The 15-year-olds who possibly legitimized my life thus far and perhaps even my future!

This is a fairly old write-up, written soon after Rafat and Sarita's Boston visit. This note probably puts my Bhopal visit in a better context.


Its been 3 days that Sarita and Rafat left Boston. And i am still in shock, trying to realize who they were for me, and what I was for them. To start with, i was completely taken aback by the energy and unconditional love these girls had to offer all of us. No inhibitions, no judgments, no expectations.. just pure affection for people they don't even know, a strange form of respect for everyone around them, perfectly in balance with the respect they had for themselves. The strangest and the most shocking aspect of all of this was actually this perfect balance that they struck. I can tell from my own life that every time i attempted such an act, i found myself facing contradictions. In contrast, the simplicity with which the girls managed to synch the two shook me completely.. are u kidding me?? these are just 15 year old kids!!! Will I be ever able to see life the way they do?! Am i capable of offering such unconditional love? Will i ever be a part of "them"? But the bigger "shock" probably needed some time to sink in. And that's what is probably making me write this note to myself. May be 20 years down the line, this deep cut I am bearing now will be fleshed out by newer tissues developed by my thoughts, for the better or the worse. This note will then, hopefully, at least remind me of the cuts I had once. The girls left me wondering: "where do I fit as an actor in this whole play? what should my role be?" At this point, I can imagine 2 basic roles i could take up later on in my life. Lets do a thought experiment. Assume that there's an insulated box, with 2 chambers filled with a gas whose particles can take decisions, the chambers being separated by an insulating partition, which is free to move along the length of the box. The partition is kind of semi-permeable, in the sense that it takes a lot of effort for the particles to move from Chamber B to Chamber A. Also that there is a heating system in each of these chambers, and that these systems can be controlled by the particles in each chamber. Also, assume that empiricals like the Laws of Thermodynamics hold in our world. By divine accident (?) i am a particle which landed up in chamber B, which, it turns out, has its heater functioning at the highest level, whereas chamber A's heater is almost dysfunctional, which is leading to the partition getting moved so as to shrink Chamber A with time. Since I have been brought up as a believer in stable equilibrium, i am driven to help towards restoring the balance. There are 2 distinct roles that I could take up. I could either try and migrate into Chamber A, and turn on the heating there, or i could stay in Chamber B, and turn its heater down a bit. The natural question is which of these roles suits me the best? Since i somehow like the letter A more than the letter B, my heart urges me to try and migrate, whereas my brain instructs me otherwise, since there is a big time-tested evidence that i would almost surely not make it across the partition in the first place. This is the conflict i have been going through for the last 3 days, after the girls left. And as usual, Gourab De takes up my mom's role, trying to pull me out of these troubled waters, and what could be a better place to talk about this than 1369?!! At least tonight, i believe in staying back. The first thing i realize today is that i can't possibly take up the role that the girls did. As Utpal Dutt had said in Agantuk, "...years before i left home, Rabindranath, Marx, Freud had entered my marrow, which is why i need 'field-notes'. I wouldn't need them if i were a tribal myself". As always, Agantuk continues to be strangely relevant in my own life! There's no escaping the fact that Rabindranath, Marx, Freud have made their way into my blood, as they have done to almost everyone around me in Chamber B. And i have spent 25 long years towards acquiring this knowledge, whether its for good or bad, that's besides the point. So may be i am more suited to turn down the heating in B. This role, although seemingly more efficient, is probably much more traumatic than the other one, since this means my heart and my mind will have to fight this battle as long as i live. As Rabs pointed out correctly, that's possibly why I, as a volunteer of AID, is much more aggressive about my beliefs, than these girls who visited us. Although this seems counter-intuitive to start with, since I don't live in the conditions in which they have to, it looks like this relentless battle between the heart and the mind is what adds to my aggression, my reservations and disbelieves. My resentments breed from a sense of guilt that I have for being part of this Chamber B in the first place. And this trauma will probably be chronic for me henceforth. But for once, i may have to side with my mind against my heart, since here its not just me who has stakes in my decision anymore, i am part of a much bigger ecosystem when it comes down to this. One satisfying corollary this has is the legitimacy that it gives to my life till now. The knowledge I have earned, the culture I am part of, the profession I have chosen, everything is suddenly meaningful, and I am suddenly not so frustrated that i chose something like "Math" as a "career" if i might say, as opposed to being a doctor, a lawyer, or even a sweeper, who somehow seem more relevant than me when it comes to serving communities. My academics is what validates my place in this society, a society that has developed its normalizations in a way such that it excludes, for example, those 2 girls from itself. And today, I feel a necessity for what I have been doing in my life so far, a necessity not just in terms of my own pleasure and ego, but a necessity which involves much more than that, a necessity as basic as being able to be a part of this society, a necessity that legitimizes my very existence. As an aside, come to think of it, this is possibly what the caste-system was meant to do... provide people with an identity, which entailed their inclusion in the society. But as everyone knows, the consequences have been completely the opposite, for reasons that are part of a different story. When i write this short note, i feel privileged that i possibly have an audience for it, which is a consequence of my life so far, a thought that makes me feel happy, and validates what i wrote above, and also points out a direction to me. And that is the basic purpose of this account, providing myself with a direction on a day i might feel lost like the way i have been feeling for the last few days. Looking back at the conversations i had along these lines with my father sometime back, i now understand what he meant when he said "Do whatever you want to do, but don't get emotionally attached, because that's something that will hamper your work itself". I wont ever be able to measure my parents!! They somehow always think ahead of me!!! And this also, at least for the moment, settles my first question in this note: "Will I be ever able to see life the way they do?!" The temporary, untested answer I have is "Possibly Not". But even if I am never able to treat life the way these kids do, what is important is that I realize my incapacity. What is even more important is that I know the language to be able to describe my deficiency to the people around me because of what I have learned in my life so far. And perhaps that's where I am meant to work. Although my brain won't allow my heart to have its own way, it at least knows what my heart wants. That's a happy story there! :-) Anyway, back to my K3 surfaces. At least i feel happy at the moment for being able to weigh in favour of one idea against the other. A feeling of reassurance, as opposed to the uncertainty i was going through for the last few days. Thanks to the 2 girls from Chamber A, who posed the question in the first place, and thanks to Gourab De from Chamber B, who had some form of a solution to it. Just goes to show how relevant each of them is for the other. At some level, its humorous that there would be such contradictory forces in nature. Probably that's what people call dark humour, only that its really pitch dark these days.