Skip to main content

Beginnings

     Loneliness and isolation have their own merits and demerits. They make you envy the people who do not have to undergo the same suffering as yourself, but in a way they give you time for introspection. And it is out of this introspection that some great autobiographies have emerged. History itself, is a testament to that. Some eminent leaders have penned books that have become an inseparable part of World Culture, whilst in total isolation from the world. Adolf Hitler wrote his autobiography - 'Mein Kampf' in prison after his failed Putsch in Munich. For Hitler haters, even Nelson Mandela wrote a major part of his autobiography 'Long Walk to Freedom' while he was imprisoned on Robben Iceland for 27 years by the apartheid regime in South Africa. Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote 'An Autobiography' between 1934 and 1935 when he was in prison. Long story short, this blog is also an outcome of sheer loneliness; I hope it turns out good! Just to be clear, I am NOT in prison, nor am I a fugitive!

        We all are aware of the saying "The grass is always greener on the other side". No matter how successful we are, no matter how happy we are, from the eyes of the world, we always crave for things that others possess. Thanks to my isolation, I've learnt to look only on the brighter side of my life...where I'm living now, is the "greener" side of the grass.

        In the monsoon of 2010 I moved out of my hostel - a place where I had lived few of the best days of my life during 2009-10. It was soon into this self-imposed isolation that I realised what a horrible mistake I had made. A terrible choice. Loneliness soon crept in, so did frustration. I lost faith in everything, including happiness, and became the cynic I'd always avoided turning into. When I looked out of the broken window of my rented apartment I could only see how miserable my life was, and how happy everyone else was. Nothing cheered me, nothing could bring the smile that I never used to let go of, the year before.

         It doesn't take a smart man to realise that getting yourself out of such a situation is the need of the hour. I began trying to feel happy, albeit forcibly. I would just smile at petty things, and not let the difficulties bother me much. And it did not take much time for a miracle to occur... Happiness circled me like a group of giggling children in a merry-go-round. My days brightened, and soon the picture I saw out of the window changed. The broken glass didn't matter much, nor did the sordid sight of pigs running randomly on the street. Even a slight breeze was enough to make me smile.

         No, I wasn't becoming ignorant of problems, I was just becoming cognizant of the joy around me, and at the same time, I'd learnt to look adversity in the eye and say "You don't scare me!". Yes, isolation changed me, twice. Most of us go through such a phase, but most of the time we let suffering make us the person that we don't want to be. It's your choice after all, either choose to stay melancholy and mourn like a loser, or just turn to the "greener side of the grass"! It always works... "True story!"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Three Wise Men and the Unrelenting Power of Communication

A few weeks ago I was at a restaurant with my parents. Like every other modern family, we buried our faces in our smartphones after the waiter was done taking our order. Having read that constant phone face-burial can cause neck problems, I habitually raised my head to stretch my neck, before going back into aforementioned phone face-burial. But before that, I glanced at three men sitting at the table next to ours. At the first sight, it was any three middle-aged friends reuniting over beer and chicken. It was then that I noticed something strange about them. They were not using words, instead their hands and faces to talk to each other. Noticing the number of empty beer mugs on their table, I figured this could be a novel drinking game they were playing - no words, only dumb charades. But the sight intrigued me so much I could not take my eyes away from them. Thanks to the humdrum service of the restaurant, I still had about half an hour before my food could take my eyes and ears ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Own Your Vice, and then Overcome It!

It is a little too early in the year to talk about Christmas, but for this topic I believe I can take the liberty to at least quote a line, albeit prematurely. One of my favourite stories while growing up was Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’. For those of you who do not know the story, it is about a greedy hardhearted miser Ebenezer Scrooge who has an eerie yet impactful experience on Christmas Eve. He wakes up to meet three ghosts, and each of these meetings leads him to becoming a changed man. I will not delve deep into the story, but one of the lines from the story that made an ever-lasting impact on me was said by the first ghost who visits Scrooge: "I wear the chain I forged in life," the Ghost says. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it." Habits are a chain we forge in life - a chain that can pull us down, or lift us up. It is very important to know that we ourselves are...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tanuj Nabar and the Deathly Phoenix Fire of the Half-Blood Prisoner's Stone Chamber

                       None of my friends actually understood my obsession with Harry Potter-the world's favourite bespectacled boy wizard. There's a small but significant reason behind why I like the series so much, despite having read every book just once front to back (albeit I've watched every movie at least 50 times). The story goes 9 years in my past, to the year 2001, even before the first Harry Potter movie was released. I'd just been "blessed" with a pair of ugly, dark brown eyeglasses, similar to the ones worn by Harry. I never really got a chance to wear them in school...most of the time they would be an object of playing catch-catch by a few tall bullies in my class. My untidy, fast growing hair earned me many black remarks in my school diary, and I wasn't very happy with the domination I faced because of my small size.                       And t...
Post a Comment
Read more