2010

A large part of 2010 was purely about trying to survive. This time around, last year, I was well on my way rampaging through everything I held dear after, once again, being proven incapable of handling a relationship that went bad. A year on, much has transpired. There are instances where I have doggedly held on, there are instances where I have let go and there are instances where I have lost, but I am glad to have made it so far. It was a hard year.

As I grow older, I see that so much of what I do and think are steeped in guilt, fear and regret. It is a deserving comeuppance of sorts for someone who has easily sat in judgment of every other human being than himself. I am not sure if I am reformed yet, but I do stop myself a lot more these days before I accuse, point fingers and not make allowances for the fact that there is much in circumstances and in understanding itself that are beyond my capabilities in this world.

The hardest was in letting go of some of my core beliefs; that did not come easy. I fought and I fought hard to hang on to it, it was the pivot around which my world moved, it was the north for my compass. It made me. Until it no longer made sense. There are mutually exclusive situations and this was the mother of all of them. I was not humbled because I was looking for it, I had no other choice. As the drops of realization trickled in, I slowly started giving up the fight.

Let us give this a real shot.

I had nothing to lose. Every few years I have been forced to rethink, redo most of what I have held close. To the extent of being blanched to the point of nothingness. I could be for, against or ambivalent to anything without it meaning much for me. This was the last and only outpost of passionate belief left in my life. But it made no sense anymore. Grudgingly, I decided to give it a shot. Words, actions and all else you give in the world had to be consistent. The soul screamed out in agony. Reality, very effectively, muffled it.

If this is a death of sorts, I am glad it is far less dramatic and painful than what I thought it would be. But, in its dying it does ask a lot of me than in its living. It asks for a measure of patience, faith and trust that I often struggle to find. It forces me to look inside in a manner that reveals much unpleasantness. To be honest, I am not always convinced, but forward is the only option. I am not going back to where I came from.

And sometimes, to go forward, you have to go backward first. I drove a few thousand kilometers, crisscrossed the country mostly on my own to be where I have always been very wary of being for an extended period of time. I don’t think I have ever dug deeper inside to just sustain and survive. The irony was that I was trying to collate the many versions of me into a whole while I was often close to losing myself for good.

The road always does me a world of good. It calms me down. It forces me to stay, hold ground and live in the present while keeping an eye on the destination and be cognizant of where I came from. No journey is real ignoring any of the three. I have always bolted – sometimes inward, sometimes outward, sometimes by hiding behind the wall of distance. Three months was probably the first time in a decade that I stood my ground in place which can still easily throw me off my kilter.

I came back different, to a different Delhi. I always come back different to Delhi only for it to be erased in a matter of weeks. I have held on better this time around, even though the fear of December is still there in the background. I watch myself, look for patterns and correct myself if I see me going out of line. I do not give as freely or as easily as I used to earlier. I am not certain anymore of the right manner to do it anymore. I am certain one of these winters I will make my way there, be it even grudgingly.

For the most parts, the past 12-months have been a wrestling match with a demon whose company I have not had the pleasure of ever in my life before. Sometime, starting the last quarter of 2009 I started feeling desperately alone. I do not know if that has anything do with what society readily tells me – that I am closing in on 35 and not married or any other readily identifiable cause. Fact is that it is a problem and it is hard to deal with at times.

The tough part is that I play both sides of the game. Sometimes I cut off from everyone and then wonder why I struggle with being alone. But is it about actually being with someone or having the closest of relationships? I do not know. Maybe it is that I am tired of being the sole keeper of my own conscience. Age does play a part. The mind is weary and often leans on habit than purpose to react.

That is not to say I am unhappy or ungrateful. One of the best things about the past year is a genuine and deeper appreciation of the many little and big mechanisms that silently work in keeping my being going. Whether intended that way or not, it is a certainty that I’d not last too long without them – they could be people, circumstances, luck or whatever else you can think of. These days, at every crucial juncture I say a quiet ‘thank you’ to these varied wheels that keep turning.