"The moment I was old enough to play board games, I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. O perfect balance of rewards and penalties! O seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice! Clambering up ladders, slithering down snakes, I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When, in my time of trial, my father challenged me to master the game of shatranj, I infuriated him by preferring to invite him, instead, to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes. All games have morals; and the game os Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot and stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosity of the serpents; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see , metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; ...but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity - because, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down ladders and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake..." "a person must sometimes chose what he will see and what he will not; look away, look away from there now..." "This was the last and worst of the jungle's tricks, that by giving them their heart's desire, it was fooling them into using up their dreams, so as their dream-life seeped out of them they became as hollow and translucent as glass." (from: Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie Time, duality, ambiguity,
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