A Storm of Situations, a Stillness Within

October 13, 2026

October 13 happens to be my niece Saifiya's birthday. We call her Saifu with affection.

An introvert, silent girl.

She has seen very unbecoming circumstances right from childhood. Her father, a chronic drunkard, has not been able to fulfil any responsibility, and she, being the only girl child in a household stricken with her father's almost sinful carelessness, had to witness him just lying flat, fully drunk throughout the day, not going to the office for his small job for weeks altogether.

And we, her mamaji and mausi, right from the beginning, have been trying our level best to support them.

And after my mother's demise, things went so wrong that my sister's husband could no longer go to his office. He quit his small job as a factory supervisor, and there he would be throughout the day, lying drunk, senseless.

A horrible environment in the house, in that small two-room apartment that they had taken on rent.

We had been trying with our meagre resources to fill up the gaps in order to help them survive economically, but now even his little earning was gone, and it was a vicious, painful environment for a young girl.

Saifiya was 17 or 18 at that time, and that is when I realised this little flower needs a better environment. It will just wither away in such tension.

My sister has a temperament that would enable people to term her as one of the best girls in the entire village. So soft-spoken, honest, gentle, just staying on the course of domestic life on the basis of her faith, no anger, no bitching, no spreading rumours like women in neighbourhoods do.

I would say a quiet and silent sufferer.

So it was too much.

So I brought them back to our house. We had to abandon the idea of continuing with the earlier arrangement because her husband has absolutely nothing. There is no ancestral property, no savings, nothing. Even the apartment they stayed in was on rent.

And there was another consideration, the familiar question of what people would say. In conservative societies, people start passing judgements when you have your daughter sitting at your home.

But I thought if I just look at it that way, that would be like feeding this drunken leech just in order to save this so-called social objection that a woman, however hard life is for her, should stay at her husband's place.

So that is, I thought, instead of just supporting him, who does not deserve support in any way because he himself is not taking any responsibility, had he even just gone on with his small, petty job that was just sufficient for his own expenses, we would have still continued supporting our sister and niece.

But now it was impossible, and with a heavy heart I brought them to my place, and me, my brother, my sister, we have been taking care of them.

Absolutely, they are family.

In fact, to me they are the immediate family.

So the little girl, the little flower on the stage of drama of life, whom I had seen years back as a little pink-faced, tiny monkey in the hospital, just 15–20 minutes after her birth, is a young woman now and working hard to make a career.

All the best to her.

I wish her the best of life and living, and we are always there with our protective, blessing hands to nurture her, to help her realise her full potential.

And this is a sort of gift in the drama of life from her mamaji on her birthday: this article.

There is one simple thing I would like her to understand as she goes through the various situations of life.

Don't take things, people, situations personally.

Remember, we are merely playing different roles, various roles at home, in the office, in business and careers, in relationships.

Now what do I mean by taking things and situations as just roles played without taking them personally?

By merely playing a role, I mean being aware of the level of engagement involved in dealing with a situation.

The situation, of course, will have various operating elements involved in it, including people, relationships, duties, responsibilities, dos and don'ts.

So we will use the word situation, by which we mean any type of engagement a human being goes into on a routine day, involving both personal and professional domains.

So we can say, as a summary, one should not take situations personally.

There is a reasonably wide scope for our level of engagement with any type of situation. Enough to play the role of a problem solver, or being a part of it, or resolver of the issue, or facilitator of the process in some capacity.

There is a healthy level of engagement with a situation that saves the situation from turning personal.

By personal, I mean a situation that tampers with our ego and starts triggering our impulsive reactions, thus breeding hate, anger, argument, guilt, shame, etc.

I will give you certain examples to prove this point.

Suppose people are watching Ram Leela and they get involved and become something other than mere audience, take things personally, forgetting that the person playing Ravan is a chap like them acting in the epic story, and attack him.

Won't it create chaos?

Or take the example of a bureaucrat sitting on a file.

Now there can be two reasons for delay or denial: purely technical, that is, things not matching up at the legal, regulatory, policy or instructions level, or his own personal biases and judgements born of them.

If the delay is due to the latter, then it becomes problematic.

It will bring anger, which will further feed on his sense of balance and fair play.

It breeds injustice.

And all that just because he took things personally, forgetting he was playing a duty.

The only loss for him is that his ego gets more strengthened. He turns more arrogant and power-crazy.

We can also take the example of a stage play.

Suppose the actor playing the lover on stage takes things personally and starts assaulting the other actor who is playing the heroine's molester.

Won't it be crazy?

It will be, surely.

Or say two groups on the stage, standing against each other as per the plot, take things personally and cross the playwright's boundary of arguments and discussion to outright assault.

That is how it is in real life.

The role merely needs an argument, but we end up assaulting.

And assault, in its direct as well as indirect, subtle forms, is a massive nourishment for the ego.

Thus, we have to understand that there is a hierarchy of engagement with issues.

There is a threshold beyond which things turn personal, creating chaos.

It's a very simple spiritual practice if we try to be aware that we are merely playing roles meant for various situations in the drama of life.

We can one day become detached from all that we do. The wisdom of akarma -- learning to play our roles beyond our ego. 

A stillness within a storm of situations. We might be in a storm of situations, but without that personal bondage, we build akarma, even though so many things happen through us. That, according to me dear readers, is the wisdom of detachment -- playing our roles without becoming them. 

The Cosmic Restlessness: From Primordial Life to Infinite Possibilities

October 11, 2026

If your sense of identity, self-worth, and 'being just you deem yourself to be' gets inflated too much, O thou human being, then take a pause and look back.

Look at a monkey, or go into a zoo and watch out for, if you can, some orangutan, ape, baboon, chimpanzee, and look closely, and you will find there is a bit of you in that ape.

It's a long evolutionary chain. But to acknowledge it, you have to be aware of it, accept it, that you are part of a flow that started with some small amoeba in the original sea on Earth. And then that particular trail branched off in your direction, and now it manifests in you.

Look closely at a monkey; you will find most of the raw elements of you in it. Just its mind is a bit less organised, but fundamentally the structure is the same.

It's like you have a fully mechanised motor car, well controlled with all gears, levers, switches, steering, brakes, accelerator available to you so that you can control it.

The same is the difference between a human being and a monkey. A monkey is simply a rudimentary, unmechanised cart. But basically, it has the same purpose.

So you have to accept this fact that you are a monkey fast-forwarded.

And this is not merely about recognising our physical resemblance to other creatures. It is also about acknowledging the long evolutionary journey of which we are a part.

In the same way, if a snake had the awareness and consciousness just like we humans, it could see a bit of itself in an earthworm.

