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A few days back I had a long talk on the phone with an old friend of mine. It had been almost a year that we had talked to each other. I went on blabbering to her, narrating every bits and pieces of my present life. She seemed to be pretty jobless during the time I called her up. I hadn’t imagined that anyone would bear to lend an ear to my stories for such a long time. After I was done with my stories she made an abrupt unexpected comment “You seem to have a busy life Avinash. So you must be very happy.”
This startled me. I had never tried to answer this question. In real sense, I had tried never to think of this question. Was I happy?
I wanted to reply back “I try to remain busy so that I can keep the past out of my head.” Frustrations and inertia have been a part and parcel of everyone’s life. Maybe I would be blowing off myself too much if I keep on retelling these past failures. So I refrained from telling anything to my friend about the reasons behind me being busy. I just winded up “Yes I am busy and I am happy.” …...………………………………………………….
There once lived a writer called Samuel Smiles who happened to write a couple of books on virtues like self-help and character. Somehow, those books made a way to my mom’s reading table. A couple of days later I was given instructions to go through these books. I tried reading one of them for an hour only to realize that I had fallen down asleep for the next three hours. I tried reading another of these Samuel Smiles book and fell asleep for the next four hours. (I was in the seventh standard at that time!!). Years on and today world makes me realize the necessity of these virtues like self-help. These are lessons which are best learnt by falling down and getting injured in the path of life and not merely by falling down asleep as a seventh standard student……………………………………..
The world has indeed gone a long way from the time I was in the seventh standard. There came the year 2010 and hence came BITS Pilani to my life. This has indeed been a long way to me – from the remote, desolate town on the bank of the Brahmaputra to the din of New Delhi and henceforth to the desert of Pilani. Surprisingly, this has been true for me both literally and figuratively. ( You can’t travel to Pilani from Assam without reaching Delhi !!).
The world moved on in 2010. It tackled with epidemics like H1N1. It suffered with Mexican landslides, Indonesian tsunamis and Javanese volcanoes. The world went beyond its realm and surpassed records of putting man in the outer world. It respired with life as Aung San Suu Kyi got released and finally it marked the occurrence of the lunar eclipse on a solstice. The world still moved on. But I seemed to stop. My seventh-grade self-help books could not take me beyond. Inertia encompassed me. Neither the dreary sand of Rajasthan nor the inexhaustible waters of the Brahmaputra could soothe me. Time moved on. And hence I got busy so that I could be happy. The past is gone. The future is not unknown. But still, live in the present.
