student magazine that I had stumbled across while doing spring-cleaning, I found the following lines from 'Taste Of India' by Aerosmith:

When you are born, you are afraid of the darkness
And then you are afraid of the light

I forwarded them to one of my friends who promptly replied back saying that there seemed to be something wrong about the message - maybe the positions of the words 'darkness' and 'light' needed to be interchanged.

Hmmm......now I am not sure what the author had in mind while penning these lines. But my own interpretation is as follows - when we are born, we are hungry for knowledge - hence afraid of the darkness i.e. ignorance. When we grow up, we are afraid of the light which could symbolize some inconvenient truth or another which could potentially harm our comfortable existence. We prefer the ignorance that is bliss. 'Light' can also be associated with 'freedom from the cycle of birth and death' which almost all of us shun because we are in love with this world and all the material things in it. :-(

I must confess here that appreciation of poetry is not my claim to fame. I don't understand poetry - plain and simple. But I believe that sometimes it doesn't matter what the author had in mind while writing a song or a poem. What it means to you in the context of your life - your experiences, your triumphs and failures, your joys and sorrows, your thoughts and opinions - is what matters in the end. What say?