An earthworm, a slow, harmless, lethargic crawler, going around, stretching its body to reach its destination, exposed to the sun's factors, to being trampled and mowed to death, not able to strike back in any way, and always there to be struck by anything, ranging from determined ants to chance footfalls of a human being.

And that pain, that helplessness, that possibility of always being a victim at any moment by any type of situation, has given it a thirst.

And with evolution, propelled by that thirst, there you have a snake, fast, furious, able to take care of its survival in a better way, being scared and being scary for others, not just like an earthworm that is there to be mowed to death by accidental footfalls or curiously merciless plays of children or nibbling ants.

If a bird, if an eagle, the majestic hunter of the skies, with its claws and talons, strong feathers, hawk eye, ready to tear away at the prey, had the same capability of observing and looking back into its evolutionary chain, it would find that there is a bit of it in a small ladybird.

A beautiful speckled beetle taking tiny flights, spreading its small wings, hiding among the leaves, always at the risk of being hunted by sparrows.

And that urge to be something more than just a ladybird, a beautiful speckled creature. There it grows and evolves over a period of time, and you have a ferocious hunter of the skies, an eagle.

Or a vulture can look back and find a bit of itself in a butterfly fluttering beautifully with its colours, so fragile that even a gust of wind will change its course and destiny.

And that incapability, that being limited, that confinement of life expands to become a vulture, a strong scavenger ready to tear away at carcasses, making harsh sounds, the denizen of the stenching meat, carcasses, bones.

Of course, these are not necessarily direct lines of evolutionary descent. I am looking at them as illustrations of the larger tendency of life to acquire new capabilities, shapes and possibilities. The perpetual urge to 'become' something more than one is -- be it a stone or a human being. The eternal restlessness of existence, the cosmic churning from amoeba to artificial intelligence. Basically, it's a universe that can't remain still. We can see it from primordial life to cosmic frontier. In this ever-restless cosmos, there is this forever-unfinished journey of 'becoming' something more than one is (sentient or insentient). Even galaxies are mere drops in the cosmic sea, in this infinite drama of 'being'. 

So each and every species that has evolved, acquired a more sophisticated shape to have a bigger role in the arena of existence, in this game of life on Earth, will find a bit of itself in the smaller crawlers among insects, beetles, little birds.

So basically, it means there is an elemental force that is always acquiring different shapes, having more sophisticated roles, responsibilities, a very strange restructuring over the prevailing structures to have more and more complex roles and responsibilities in the domain of life, from raw playfulness to more and more shapes and sizes.

Things are going just from merely raw physicality into more sophistication in minds, so typically symbolised by Homo sapiens.

And this tendency does not seem to be confined to living species alone. It seems to me to be part of something much larger.

So when we look at the cosmos as such, I think there is an urge to manifest in something new.

And why does it want to manifest into something new instead of just resting with the established structure, be it in the form of a species or in the structure of matter?

I think there is some cosmic restlessness, the inherent cosmic discontentment, as if it just cannot stay paused.

It has to cascade out and storm into being something beyond what it already is.

There is something which is always trying to cross the boundaries and leap over into the uncharted zones and become something completely different, something new.

So that is the mystery, this mystery of not being restful and acquiring some new shape, size, structure, some new role, some new responsibility in this game, in this cosmic play.

And perhaps what we experience as our own dissatisfaction is just another expression of that same restlessness.

So when it comes to our being very restless, not feeling complete, always finding something missing, always trying to be something more than we are, not even being able to enjoy the present of our existing state, we inherited it fundamentally from that primordial restlessness that is driving more and more sophistication in different ways across species.

And since we carry the inherent core of that same restlessness, which gives rise to galaxies, black holes sucking mammoth stars, a million times bigger than the Sun, ghost particles, millions of which are crossing even our fingernails at this time, particles so small that they would cross over the entire thickness of Earth.

So what does it signify?

It signifies there is something ever running, perpetually restless, continuously riotous, forever running away from its present state to be something else.

And if that restlessness is inherent in the very nature of existence, how can we humans remain untouched by it?

So aren't we helpless in being restless, in not being satisfied with whatever we have achieved?

Go and ask anybody in any domain of life. You will find he or she is not satisfied with the state of being.

Go to poor people. Obviously, the natural concern there is making more money.

If somebody is staying in a hut, he is always thinking of staying in a big pucca house, a house of cement and mortar, not exposed to weather elements.

A person going on a bicycle is always thinking that life is only about acquiring a car someday.

A person who has been an aspirant at the grassroots political level and is just able to become a village administrator is thinking that life is only about becoming the Prime Minister or President of the country.

So on and so forth. I mean, it's only about becoming something more.

And even those whom people consider to be lucky.

The person who is staying in a wealthy, big palatial house, he has got his own ways of discontentment.

Either he is thinking about people who have got more money, or if he is at the top platform, the plateau where he sees the top position with a few hundred people of his level, there is a discontentment born of cutting each other's interests.

But those hundreds within a country or thousands on the entire Earth, the people on the peak, not the pointed peak but the plateaued peak, where there is no further possibility of going beyond that because the institution, the bearing capacity of Earth won't allow that.

So there is a plateau.

Now there the discontentment is not about achieving more than that. There the discontentment manifests in different other ways, like there are corporate wars they are fighting among themselves, and to manage that position itself is a source of very big restlessness, fear, discontentment.

At one level, the struggle is to rise. At another, it is to retain the position already acquired. But the restlessness remains.

So that perpetual element of restlessness, of not being sufficient, of being something more, is always there, be it the smallest of persons to the biggest of persons on Earth.

It just manifests in different ways.

Now if we look at the core principle here, that is a cosmic instability, always, always fighting against a stable state.

And if at all there is a stable state, obviously there is, that is just a very little pause, a kind of reflection before going full force with even more restlessness to become something completely different.

And I don't think there is any pause in nature anywhere around.

You will find there is a big flux going on around.

And this is not merely the visible restlessness of human ambitions or living organisms. Even apparently lifeless matter is subject to processes of change.

Even in a stone, the subatomic particles are in a flux, and they are maintaining that cloud, that molecular structure.

That structure of the stone is dependent upon a very forceful defence, forcefully defending its fort, the rocky fort, against the forces of decay, destruction, entropy, which are trying to make it into something else, that is, to break into smaller particles and then dust and then earth, and out of which the trees will grow, grass will sprout.

So where is pause and stability in all this?

It's a massive churning pot forever. Always, from each and every pore of existence, there is a tendency to become something more or maintain its status quo and then fight to become something bigger.

And how long has it been going on?

