A realization

What would you be if you lived a hopeless life? Today I went out to purchase an electronic tabla and on the road I came across many people who had no life in their eyes. It all started when I saw a beggar; or may be he didn’t beg but just looked like a beggar. Something bad had happened to his hands: both hands were terribly swollen and putrid. They looked like tennis bats because they didn’t have fingers and on both the hands there was a partition in the middle. So his hands had such two gargantuan fingers. In one partition there stuck a cigarette that he wanted to light. He had either purchased the cigarette — which didn’t seem possible considering his disposition — or had found it lying somewhere. Now and again he requested the passers-by to light it but people just shrank away when he approached them. I kept looking at him, hoping he wouldn’t approach our car. I was waiting outside a music shop while my guruji was trying to get me a good electronic tabla.

There was no life in that beggar’s eyes, leave alone a chance of finding some remnants of hope. Like a lost soul who had no business being in this world he walked upon the pavement, with dragging feet and laden shoulders and a swarm of flies giving him constant company. Even when people shrank away from him he displayed no expression — he simply moved on. He was the first person among many that I saw having no hope in their eyes. They walked like zombies, carrying the burden of their living moments upon their spindly, stooping postures. They had nothing to look forward to, and no two days were different to them. Their yesterday was same as today, and their tomorrow will be same as today. They spend their days just because death hasn’t occurred yet. I cannot go into their psychology but it must be amazing to know what keeps them alive; considering how we get upset at small things. People having all the privileges of the world kill themselves because they cannot find happiness. Why don’t these people, who are very poor, who are constantly shunned by society and embraced by misery, kill themselves? Why do they carry on living? Certainly they don’t nurture hopes and aspirations as we do, and obviously they are not happy. I never romanticize poverty so I assume that a poor person who has no clothes to wear, no food to eat, no place to live and no opportunity to improve his or her life is not happy about the way things go everyday. There is something deep, or something really mundane in all this: seemingly comfortable people blow their heads off or jump off the heights, jump in front of running trains when they can’t handle difficulties and here there are people who have no reason to spend living another day keep living till a very old age, foraging for food, losing their limbs, getting kicked around, living naked not by choice but circumstances.

Just a small, nano-small genetic accident and I could have been in place of that person with tennis bat hands and he could have been sitting in the car looking at me. Is it really an accident or some divine incident? A wave of realization hit me with an amplified clarity: doesn’t all this falsify our notions of having and not having, doing and not doing, being and not being? I get up in the morning full of plans. I sleep thinking about things that I need to do in the coming months, and even years. Life is full of life, life is full of hope. It is replete with plans and strategies. It seems I have endless things to achieve and there is so little time. There is always this race against time. I know from where I started, I know where I am going, and I know what roads to follow and what roads to avoid. This is so great! It all makes living worth it. Despite all the hope in the world if I feel down, if I feel sad because certain things are not happening the way I want them to happen, then there is very little difference between me and that man with tennis bat hands.

There was no single agenda behind this post and it may be that two different paragraphs are not related to each other, but somewhere I feel, that man with tennis bat hands had appeared to deliver a message, a message I haven’t been able to properly decode yet, but some day, very soon, I’ll decode it.