and I met life ....

Just a while back while reading the novel I knew I was fagged enough not to continue. I put on the alarm for 7 am, feel elated that tomorrow is Friday just a day away from weekend :-) [the happy sensation which I am sure I share with thousands of s/w professionals world wide]. It was a long day today, hectic work schedule, traffic jam on the way back home, the maid didn’t turn up, exhausted gas cylinder, a below average but expensive dinner at Lahori's (the restaurant), fight with my girl friend (a routinely affair though) and ....and yeah that’s all. but Who fuckin' cares, I am still happy. But is that really all, am I genuinely happy..?? chuck it dude...!!!! The answer to this is put on abeyance, like an umpteen number of times before, to be thought only when I would be free and fresh or better to say INDEFINITELY.

I open the door to my balcony, switch off the lights and jump onto my cozy bed. I close my eyes, some ergodic thoughts wander my mind and suddenly the question came back to me, hits me with some thrust...

R U REALLY HAPPY ...???? Thinking I would fall asleep soon, I tell myself (reluctantly though), that I am happy. Suddenly now my sleepy dreary eyes are wide open, I know no sleep. I wage an unsuccessful war against my impermanent insomniac condition, but all in vain. It's 0130 hrs and I lay wide awake, blank and absolved of all types of pain just like a new born. Just then I hear a knock on my balcony door, though my flat is on the 7th floor without any reverence I glance in that direction and w/o getting up I welcome that intangible entity in. I can feel some energy, source and form of which are indescribable, flowing around me. My body responds with horripilations, giving me pleasure. The voice asks me the same question I ward off all the time, but with such an authoritative yet mesmerizing voice that I am no longer able to evade or procrastinate the answer to;

"R U REALLY HAPPY....??"

"Yes ofcourse...!!!", I snapped. "I am well to do, earn reasonably good, afford a good luxurious life, eat good, love and is loved by my parents, got wonderful bunch of friends, have no inferiority complex whatsoever, very confident and so on....what more could one want in life."

"U SURE..??",the voice asks back.

I knew I wasn't. I confessed that I knew all this while that I had been lying to myself, only not acknowledging it. Probably wanted to believe in my own make belief world.

There is some void inside me which is inaccessible. I feel that emptiness all the time. When I am in a group laughing out loud, talking to my best pals, working in the office, hanging out in pubs or coffee shops, it just doesn't leave me. I feel it all the time.
I was retrospecting hard, desperately trying to find out that missing element.. I reflect on my routine:
~ get up at 7:30, follow up with the ablutions (the cold water bath still chills the hell out of me),
~ board the bus to office at 8 (waiting for bus at the stop seems to be history, it's the other way round now),
~ finish with the breakfast [of which porridge is an inseperable part, we call ourselves the dalia-gang; though it's quite contrary in attributes to the dalia gang in college ;-) ]
~ follow up with work, inbetween having 5-6 cups of tea is an unsaid custom which ofcourse I follow diligently.
The office hours finish soon, probably I realise so coz the work timings are such that we don't really have much time to kill time :-).
~ at 6:15 I am usually home. This is the time I have at my disposal, which I can expend to my luxury. I choose to read novel, spend some time listening to music (my iPOD is an inseperable part of my life), and for a change kill time in front of the idiot box.
~ before retiring to bed I spend about quater of an hour in calling up mom, and friends. I talk, I laugh, I share but... but still that emptiness.... something aint just right.

The voice tells me that I am living the same day over and over again. Seldom is there any change in the monotony, day in and day out, over and over again. I am effortlessly wasting my life .

The voice asks me, "When was the last time I was a reason for a kid's smile, last time when I helped someone old, a walk in the rain, a state of no mind, a state conscious of no one, a state of being truly myself away from all the pretensions and expectations...."

By now I was slowly realizing the root of the problem. I acknowledged that the root lies nowhere but inside me.

It was I who chose to ignore my inner voice, it was I who blindly followed my life where ever it took me, now realizing that it should have been just the opposite.

I was smiling, because my ignorance seem to amuse me. How could I just go on with my life without knowing the purpose and assigning meaning to it? I appeared to me as if some clouds were shunting of the clear blue sky, as some mental blog had vapourised.

The voice told me that
"So often we loose our individuality to those who matter the least. We allow ourselves to be the football of other's opinions. Kicked left and right, over and over. The cost we pay is grave. The cost is death of a real OURSELVES.
We have long back forgotten to do the things which hold the key to real happiness, these of course can mean different things to different people. All we required to do was to sit back and take time to think what it meant for us.
Stuck in the cow web of busy schedules, we have limited our horizons of our thought process. The purpose of life is to have no purpose at all and simply pass our lifetime in eating, working, sleeping and committing some of the most horrendous immoral acts which we hate to confess even to ourselves.
We try to seek happiness expensive eating joints, coffee shops, magnanimous reveling malls without knowing the happiness we are seeking could lie in the nukkad dhaba and a 2 rupee cuttin chai :-)"

By now I was realizing that most of my life had been a phoney. I was thankful to the intangible entity that helped me reflect over my life tonite. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of joy and felicity.

I asked the voice who it was, the reply was, "..I am life, which you had abandoned long ago, waiting to be embraced and lived..."

Just then I heard the sound of the sparrows chirping, some light in my eyes which seem to disturb the tate-e-tate with my friend, LIFE. I got up and realised that I had been sleeping and all that conversation had been a dream, a ravishing dream, something which was much real than reality itself.....

ciao..
vikas