Infinity, they say, is something beyond the measures of space and time in the form that we have so far come to understand it.

But these are concepts, theoretical concepts.

Infinity, in the real sense, cannot be defined by limited sense perception-based models and theories.

But the beauty of infinity is that, being so open-ended, it will give certain bragging rights to a scientist to arrive at a theory which gets proven as well.

Even with the limited subset of elements, parameters considered, it gets proven because infinity is open-ended.

What I mean is that a theory may explain a particular range of reality within the parameters it considers, while the larger mystery remains open.

Had it been closed, only then a methodology which was not appropriate to define it would have failed if it had not fulfilled all the conditions.

But infinity, being something absolutely undefined, something absolutely without any established absolute value, leaves enough scope for mankind to set up a model or a theory with its assumption of a few absolute values even, and prove that yes, that's how infinity is possible.

So mankind's ability to prove infinity is a proof of infinity itself, that it can be defined in infinite ways.

Had it been a different kind of most established mind instead of Einstein, he would have defined it in some other way, which now, according to Einstein's law, seems like fundamentally it would have been totally different from what Einstein has established, and things would have served the same purpose.

Still the world would have run.

So what I want to say is this is a mysterious game, and it will always keep opening up more and more avenues, even for the artificial intelligence that we will have in future, artificial intelligence-driven, call them robots or half-human or half-artificial machines.

And if human intelligence itself is one manifestation of this expanding complexity, then artificial intelligence can be seen as another extension of it.

Artificial intelligence is not a crop that has arrived on the scene randomly or out of nowhere.

It is a symbol.

It's a representative entity of all that sophistication-driven force in nature.

Now it wants to expand even more.

Now, since we have just not been satisfied with doing things first with our mind and simple arithmetic calculations, then we had mathematical tools to arrive at more manual calculations, later on we had rudimentary computers.

Now we have artificial intelligence-driven models and agents which can do almost superlative calculations in a flash of a second or milliseconds.

So what does it mean?

It's just the extension of that willingness to grasp more, calculate more, marvel at things in different ways.

So let us see where it ends up, because things won't stop even with so-called superlative capabilities of artificial intelligence-driven ultra-modern systems.

They will keep diverging into different ways, and it's as good as there is a riot of energy in a supergalaxy.

So even here on this tiny bit of Earth that is our planet, it's always a replica of that riotous energy, randomly cascading around, a storm of energy, restless, trying to manifest in different ways.

And out of that are established temporary patterns fighting against each other, trying to overpower the supposed or apparently rival things.

And that competition is evident from the raw, naked game of survival at the level of organisms to more and more sophisticated artificial intelligence tools fighting against themselves to establish predominance over institutions, over Earth.

So it will go on and on and on.

So we just cannot freak out at the latest emergence of things as something negative.

We cannot just look at it from the binary of positive or negative.

It just is.

Just that we are wonderstruck at the moment, because now the rate of change is becoming shorter and shorter.

In future it will be even shorter, and then the domain of life will go into... the Earth will become very, very small for the manifestation of aspirations to contain that restlessness of all those emerging patterns of institutions, humans, machines.

That interface will be too big to contain life limited to Earth only.

And once the capabilities expand beyond what can be accommodated here, the geographical boundaries of human activity will also have to expand.

Then we will go for interplanetary things.

That is just expansion, like in older times we had people who were geographically segregated.

There were no means of communication, so people stayed in isolation.

And even crossing the seas was a big issue.

That is why we have the milestones of Columbus and Vasco da Gama discovering new lands.

So that was monumental.

Now similarly, the new rate, the new definition of being something very monumental in discovery will be just like Columbus discovering the new continents.

It will be like astronauts and scientists discovering ways and means of travelling to far-off planets and later on even galaxies, and making those places habitable with their scientific knowledge and equipment.

Just like the colonisers, they were able to cross over to different geographical lands and then they established their systems there.

So we will be space colonisers.

We will be spreading out in different directions.

We will have more efficient spacecraft.

We will have more scientific ways of putting bodies into a sort of hibernation across years, decades, so that when they land up at a distant planet many light-years away, they can resume their lives and begin establishing themselves there.

Just like colonisers have established their institutions, their economic models, their system of education in the new lands, similarly, the space colonisers will be taking up their versions of reality and institutions and setting them up there.

And it will continue expanding until it comes into interaction or collision with other forms of life doing the same from some other corners of the far-off cosmos.

And that will again give rise to more possibilities of happenings.

Like there will be clashes, just like here, between colonisers and the natives of the occupied lands.

There were clashes, there was strife, there were give-and-takes, there were even adjustments, accommodations, learning, relearning at both ends.

The same will be happening on a far bigger scale.

It is happening here on Earth.

It has happened in very, very small geographical locations.

Earlier little tribes would fight over dominance and territories and try to impose their version of reality over each other within a small forest.

Then the domain increased to involve bigger geographies.

We had little kingdoms within the present-day countries, and they fought each other.

Then countries are fighting against each other.

Continents are also sort of in a tussle against each other.

And then sophistication required more rivalries across different other fronts, in economies, in education, in politics, in religions, name anything, whatever defines modern life.

It's a kind of rivalry going on, pushing against each other, trying to overpower others, trying to impose their version of things, and then expanding like this.

So similar things will happen in exponentially larger, millions of times larger ways in far-off space, at different distant stars, galaxies, habitable planets.

So if we think that things will just, you know, end up with Earth not being habitable at all?

No, that's not possible because we are expanding the zone of churning, the interactive zone of all these fights among different elements competing for dominance, etc.

It will be taking place in a far bigger arena, covering even stars millions of kilometres away.

So there is restlessness.

Whatever we are witnessing now is just born of all that, and it has been going like this.

And it is going on at so many points in distant galaxies and far-off planets.

Because this is the same energy moving around everywhere.

And if this restlessness is a universal phenomenon, then why should its manifestation in the form of life remain confined to this one planet?

So if it is happening here, it cannot happen in isolation.

How can it happen?

Just like a drop in the ocean cannot exist in isolation and manifest something very, very different from the rest of the sea.

Is it possible?

Not at all.

Now to assume that we have life here on Earth only would be to assume that a drop can have an exclusive existence in an entire sea.

It just cannot.

So this is the same cosmic soup.

This is the same cosmic energy cascading around.

And if we have this type of life manifesting here, it's just like a drop in the cosmic sea.

So it must be happening somewhere else as well.

Yeah, that is possible that it might be happening in different ways, because we have this particular type of environment that has given rise to, incidentally, this form of life.

Some other planet in some other galaxy may be something similar, possibly, or very dissimilar, having completely different concepts of what it means to be aware of one's worth or one's life.

