Ruchira's Ramblings

    Photo by Author. All rights reserved. The world breaks down into faraway islands. Yesterday I could have found you in a chance meeting, a couple of wrong turns or an unexpected phone call. Today you are on a different planet. And I am hiding out in my little bubble. It is peaceful, I admit. I haven’t had such a luxury of solitude in a while. But when you pull down the shutters against the world, you don’t expect the world to shut you out as well. Funny things, islands. One gets tired of all the noise from the busy ports, and one gets tired of the sound of water lapping against the stone. People are the same way. They want to run and they want to stay still. They want adventures without things changing, and when things change too much, or stop changing at all, they wonder why they’re still standing where they were. And sometimes, it’s not the world standing still or the world spinning too fast that is the problem. We are, to use a cliché and a curse, living in interesti...

There’s this word, or idea that I like. Journey. Odyssey. We are travelers in time and space, all seeking, knowingly, or unknowingly our purpose in life. Pilgrimage. That’s another word. Draupadi and her five husbands knew this when they embarked on the final journey of their lives (perhaps a lifelong path of wandering homelessness taught them that) – the one we call the ‘Mahaprasthan’- the Great Exit. And that’s true too. We journey to a purpose while also moving onwards towards the final leave-taking. Estragon and Vladimir were travelers too, even if all they did was wait beneath a dead tree. But what if our paths are ellipses, an Ouroboros circling Godot? What if we were all just lonely planets lost in our own orbits of individual, inexplicable sorrows? And the hope of meaning and purpose, like the sun, gives us light and life-sustaining warmth, but we can never really touch it, and getting too close would burn and blind us, and so it’s much, much safer to remain content with...