Reflections

It’s been a long time since I have written. It is something that scares me. A person’s passions make his life and to lose your passions is as good as losing your essence. It is a realization that has grown stronger with me after coming here, to this physically beautiful place called Kozhikode.

You may ask the reason for my unexpected disappearance from the blogging world. But I myself don’t have a confident answer. Probably, it’s just that I have not been able to gather enough inspiration, or probably that I was too intent on writing an article that was nowhere below excellent. That brings me to why you find this article on a new blog address. I actually did write a few things during this last half a year (phew...how time flies), but never put them up on my old blog. It’s come to be something very sacred for me, my old blog, and I did not want to put up routine things on it. I will in all probability do that here, unless I become obsessed over this one too. Some people, I am sure, would prefer the words neurotic to obsessed.

To tell you exactly how life has been this past half a year in a single emotion is difficult, rather impossible. Time doesn’t wait for anyone and emotions wait even lesser. They just whizz by before you actually start feeling them thoroughly and start believing that you are in a state which you can qualify by a particular emotion. That also might be one of the reasons why I haven’t been able to write. Whenever I have made an effort, I have found it very difficult to think along one line. Emotions have been multitude in number and their direction has been very random.

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A few observations, and a few insights, during this period which I feel are worth sharing:

1. Most people are essentially good-natured. My initial scepticism over my future peer group has given way to an assured feeling of potentially long-lasting friendships and the acknowledgement of the inherent goodness of people.

2. I was reading a dear friend’s blog here, in one of whose articles, during the course of a conversation between two of his fictional characters, one of them comments about the travesty of success - “in the end, you may realize that it was not so important after all”. The statement struck me. And since then, I have grappled with the question of what success is. How important is it? Is there actually contentment after success? How do I measure my success? Success to me might not be a success to you. But your failure may still be a success to me. Why do I desire success?

3. There are a few moments in your life when everything comes to a standstill, and you feel your purpose of living has been accomplished. In such moments, you can see the whole essence of your life coming through. In such moments, you just sit back, reflect about yourself and your past life and marvel at your journey. Inevitably, more often than not, such moments would occur in the simple things of life and maybe when you least expect them. At such moments, you have no regrets over the way you have lived your life, over the way you have conducted yourself.

4. The Social Services Group here started a wonderful little initiative of career counselling for school children. While volunteering for the event, I had the fortune of sitting in the auditorium hall and watch the young children listen intently to the counsellors, earnestness in their eyes and curiosity on their faces. Though it didn’t actually transport me back to my school days, those were some wonderful feel-good hours and I soaked in the charm of school life all over again.

5. Probably it’s the proximity in time between my graduation and post-graduation, but I still fondly remember BHU. And it’s mostly for the things that are ostensibly inconsequential in the supposedly larger scheme of things. One of the most vivid images which I remember very frequently is that of my batch mates sitting around the lamp-post towering vertically in the centre of the hostel. It was a common routine. One by one, people from different corners of the hostel, would come towards that circle as if there was a magnet pulling in all directions from there. It surprises me still how we managed to talk so much endlessly over potentially the same topics, the same teachers, the same girls, and still always managed to pull off interesting talk.

6. It’s truly remarkable how every person is so unique, while being so similar. Pick up any particular quality, and there is a role model for you. I have come across some amazing people here - people with so much equanimity about themselves that I feel as relaxed in their company as my limits would allow me, people with so much ambition that I too feel like setting the world on fire, people with so much dedication that I would willingly absorb a trickle of it, people with so much in love with what they love that it puts my passions to shame, people with so much maturity that you feel like a kid who is allowed to toy with his musings.

7. There was a most wonderful person by the name of Prof. Mathew along the way who taught us a course by the name of “Social Transformation of India.” He was not a sermonizer, nor was he a priest, but he tugged at our heart strings like no one ever has. In those few classes that we interacted with him and those few movies he showed us, he made us feel extremely small, while at the same time, giving us hope that there was a chance we could redeem ourselves.