Maybe things are fundamentally different somewhere else.

And more sophistication would only mean that there will be zones of convergence between these distant manifestations of life.

And that itself will create more fronts for creating something completely different.

So perhaps this is the very nature of that cosmic restlessness I have been talking about. From the smallest organism struggling to survive to the most sophisticated intelligence reaching out into distant galaxies, it is the same mysterious tendency to go beyond what already exists.

The forms may change, the arenas may expand, but the churning continues.

And who knows what entirely new manifestations might emerge when these distant currents of the same cosmic sea finally meet?

The Cosmic Leela of Chance: Becoming Gardeners of Our Own Lives

October 10, 2026

Many people believe in the principle or law of predetermination. They say that everything that happens is supposed to happen. It has been fixed by external forces under the guidance of the ultimate cosmic force, call it God or the cosmic intelligence. They maintain that it could not have been otherwise.

According to me, it seems a very nice and practical way of dealing with circumstances and situations which have gone horribly wrong. Suppose there is a tragic incident in a family. Under such circumstances, it becomes a very practical consolation that one cannot avoid these things since it was destined to be. 

Possibly it saves the family members from the feelings of guilt or helplessness or even shame that they could have done something to avoid that tragedy. So this self-fault-finding, which is a source of big pain to those who are left after the demise of a near or dear one under unnatural circumstances, or even due to some disease or some other cause, it saves them from those pangs of guilt and repentance.

When many people tell them that one cannot do anything in the face of God's will, that hard reality becomes digestible.

So it's a beautiful social phenomenon, this law of predetermination. It has its relevance. We cannot just dissect it critically, because it's not about being scientifically valid or not. It's about what positive role it has played in mankind's evolution through the ages.

It has been a very nice consolatory companion always giving a solace that after a point things are no longer under our control, and it's not in our hands to change certain situations. Then we accept destiny. It becomes easier.

This aspect is more or less acceptable even from a scientific inquiry point of view.

But if we just analyse it without considering its social role and its relevance, we will find that possibly the law of predetermination is not one of the elemental laws that drive this creation around us.

For example, the people who are on bhakti marg, who have absolute faith in God managing each and everything, from the tiniest movement of a leaf in every nook and corner of the earth to the crawl of an insect or the movement of microorganisms. Is it possible as per the laws of science as we understand it at the moment? 

I think logically it seems impossible that there would be an external force which is managing all these happenings that unfold in trillions of ways at every instant as per a fixed plan.

It's not possible.

Infinity demands that there is an open-endedness, undefined potential and ever-spooling possibilities for things to happen, occur, evolve, grow in various ways.

We might consider them positive or negative; that is our subjective or objective discretion. But there is always the maximum potential for things to acquire a shape which can go in any way.

There is a great chance factor, but of course there are elemental, fundamental laws working behind it.

But again, the chance factor is always there. Chance is the shadow of cosmic laws. 

For example, consider the law of gravitation. Now the law of gravitation says that if you drop something, it will fall towards the ground at a particular rate of acceleration. So that is quite predetermined. But what happens when there are other circumstantial chance factors?

Suppose something falls. Suppose there is a stone in your hand and you are standing on the terrace of a multi-storey building and you decide to drop it.

Yes, the fundamental law of gravitation says that it will fall with a particular speed. And then there are other laws also, side by side -- that its rate of fall will be determined by other factors.

It's not that it will fall with the same speed and acceleration under all situations.

Suppose there is a speedy wind, a kind of storm that changes its trajectory. Now that change in its trajectory and the change in its rate of fall will also be decided by the fundamental forces of the horizontally or vertically cutting-across wind currents.

That also is objective in nature.

But at a particular time, how come those situations develop to create a situation where the fundamental laws come into play? That is quite incidental.

There might be wind, there might not be wind.

The stone may end up hitting somebody, it might fall harmlessly, it might hit a concrete surface, it might hit a grass patch, a lawn.

There are infinite possibilities where it can create a different pattern of reality.

So here I do not see the law of predetermination working, because it is open-ended—anything can happen.

By chance somebody can be there and end up getting hit by the stone. It might happen incidentally. It might end up hitting some cattle or a dog or the roof of a car.

Anything can happen.

And the objects that incidentally happen to come into the path of its fall, those also are propelled by so many chance factors.

For example, suppose somebody is joyfully reading and suddenly he gets this thought that, okay, let me go out for a stroll, and suddenly he comes out and ends up being hit by the stone.

Or his mother or a family member asks him to go on an errand, or go to the market to get something, and that person happens to be hit by that stone.

Or a dog is running after another dog and ends up getting hit.

Or a car just passes by and its windshield gets broken.

Or there is nobody around. It just falls on the ground and patters.

But after falling also, at what angle it hits, that also is defined, is also decided by the scientific forces: at what angle it hits, the edges, the momentum, torque, the inertia, the weight, recoil, in which direction it can go.

It can go in any direction.

And again there is a further possibility of another chain of events happening.

So even though there are elemental cosmic laws at play, still at that stage there is a possibility of things going in any direction.

It's just like a chain reaction in nuclear explosions.

At every point there are multiple probabilities opening up, but the spine of those probabilities again is decided by another fundamental law.

If that particular incidental point in space-time has to move ahead, it again will proceed as per a certain fundamental principle, almost a scientific law.

So all in all, I find it a divine combo between cosmic law and chance factor, as if Mother Existence is playing a grand leela to find out in how many ways it can express itself, from monumental galaxy-level blasts to little flowers smiling and a butterfly sitting on one of them.

A grand leela of existence among determination and chance, which carves our destiny. This world is the offspring of divine marriage of cosmic law and chance. Universe , or multi-verse, is open-ended, where sheer potential consumates manifestable possibility to sire destiny.  

All this churning falls within the infinite range of events and happenings at infinite places in existence.

So the topic is quite comprehensive, but if we look at it from the point of view of the fixation, for example the fixed number of years that a particular human being is going to live. Now, in many religious traditions they maintain that you are allotted your exact number of breaths, or one's lifetime is fixed.

It doesn't seem so.

Maybe it's a big consolation to accept death that it was destined to be at a particula time under specific circumstances.

But if we analyse it in the background of all the discussion that we have had so far, it's not possible that something can be so fixed as to work like clockwork to give such an organised, well-ordered and synchronised point of existence in the form of human life, having all this cosmic sea of uncertainties developing at numerous points as per certain fundamental laws.

It doesn't seem to be possible.

It would be just like expecting a drop of water in the sea to have a fixed pattern of its existence, which does not seem possible, because it is surrounded by a churning fluidity driven by chance winds.

