Oh Captain!! My Captain!!

Reading Sartre is intimidating, depriving a curious onlooker like me of any hopes of resilience! But in “tête-à-tête”, when the intimate moments shared by Beauvoir and Sartre are on display, I am bemused, left groping for a pulse of my usual instinctive judgment. Is it the case of Fallen Idols? Or Elevated Mortals?

When Beauvoir Says, “In what a ‘desert world’ I walk, so arid, with the only oases my intermittent esteem for myself”, I witness a resonance in me, a carnival of alternating hope and despair.

I choose elitism to not let ‘laissez faire’ be the motto for a risk-free life muddled with the mundane, more so, to so consciously override the effects of my overbearing past conditioning and subsequent deprivation. There IS a protective conformity in elitism. Time and again, I step out of this shell, only to return bruised with vengeance not to swerve again! There begin contemplations…..

The windows of retrospection can produce some crystal clear deliverance. It takes the accumulated experiences of some suffering and loss to reflect upon something in the past with clarity, leading to a present day’s pristine perspective. Look at this: … PLA wrote this to me ages ago:

“Thoughts are strange things at times - profoundly impacting in a moment to avariciously ridiculous. And then one day it's the amazing realization that there is a person who in his own gentility and nobleness wants to be associated with you and share thoughts that rarely leave the realm of intimacy.

Perceptively, life can be so chaotic, thoughts being an integral part of our eternally woven existence. Yet it is the soothing acceptance of a wonderful person in perfect resonance with you that somehow brings in a whole new colour. And you just want to soak its blissfulness in all its glory - mentally, emotionally and physically.”

The epiphany leads to a depth of gratitude. My admiration, trust and tenderness towards you PLA are sans reservation. And now a solitary tear wells up……

A Himalayan Bliss

All my courage and appetite for the vagaries of life has emanated from the certitude of being understood at some level by some one – a sojourner, a dear friend, an authority figure, or even a muse. I am fully aware that this is in no way a requisite surrogacy for that mirage (or so it seems) we all so dearly search for – LOVE. But if I were not to have at least this kind of approbation in its own idiosyncratic forms, I am sure to be victimized by the fangs of restlessness, devoured to the fullest by aimless drifts.

What strikes me as incredulous is the hitherto unimaginable way I was awashed in some strange sense of harmony: the regal splendour of the pristine mountains of Himalayas is simply unparalleled. Tall and imposing, oozing serenity unbound, their sighting had magically dwarfed my frettings about life. I was encircled by these new found joys (oxymoronic in that they are abstract yet absolute) for the whole duration of my stay in Dhulikel, Nepal.

The perennial temptations of the material comforts notwithstanding, I now make a renewed promise to myself ‘to matter’, to acquiesce to humility, to stop deriding myself as an ancillary being as in the past. I now harbour confidence about being an upstart in the milieu surrounding my daily life – all by virtue of earning the right to be so through the discovery of majestic glory of Himalayas and the message they so effortlessly drive home.

Thus, I have accidentally taken to being courageous. I am happy. I am not just one among the multitude (as I have so often feared I would end up being), at least in these exalted moments of reflecting upon these joys through my true companion – “les mots” (words). I am plain happy. There is just enough abundance of exuberance vibrating in me, urging me to live life to the fullest.

But then… I am nervous… that going back to the stress riddled urban life will see me making exigent concessions to prudence, seeking every which means to look for instant gratification. May I have the strength, following my thoughts to where they lead me, hopefully towards that road less traveled…..