SLOW-fumbling-LIFE

I am sitting at a café, waiting for a dear friend. She will take a while. Mostly I am comfortable being alone but I need to be moving, that way I presume people will not notice that I have nothing to do but wait.

It’s a scary thought, but one that rarely ever crosses my mind. Guess it’s not something any of us dwell upon very often. We have just one life; I will be 24 years old only once, I will be young just once and die some day. This is the kind of thinking that results in a things-to-do list for most people. In my case, there aren’t many things I’d want to do that I would really enjoy and that are practically doable. I mean I do want to make a movie but that’s a long way off. I use this atypical vein of thinking, instead, to make a few rules that I believe should shape my life, or shall I say things I do not want to do.

Today I realised I do not want to be able to predict the course of my life. I don’t want to be exactly aware of where I will be five years from now. If you have ever sat for one of those queer job-interviews, you will know this question. It’s the kind of question the interviewer congratulates himself for having asked, the kind she feels adds a hint of philosophy to her otherwise corporate existence.

So, tell me , where do you see yourself five years from now?

The first time I was asked this question I said, I don’t know, in , at a senior position. Then she went from five to seven, to ten to fifteen and I followed to seniorer, seniorest, seniorestest.

I never did get that job. Guess I should have just told her I don’t want to see where I will be five years from now. Frankly isn’t that a bit boring? I mean then you might as well just ask to be transported in time to the end of the five years. Don’t you need the twists and turns to really stretch out life, to really live?

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Bihar has seen the worst flooding in fifty years. An entire river has shifted its course by a few hundred kilometres washing away countless villages, and lives. Some are calling it the worst human disaster India has ever witnessed. For two weeks the news channels were full of it, enterprising journalists went to the disaster zone, and brought to our living rooms stories and pictures of the devastation. And then the economy crashed and the stock markets fell by more than twenty percent all across the world. For two weeks now the news channels have been full of it. Enterprising journalists are travelling to the homes of the common man, whose life has been destroyed by the sudden and giant financial mess.

The last census tells us that 3.2 million people lived in the flood affected areas. Even the most generous estimates of those that are in relief camps or have been otherwise rescued peg the figure at 2 million. This means that more than a million human lives are still stranded, without food, water and shelter in the districts of Bihar. Of course their misery is no longer the stuff that moves channel viewership or national sentiment.

I won’t lie, apart from wishing that this hadn’t happened I didn’t really feel even slight inconvenience. I went about my life in a usual manner, hoped that my sales target would be reduced because of the flooding (it did not happen) and arranged for credit recovery from the severely affected areas.

******

I intend to be involved, very soon, with an NGO in a project that would rehabilitate people in the most severely affected districts. This might require me to take a sabbatical from work, or even quit it altogether. It means I will no longer earn the huge amount of money I get paid every month. It means I need to once again, start worrying about the price of the food I eat, the clothes I wear, the trips I take, the alcohol I drink. It also means I might have to give up what would possibly have been a stellar career studded with recognition, money, challenges and consequently satisfaction.

I made this decision over a short conversation at lunch today. The motive is to embrace an erratic course for my life. I want to be in a situation of instability.

More importantly, and more specifically, I want to understand whether or not I have any form of humanity in me. I am not doing this because I feel for those people; I am doing it because I want to, or at least because I want to know whether I am capable of empathizing with them. I’ll be honest; this is not a sudden bout of saintliness or deep concern for human suffering. Mostly it’s just another way of earning respect, achieving things, earning a living, being challenged and consequently satisfied.

******

I wrote that a few days ago. Then it was just lying open on my desktop. Then I spilt some water on the keyboard and the laptop shutdown. I thought I had lost the file, and now it’s been recovered. Only I don’t feel the same way. In fact I am positively scared of change. I don’t even have the energy to read what I wrote. And I haven’t made the call I was supposed to make or sent the cv as I had promised. I want to make a statement now that will define this situation but my thoughts are too hollow.

How is it that something that made complete sense eventually doesn’t?