I will give an example.

Suppose I have a few potted plants, and I have sown seeds of flowers there. I take care of them.

Now in the seeds there is a potential, potential for a plant to grow and give flowers after a time.

That is potential, nothing fixed about it.

The only fixity is that the little seeds carry the code of regeneration of that particular species.

That seems to be the fixity there, the surety.

But that is pure potential, because the growth, actualisation or manifestation of that potential is determined by so many factors.

Now when I am sowing seeds in pots and managing them, nurturing them, it's not that there is a law of predetermination there.

The only law working here is that these seeds have the potential to grow under favourable circumstances of nourishment, climate, weather elements, and the care taken by the gardener.

The role of the gardener here is of utmost importance, since they are not linked directly to Mother Earth.

There is a border in between. There is a boundary.

The material of the pot serves as a boundary.

It is just a little portion of earth which the boundaries of the pot have separated from overall Mother Earth.

And if I want the seeds to grow and acquire a shape as per the potential decided by the coded potentiality in the seed for a plant, a flowering plant of a particular species or genus, then I have to be there as a deciding factor.

If I take due care, if I keep watering them, sheltering them against winters, against harsh windstorms and stormy rains, if I take due care, providing fertilisers, they will bloom.

That is life.

That also is life, just like humans.

We are a different type of plants that have grown here. Our awareness of self identity is simply a potted plant in the cosmic garden. And with our will-power and volition we are the gardeners of our own self. 

So in my little group of potted plants, if I do maintain a certain discipline, the law of predetermination is almost inoperative.

As long as I am taking care of all the plants and everything, flowers will grow, bloom.

But still there are so many uncertainties, like the monkeys coming and spoiling everything, or a child breaking the plants out of curiosity, or cattle or a buffalo destroying them.

That uncertainty is always open-ended.

If we ignore that uncertainty, if we take the human element out of it, if I become careless about the plants and stop watering them, they will die.

So the same seems to be the case with human life.

We are potted plants. It's like the gardener, seeds and the cosmic dice engaged in a game beyond predermination -- exploring the infinite possibilities of existence. 

We don't have a direct touch with the infinite energy from which we are taking little portions to survive.

So if we manage our life in a disciplined way, as per all the dimensions of well-being—physical, mental, spiritual, emotional—it will grow in a better way.

Of course, just like a potted plant is always exposed to being destroyed by external factors like cattle or a kid or weather elements, the same is the possibility with a carefully nurtured human life, nurtured by herself or by the system or by the family, society.

There is always an infinite possibility of things going wrong, certain accidents happening, something just randomly happening, chaotically, disorderly, and undoing the entire management of human life.

But even if we ignore all these uncertainties and just come down to the management of a particular human life by herself, we will find that just like a better and more carefully nurtured potted plant will give more beautiful flowers, will look better; similarly, a better self-managed life covering all dimensions of one's existence—physical, mental, social, economic, spiritual—will manifest in a more ordered way.

There does not seem to be a law of predetermination driving the force here, just like the manifestation of life in a potted plant is inherently dependent upon better care and discipline at the hands of the gardener.

The same with the human potted plant: the gardener is conscious effort, willpower, discipline, and an acknowledgement that one has to be there with awareness to take care of the potted plant, that is, the life in this body.

So it will be better if we prove to be a good gardener in taking care of our potted being; if we ignore it, it will manifest in a different way. More open to random forces. Entropy finds a better probability there. 

Basically, Mother Existence is trying to explore the fundamental code of survival through one particular human, through one particular member of a species, be it in animals, plants, insects, or anything anywhere or everywhere.

So all in all, when I look at it in its entirety, I find that the law of predetermination is a very relevant consolation to accept things when faced with apparently unjustified happenings, accidents and tragedies.

But at the end of it, when we look at it objectively, we will see that we are almost like potted plants.

There the pot is made of clay, and there is a plant in it.

Here the pot is this body, and the plant is our soul, our awareness, our consciousness of being.

So it always serves the purpose of being better gardeners of our life.

The Urban Jungle and the Little Republic of Survival

The years between 2010 and 2016 cover my career in publishing in Delhi NCR. I worked in a few companies ranging from online B2B marketing, content development for web portals, digital publishing, and hardcore academic publishing.

The jobs were thoroughly engaging, requiring your submergence into the sea of words with total focus, and at the end of the day you would feel like you had been doing hardcore labour, just like unskilled workers in the manufacturing sector do. And on top of that was this feeling of not getting enough payment, a kind of undercurrent of being underpaid for all this hard work.

It was tiring and exhaustive work, full of underachievers because, of course, in editorial and content development work, these were people who had some talent, who had academic inclinations, but unfortunately could not achieve in life what they really deserved, and at the end of the journey they had to take up this job.

I don't think I came across anybody who was here by choice. It was by compulsion. It was just by circumstantial forces pushing one into a corner and then having to take up this job when there was no other option.

Salary, of course, was always an issue. It was not as per my expectations, and especially after all those lofty aspirations and nearly coming to touch the civil services, and then having tasted business, and even though at the end of it I had to quit business, still I had seen, I had felt what it was like being an owner of an establishment, however small it was.

I had seen money arriving, money going, and the nice lifestyle in between, international travel, seeing the world, and other luxurious things. So having to convince myself to take up a content writer or editorial job in academic publishing houses was almost a milestone.

I accepted my fate and melted into the ignominy of congested, crowded, jostling, teeming, unkempt, labyrinthine, suffocating, mushrooming, disheveled Delhi. Being lost in this claustrophobia being as good as finding oneself in silence and solitude in the infinite space among the crowd.

My major stay during these six or seven years was at Aligaon near Badarpur Border in Delhi. A rural settlement caught in the restless entrails of the concrete octopus spreading its tentacles but not able to digest it completely.  The smell of struggle in the streets, the sweat and fatigue of labour, the diehard stubbornness of hope and dreams, and the soft, quiet, unassuming dignity of people struggling against enormous odds. Here you had thousands of struggles within meters. Dreams here were plentiful, sadly space wasn’t.

It was an urban village off the road to Faridabad and Mathura, cutting across the congested stretch from Ashram to Badarpur Border. On the right side you had this manufacturing corridor in Okhla Industrial Area. On the left side you had Sarita Vihar, and just nearby was this urban village growing very weirdly, unshapely, being pushed from all corners by the urban forces. Here poverty was the landlord; necessity its poor tenant. Everybody seemed to be moving; few in reality were progressing.

