It happened  a few years ago.

Phanom Phrai, Bang Fai Festival.

I am in the middle of a crowd of local people who, very excited, are about to watch the Bung Fai Festival.

What is this about? In short, it is about many rudimentary rockets of different size and shape being shot in the sky as a symbolic request to the Gods for rain.

Therefore for the whole day a dense curtain of smoke is covering the area, loud noises, blasts, and people wandering around without any safety measure.

For the whole day I felt a creepy feeling of “accident waiting to happen” and in fact … it happened. One of the said rockets just fell into the crowd beheading a woman and hurting about 60 more people.

But this is not what I want to write about.

The thing is that I was watching and observing all these human beings always moving around, buying food, drinks and other amenities from the countless stands, I was watching young people gradually getting drunk from cheap Lao Whiskey bottles and the usual, recurrent question resurfaced in my mind. What the hell am I doing here?

And I was not meaning Phanom Phrai or Thailand but I was thinking what am I doing here on earth, why do I live, what is the purpose of my life, of life in general?

What is the purpose of the many unaware souls around me?

Who is throwing the threads which are tying us to each other whose design is all this?

Are we just connected puppets being part of a much bigger plan?

© - Copyright Claudio Romano