Life is unsettling and unfair. It’s also beautiful and adventurous. Years melt away like a block of ice on a hot pan. Days drag on, abnormally so. Two and two make four, but sometimes, five and five don’t make ten. What we expect often breaks us; what comes across unsolicited sometimes saves us. This duality, the shades and layers embedded within it, constitutes the essence of life. You can’t do anything about it. I can’t. I couldn’t.
The roads scream with sizzling asphalt during hot summer days; the streets shiver and quiver in freezing winter nights. The old yearn for youth; the young wish to grow old. Children’s excitement knows no heights when they measure their bodies, eager to show how tall and thick they have grown. Adults, meanwhile, ache when they consider how close they are to death or doom.
Women sometimes wish to be men. Men to be women. The former lament the slings and arrows life hurls at them. The latter represses the heaviness of responsibilities hanging loosely on their shoulders. Bystanders’ hearts melt when they witness a woman reeling in pain during childbirth. Sweat dripping from a man’s forehead in a factory speaks of his sacrifice and strength.
Hospitals teach the value of life. Emergencies reveal how fragile we are. Doctors prove how indispensable they are to a society. Nurses embody compassion as they tend to those on the cusp of death. Graveyards whisper of days long gone, of people absorbed by the cruel grains of soil, of eras and generations and chairs remembered only by the names carved on stone.
The rich often fall prey to psychological torment, sometimes ending their lives. The poor are crushed under the load of what the rich take for granted. Both are subjected to the ups and downs of life, just variations engendered by circumstances, class, and chance. Look closely, they teach, they scare, they awaken, they prove how complex we have made life.
Voters are kept at a distance once a politician wins an election. What was once a face-to-face exchange between a demagogue and the public turns into long queues and appointments after results are declared. What is promised during elections must later be begged for, once the ruling party speeds away in its luxurious cars, trailed by men in uniform.
I don’t complain. I am not here to factor in logistics and statistics and studies and affordability and business. I’m just amazed by the absurdity of it all. I am concerned with the broader picture. I wish Fyodor Dostoevsky were alive; he would have written volumes about it from deeper, more human angles.
How is it sane to spend lakhs on luxury when our own kith and kin lack the basics? What moral turpitude has come over us? What explanations remain for our supposed rectitude? God is there. He listens. Cars will rust. Graves await. If we believe at all.
In our pursuit of sensory pleasure and comfort, we have forgotten to open our eyes and look around and see those suffering beside us. Humanity may not be a perfect creation, but keeping darker forces intact, we have let the monstrous within us grow. And it takes on subtler forms now: see a person suffer, look away; hear painful shrieks, shut your ears; find a stone in the road, change your path.’
We are all crucified between the past and the future. The past is a forever déjà vu of the worst type, following us like shadows. The future, still unlived, drives us nuts. The noose with which we hang ourselves never breaks; it only tightens, keeping us suspended – and suffering. Suffering born of imaginations, what-ifs, buts, and beens.
A crooked tree doesn’t lament its form. It grows unconcerned with its snaky branches. The aberration, seen from a distance, appears beautiful. Sticks out as unique. Unstoppable. Ferocious. Stoic. Stellar.
Humans, burdened with conscience and expectation, suffer this way alone. Yet, everything fades in the broader scheme of things when we reflect on hospitals, the brevity of life, the unfairness of fortune, the gulf between rich and poor, and death itself.
There will come a time when you will laugh at cruelty, at violations, at elections, at corruption, at desires, at time itself, at everything that once made you mad. One day. One fine day. Period.
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