 

Under unplanned forces, it was just like any other urban village, as you can imagine, people trying to cope with the rising economic opportunities and then just rushing into the first major thing that comes to them, that is, making rooms to accommodate more and more people as tenants. The tenants had to be busy, busy and busy to make ends meet; nobody had the luxury of standing still. The city promised mountains but delivered molehills; but hope was the cheapest item that could always be bought even with empty pockets. Life was cheap; but survival was very costly.

This area was a cheap locality because on one side you had Okhla Industrial Area and Mohan Cooperative industrial zone. Then you had the Badarpur and Faridabad industrial corridor, and across the Yamuna to the east, of course, it was Noida. It was thronged by unskilled migrants labors, hawkers and vendors carrying inherited struggles on their frail shoulders; but at least hope would take birth every day in morning after dying by the end of the day.

Here poor migrant unskilled labourers from UP, Bihar and MP were staying, paying low rent for one-room or two-room accommodations. Here in this tiny rural corner with a mountainous urban grafting. A stubborn village although swallowed by the urban leviathan, but not completely digested and hence puked out in a strange half-digested rural-urban hybrid -- weird, shapeless illegitimate child of unplanned urban development. The streets slept very lightly; while hunger hardly ever slept. Full of crowded lives with almost empty futures.

To me personally, it was even peaceful to be lost in this concrete wilderness, to be wandering unnoticed while caught in the sprawling tentacles of this heartless urbanization. In the suffocating embrace of urbanization -- a labyrinth of brick, mortar and human strife, struggle and desperation (but dreams also) – it was strange type of peace. Here in this haphazard anatomy of the urban village, in a forgotten crowded pocket, where this untidy untended creeper clung to the big metropolitan banyan tree, I also rented a little nest. While the city exploded like uncontrollable organism around, I willingly became a participant-cum-observer of this claustrophobic geography of survival and needs. There was dignity in this drudgery. There was discipline in this desperation. When tomorrow is mortgaged to today’s needs, survival itself turns a full-time occupation. And there is art in it. Aesthetics.

Staying here would save me a lot of money because just for two and a half thousand rupees I had a reasonably good room in comparison to the majority of the people who were staying in almost slum-like conditions at 800 rupees or 1,000 rupees per room.

As they say, a one-eyed man is a king in a group of blind people. The same was the case with me. I was surrounded by people whose labour the metropolis was aware of but wasn’t aware of their names and presence. It needed their hands, but wasn’t interested in even casting a single cursory look at their faces. Every tiny hovel-like room had an unfinished story. To me nobody was insignificant in their struggle. It was a big university without classrooms to learn lessons in life. I studied their curriculum, they busy in trying to pass the exam of survival. I saved money here, but I collected rich experiences also.

The entire street where this house, whose one room I had taken on rent, was situated was full of unskilled labourers, security guards, petty shop attendants and vendors, street hawkers, or engaged in any type of job that can be sandwiched between the urban toast to squeeze out a morsel of survival and living. Quite a busy and happening place.

Poverty has its great tightening grip on its carriers, and there is a sort of communal living where many struggling poor people are staying engaged in different types of jobs.

It was more or less like a village kind of environment, people speaking in Bhojpuri and Purvanchali dialects, addressing each other like they were from the same village.

It was a very happening, busy, noisy street clamouring with the pangs of survival, the economic survival of unskilled migrants arriving here in the urban jungle with dreams and aspirations to look for a relatively better way of life, but getting lost in the urban sea as unknown entities. The fast wheels of economic growth, development and progress plied over them like they were a layer of tar or asphalt.

The central thoroughfare with ceaseless caravans of economic refugees arriving like human tributaries emptying into the metropolitan river. These uprooted children of impoverished hinterlands jumping from deprivation to uncertainty, sometimes calamity; their entire possessions tied in a few rag-tag bundles; the unsung and unknown foot soldiers of our economic development. They land on the platforms, day after day, year after year, jumping into uncertain destinies. The restless migration of unmeetable dreams; the flight from inherited deprivation to uncertain opportunities. The small-human tide washing against prosperous shores. The exodus of these refugees from the circumstantial tyranny makes them look like economic pilgrims moving towards the shrine of the goddess of prosperity. And when these invisible passengers of our train of growth land here, ogling at the distant lighthouse to these dispossessed, it's a leap from familiar poverty to unfamiliar struggle. Ironically, it feels like a massive migration starting from fringes and ending on margins. A herd, almost in tandem with herds of cattle and sheep moving almost hypnotized: carrying the accumulated arrears of historical injustice; shackled by the inherited chains of inherited deprivation; a life starting several miles behind the starting line; squashed and pulped by the crushing arithmetic of daily survival; haunted by the perpetual deficit of existence; burdened under the ancestral baggage of discrimination and exclusion; struggling to come out of the bottomless pit of everyday necessities after spending a lifetime in the pit over the generations; busy in the merciless mathematics of hunger; balanced on the knife-edge; chalking their endless plans for survival; a life lived on the narrow ledge between life and death just a step from each other,

It was not a long street. It was a mere side street. It ran for just a hundred meters approximately starting from the main street. The house was situated at the end of it. About hundred meters of compressed humanity: a microcosm of our unfinished social transformation; a little republic of socio-economically dispossessed; a miniature struggle of survival; the cramped theatre of everyday survival; the living museum of everyday existence; the buzzing beehive of human necessity; a human anthill of restless activity.

It was a little street with hundreds of twisted tales, unfinished and bleak. It was a cauldron of conflicted dreams at the congested crossroads of destinies perpetually getting baked under fire. In this mosaic of deprivation and determination, there was the orchestra of labour, laughter and quarrels. A tiny republic on the crowded island of humanity where citizenship meant to be ever-a-soldier in the miniature battlefield. Here the unending carnival of unending needs and necessity played out day and night. A little universe held together by the undying will to survive. 

There was a dead end, and beyond that was the single railway line for cargo trains that fetched coal to Badarpur Thermal Power Station, which belched smoke into the already smoked-out lungs of Delhi. Along the line there was semi-wilderness comprising bushes, grass and trees on both sides of the single line.

Just in front of the house where I had taken a room on rent, there was this rectangular, double-storeyed block of a tailoring unit. They were vendors of some local clothing manufacturers. There were rows and rows of sewing machine operators toiling away day in and day out, their salary being defined by the number of pieces they finished in a day. Just near it was a water treatment plant where they drew water with a borewell, treated it and sold it in 20-litre bottles. The rest of the street was occupied by families in bundles: big families, small children, school-going children, adolescent parents; all struggling from the youngest to the eldest.

