Are You Crazy Enough? By Howard Izundu

At 14, I discovered reggae music. I was so crazy about reggae that I believed that Iwould be the authentic replacement for Bob Marley. I started writing reggae music lyrics. I was furious. I was on fire. I was proficient. I chanted down Babylon. I dreamed of singing on Mount Zion.
At 16, I teamed up with a fellow student to form a pop group. We wanted to be like Bob Marley, Fela and others. Under the guidance of a professional musician, who was also a student, we started rehearsing our first song. Every evening, we would take over an empty classroom to practice. In the middle of it all, students of my university went on a huge protect because of a strident issue. Our university was closed as a result of the demonstration. When our university reopened, our musician/mentor did not return. And that ended my romance with becoming a musician.
That song we were rehearsing has remained in me ever since.
I have not told this story before, even to people close to me. It is practically unbelievable, considering the life I ended up living. Apart from the song that is still playing in my head, I still have a picture I took during that era. It was taken while I was at home following the closure of our university. In the picture I was wearing my mother’s discarded wig. I had converted the wig into a poor man’s dreadlock. It is a picture for the ages- now kept in a tightly secured safe.
....to be continued

Interesting read.

Continue pls...

....contd.
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I cannot help but think of what could have been had I continued with my ‘music career.’ As I think of it, I know that I did not stop just because our mentor left the university. I really stopped because I was not crazy enough.
I really wanted to be a musician but I could not imagine myself walking up to my father, a proud BA (Honors) degree holder from Oxford, and say that I was throwing away my career in engineering to become one of those ‘useless weed-smoking guitar boys.’
Incidentally, when the music career ended, I went through the same dilemma as I pursued writing while still studying engineering. But that is a story for another day.
This was before David Becham's success made it okay for a boy to aspire to become a footballer. It was long before J.K Rowlings's and Chimamanda Adiche's success made it okay for a girl to aspire to become a writer. They were crazy enough to pursue their dreams. And because they did, it is now okay for a child to grow up and want to be a footballer (think Messi) or a writer. Because they were crazy enough to pursue their dreams, old ideas were dropped for new ones.
Since the beginning of time, man had to think to survive. Man had to observe his environment to navigate it and stay alive. Early men asked questions about how, why, who, what, when, where of events. These questions have not stopped. Answers of today have led to more questions for tomorrow. As the world becomes clearer, old ideas are dropped on the side for new ones.
.........to be cntd.

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When I was in secondary school, in my first Chemistry class, we were taught the John Dalton’s atomic theory. In 1805, John Dalton moved forward the hypothesis that we are made of molecules. He proved that molecules are made up of atoms. Dalton’s theory stated that, “Atom is the smallest indivisible particle. It can neither be created nor destroyed.” The name atom came from the Greek word, atomos, meaning not able to cut.
But as far back as 1932, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge had done what eluded scientists for a century before. They had split the atom into protons, neutrons and electrons.
What they achieved changed everything. It created the atomic age.
Scientists have since discovered that protons and neutrons are made of quarks. As of today, quarks are the end of it. They are as small as anything can get -as of today.
There are six kinds of quarks – up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. As we inAfrica pray for our generators to start, for our mosquito nets to withstand the anopheles mosquito, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) are working to seeif quarks are made of even smaller things. LHC is also poised to discover the nature of dark matter, supersymmetric particles and extra dimensions.
Niels Bohr was one of those who led the study of the atom. His principle of complementarity still remains a focal point in the study of contradictory properties of items. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics “for his services in theinvestigation of the structure of atoms and the radiation emanating from them.” He was part of the Manhattan Project that led to the building of the first nuclear bomb.
After Wolfgang Pauli presented Heisenberg's and Pauli's nonlinear field theory of elementary particles at Columbia University in 1958, Niels Bohr said to him, “We areall agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
That is the crux of the matter. Where the world is going is crazy. But it is not crazy enough. Not yet.


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I feel you, i feel like am not yet crazy enough to forgo the alternatives and pursue my dreams with a one focused desperation.

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