As I landed in Delhi, after couple of days at home where I had travelled on work, weather had taken a different turn. It's been raining for last whole week, much to the surprised comfort of the inhabitants, bringing the mercury down. Trees are freshly washed, green, dense vegetation in the middle of the population bring back the memory from childhood. Why does even such benevolence of nature fails to bring any solace to my bereaved soul? nothing can bring peace to a man with a feeling of having failed himself. Explanations are hard to come by, and there is no buyer. It is very hard to live with an intellect which is brutal and unyielding even to the person who owns it. It makes one see through the deceptive ugliness and baseness of relationships around. One can not go through the ordeal of life without some amount of foolish assumption, protective blindness and romantic illusion. It becomes almost unbearable with these three life sustaining factors lost on the altar of intellectual rationalism. You want to believe the money as one of the most needed yet at the same time most maligned, most detested factor in life, is inconsequential, your intellect tells you otherwise. It not only defines your own self worth, it reflects on the worth that those around you map you with. How do you explain someone who ought to love you anyway wanting you to put in cash to demonstrate your worth in their scheme of things? The fact that you have made much of it and lost a lot on them, makes it even worse. Hit with ailments of all sorts you go back home and you are asked to prove and validate your membership to the clan by buying your way through it, and you wonder what love is? All the pink glasses are off the eyes, and you stand alone like a rare tree in the desert. All the fun and frolic which you could have gone through, but you rather bought peace and benevolence in place of happiness and self gratification, floats in front of your eyes with dizzying rapidity, and you just want to run to a place called home to break down, cry and sleep like a child, but only realise that all you have in your share is an ever-elusive dream. When you at tired and bruised and can fool yourself with prtense no more, you want to rush home but where is that godforsaken place, except in your imaginary utopia. I reach out to my daughter in otherwise friendless world, sometime hesitantly, for even when I hold her tiny palm in mine, I must remember, like all else this too is fleeting, and any attempt to arrest the flow will be a criminality as cruel the one which I face today.
Picture Courtesy- GettyImages I am an only child, though not a child anymore. My childhood went in search of friendships outside the home, and waiting for the evening to come by to immerse into those rare moments of camaraderie. Our days, the Pre-Appu childhood, was largely supervised by our parents. I do not much remember visiting my friend’s place in childhood. Much unlike my daughter and her friends who keep meeting up in their homes. My friends were kids of my father’s colleagues and we met when they met. Friendships were formed and finished in the children park. The interspersed period of loneliness was filled up by books. It was from Comics to pocket-books to Geeta Press to even, Indian Classics like Ramayana and Mahabharata . They filled up my days of solitude with rare happiness. I was called introvert and adults left me alone. It was an arrangement which we both liked. There was no other arrangement in the view. For some reasons, parents those days did not appr...
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