You could see the handcarts of the people who would put either their small-time eatables, snacks, tea, or vegetables, or trinkets and toys on them and wander around the congested Aligaon to seek out a few rupees that would convince them that this life was economically more paying and better than their villages in UP, Bihar and MP, where there were no opportunities. The wage payments back home were very low, and on top of that, you had annual floods that would destroy their crops on their little plots of land.

Most of these poor unskilled migrants belonged to the so-called lower rungs of society, poor people, socially disadvantaged, from the so-called lower castes, always at a disadvantage, underprivileged, and beginning their journey from a huge account deficit, where even reaching zero and starting afresh required almost an entire life's worth of effort. But still, whatever might be the living conditions in urban villages, people get drawn to them, just like people from Third World countries are getting drawn to developed countries, even if it means perishing on donkey routes and illegal migrant routes, drowning in the sea, getting shot by guards, being duped and kidnapped by mediators on the way. That is the same old story of people running away from their miseries. So it was a little replica of this tendency of humans migrating to better places.

These were too small people to venture out for any bigger places. So they had landed here in Delhi.

On a daily basis, full trains of migrant unskilled labourers from Bihar, UP, Madhya Pradesh and other northern states arrive at Delhi platforms. You have small, dark, famished, undernourished, malnourished, historically deprived, underprivileged thousands walking with their sackcloths and gunny bags full of utensils and clothes bunched together and made into bundles, carrying them on their heads and shoulders and backs. Little women, I call them girl mothers, clad in soiled saris, carrying infants in their arms, and a few others toiling along with the struggling parents.

A very poor sight.

 

Staying among these people, it would always remind me that it's a privilege to have a skilled job, even if it was in content writing in B2B ventures, or digital publishing, or academic publishing. It would give an appearance of being a good and nicely paying job.

The house where I stayed was a two-storeyed house at the end of the small street, in front of that tailoring unit. The lower floor was occupied by Chhedi Lal, a man in his early fifties, small, stocky, funnily mustached.

He plied his handcart called thela and tried to sell his chole bhature or parathas, which his always-fighting wife would prepare early in the morning for him so that he could sell them, serving as a lunch provider for scores of unskilled migrants and labourers in the near vicinity.  

They were from Bihar, from the cobbler community, historically deprived, socially very, very underprivileged and exploited. People like them have been running away from the dragnet of historical exploitation by the higher castes. They hardly have any opportunities: no land, no education, no social standing. So here they are trying to re-fabricate and reshape a new identity, at least for the children. The woman was very energetic but quarrelsome though, and that can be understood. Managing the economy on a shoestring budget, where you have to dig a well every day to drink that day's worth of water, is wearisome and very tough. And she was giving her best. She was restless, but I never found her to be lazy in any way. Her husband, in contrast, was a cool guy; a silent pond in comparison to the gurgling, noisy stream that his wife was. So he would absorb all her grumblings, shoutings, taunts, comments. Most of the time he was silent and just did his job, and when he was at home he just lay down. He did not bother about the hurricane unleashed by his wife.

Their pairing was like a placid pond by a turbulent waterfall; almost a quiet bank of a perpetually overflowing river. If he was a man of still waters, she was a woman of restless currents. Her words would unleash like monsoon torrents, he would quietly absorb them like dry land. I could usually hear this domestic cyclone fussing around the unmoving centre. It was a treat to watch such differing temperaments yoked into the same cart of survival. As she cooked food, the steam from pressure cooker looked like her anger escaping. Chhedi Lal surely had amazing endurance. Maybe her restlessness fuelled the household and his composure steadied it. While reading after coming from office I could hear the daily thunderstorms going late into the night. I really respected Chhedi Lal for his patience against this endless friction born of poverty that cascaded from the mouth of his wife. The grinding wheel of survival is bound to give sparks. Good that he never raised his sails while her storms lasted. Otherwise the house would have blown off.

It was sheer luck that I never ever found him raising his voice. So we owed our stay at the house to his endless patience.

 

 

 

 

 

The ground floor, where they stayed, had two almost semi-dark rooms. The entry was through a small door leading to a little, always-wet corridor, on the right side of which you had their bathroom, toilet and kitchen, and as you passed it, in front you had their living quarters, and in between there was the staircase leading to the first floor where I had my room. Their bathroom, toilet, kitchen, almost always busy, always noisy, somebody shouting, somebody raising complaints, almost hara-kiri. It was buzzing with that struggle for survival, always on tenterhooks. It was always shaking, and I can never ever recall the small cemented, brick-paved flooring being dry. It was always wet.

They had four children. The eldest was a dark, slightly overweight girl, must have been around 17 or 18. She was followed by another girl, 13 or 14, a slim girl, dark in colour but with very pretty features. The girls  were followed by two boys.

The family was doing its best by sending their kids to a government school nearby, and as you can understand, the education system in state-managed schools is very poor. So it was education in name only, but still they were moving towards getting matriculation or senior secondary certificates. So even if Chhedi Lal probably never went to school, and neither did his wife, if their kids reached up to senior secondary level, that would be counted as moving up the rungs, and possibly the generation after, their grandchildren would move on to achieve graduation certificates with real skills to get into some job, some skilled job. Such fights in such families are intergenerational after all.

Children the tender shoots trying to break through the concrete of inherited poverty. Soft, slow steps on the slow staircase of generational uplift. Each school certificate a breach in the fort of deprivation and dispossession. A windowless existence so far, now education opening a tiny hole to the outside world. The tiny participants in the long relay race of social mobility. It's almost like Chhedi Lal and his wife running the first lap, followed by his children and then his grandchildren, to be finished in the coming generation. Or say, the parents planting a sapling whose shade and fruits would be enjoyed by their grandchildren. I watched their first uncertain steps out of the historical gutter. Their eyes glittering like tiny lamps flickering against the darkness of deprivation. A schoolbag carrying the unmet dreams of many generations. Walking on the fragile bridge between inherited poverty and imagined prosperity. This generation adding one more rung to the ladder, to make the ladder long enough to allow them to crawl out of the painful basement, and go on a slow painful ascent up the ladder to come onto taste open air from the subterranean existence. And go on roof and look at the distant horizon of a university degree. Vaah, the stubborn green shoots of possibility; dreams germinating in the cracks of deprivation.

We should not expect too much and expect them to create miracles, and we should never judge them, because they start their life from gutters, and to come out of a gutter, from the worms of survival, and clean oneself and start walking on the main street, and then go on to the highway of economic upliftment, is no mean task. It requires generations of effort, and they are doing that.

The eldest girl probably was in the loops of adolescent love, because I would always see her sneaking up to the terrace on the roof of my room, going past like a young filly, phone clasped in her hand and a gleam in her eyes. The other girl of 13 or 14 was very silent, and I almost always found her silent in a very dignified way. She carried herself with a lot of maturity even at that young age.

Sometimes, after office hours, when I stood on the terrace looking at the silence of bushes and trees along the railway line, the Badarpur Thermal Power Station railway line passing behind the house, and another abandoned house just overlooking the other side, it gave a very quaint feeling, a strange feeling of not being exactly in a metropolis, but in a very weirdly shaped village where so many types of stress, tensions, aspirations and dreams had commingled to form a heady concoction.

Therefore, it was quite interesting: looking at this last green fringe of the suffocating, smog-laden metropolis, with thermal power belching smoke nearby. Sometimes when I took a peg or two of whiskey the railway line looked like a scar across the urban wilderness from the terrace; a scarred iron artery feeding Delhi's industrial appetite.

At nights, the room would shake with the rhythm of coal trains carrying black nourishment to the smoke-belching giant, the thermal power station. And the smoky lungs of the tired metropolis would try even more to keep jogging, for progress and growth.

The forlorn patch of greenery at the edge of industrialization presenting a kind of uneasy handshake between wilderness and factories. But past midnight, when there was no train on the track, it gave the feeling of a thin line of silence. I would look into this abandoned yard of metropolitan battlefield. A thin slice of dying wilderness in my backyard surrounded by the soot-stained horizons. Here I sometimes heard the last whispers of rural solitude very late in the night. And to make it very ironical, it was so close to the thermal giant belching smoke.

The staircase landing on our floor lay in the middle of the two rooms on this floor. On one side there was my room, and on the other side was the gem of an attraction for this entire little house. It was full of new, fresh dreams, and it would require a complete separate chapter in its narration.

 

These were rectangular rooms. My room was a measuring about 20 feet by 10. Its roof was made in the typical rural, mundane, modest housing style, of stone slabs and iron beams. The other room in front of me, facing the street, in front of the tailoring unit, bore the same proportions with just one addition. It had a little kitchen, a very small kitchen where, at the most, two persons could stand shoulder to shoulder and try to work out the cooking. And in between, where the staircase landed from the ground floor, there was the washing area with a tap, and just where the staircase landed, there was a common bathroom and attached latrine, very small ones. A little bathroom where a heavy person would have difficulty in giving a free hand to massaging and rubbing his body during bathing. And from this bathroom, there was a little, tiny room leading into the Indian toilet on a raised platform. These two things, toilet and bathroom, and the washing area with a tap, were shared by the occupants of these two rooms facing each other. That was the setup where I was staying, like a one-eyed prince among the blind.

I was seen to be earning quite well, staying in a better room. And indeed it was so, because the room in front always had five to six occupants. Can you believe it? Five or six of them staying at the same time, sharing the meager monthly rent.

The average age of the entire group would come out to be 2O at the most. Like some of them would be under 20, some of them would be a couple of years more than 20, most of them undergraduates from poor, socially deprived families in UP and Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Bengal and other states. Most of them held senior secondary school certificates and were doing graduation through open learning courses and distance learning courses here in Delhi, with dreams in their eyes. Their families were not able to continue their studies back at home. They were doing jobs in call centres. Call centres, the dream world of any job aspirant who lands up in Delhi NCR. And one or two of them would continue getting shifted, like someone going out and being replaced by someone else. But four or five of them were always the permanent fixture, and that made it very, very interesting.

Five, six, even more when they had visitors folded in a single room, a kind of dormitory of unfinished dreams. When it was having visitors apart from the regular residents, it gave the feeling of crowded nursery of ambitions. But more than that it was a small fraternity of economic survival. They were hardworking decent boys with dreams bigger than the room that they stayed in. The young shoulders, restless apprentices of urban prosperity, seemed to carry ancient family burdens. It kept the floor buzzing with life after the boring repetitive editorial work. The experience was everyday fresh in proximity of this roomful of tomorrow's possibilities. There was a solid faith in life fuelling this apparently fragile fraternity of shared hardship. I witnessed this generation trying to approach the threshold of opportunity, their dreams traveling faster their salaries. Five or six different destinies sharing a roof forming a tinier republic within the little republic in the poor street of a poor locality. Some of them even read at nigh and seemed the midnight scholars of economic necessity; the scholar borrowing time from sleep to buy a better future.

]A crowded launching pad to take their families ahead.

They called me Big B. Not that I was too big in stature, just that I was elder to them and was in a dream job, the way they saw it. Because they would laugh that you earn as much single-handedly as all of us do in a month, and that fetched me a lot of respect from them.

These were boys from very disciplined, cultured families where elders had given them the family values of respecting elders. So I fetched a lot of respect from them, and that made it quite bearable, watching people struggle, five or six of them earning only as much as I was doing in a month, and a few of them even still teenagers, already supporting their families, bearing all their costs in Delhi, paying for their open studies, and still managing to send a bit of money back home.

 

Staying there almost a part of their group, it made life worth it. After shedding invisible sweat of intellectual labour while working on the assembly line of words in the factory of sentences and paragraphs, it was a relief in that personal environment. I felt almost like a labourer in the vineyards of words. Those who have worked in editorial departments must be aware of the mental treadmill of editorial deadlines; the ceaseless churning of the editorial mill; the quiet drudgery of cerebral labor; a miner digging through manuscripts; a regular excavation of meaning from mounds and heaps of words. While the unending conveyor belt kept on fetching more and more raw, full of errors manuscripts. Sometimes it would appear like a sea of words with no shore in sight. And I would come back carrying a mysterious fatigue born of earning a living using just mind with hardly any other physicality involved. Still, it was disburdening to be away from the spotlight in my village. I was lowest of the low here in this locality and it gave me a strange relief.

The entrepreneurial wings had been chipped, so now it was restless little bird trying to adjust to a smaller cage; a journey from steering my own boat to someone else's. From the pinching peak of ambition, it was coming down to the plateau or low land of accommodation, thereupon I wandered with a peaceful sense of resignation. The office was a tight pipeline so the once free current hardly had any avenue to feel the vastness of ambition, success and goal. The dignity that would be bruised earlier was now customized to the level of all those around me.

I could have easily afforded a nice accommodation in a nice society, but I preferred to stay here. I felt like a wearied long distance traveller now safely cocooned in this urban cubicle. My wandering spirit seemed strangely domesticated. I was fastly adjusting to the truce between aspirations and necessity. From open seas to this narrow canal. Ambitions thrown away. Personal freedom ditched. Still in this narrow confine, there was a sense of a different type of freedom, on this hard pavement of survival, in this reconciliation with the below-ordinary. I seemed to glow even more with the subdued embers of my civil services and entrepreneurial fire.