A constant learner

The last of post of January confessed that I was participating in the #WriteAPageADay campaign of Blogchatter which entailed writing a page every day of Feb. I managed to complete the campaign successfully though there were three days on which I could not write anything for various reasons. Such days are also part of the campaign, thanks to the magnanimity of the Blogchatter team.

I avoided politics as far as possible during the campaign. I wrote posts which were more interesting, in my reckoning, during Feb. But some of my regular readers seem to have abandoned me in Feb. I don’t know the reason. Maybe, many of them were busy with the campaign. Maybe, my ricocheting from one subject to another didn’t amuse some of them. Maybe, it’s time to take stock of the very relevance of traditional blog posts in the world of YouTube and podcasts and others.

As I’m concluding the Write a Page campaign with this post, it is quite natural that some sort of self-assessment struck my meditation today. This contemplation took me back on the memory lane and I found myself as a young man in his late thirties squatting on the carpet inside a prayer hall of a Hindu ashram somewhere in Kasaragod district of Kerala.

I was in Kerala on the usual annual vacation from Shillong where I worked as a college lecturer. The college had made my life miserable. I’m not blaming the college. It’s just that I lacked the qualities required for surviving in the kind of game-field that existed in that college at that time. My own immaturity coupled with my hubris and other vices made life a pain in the posterior of others and in all possible parts of my own being. Thus I decided to go somewhere without any aim hoping to step on the solutions to my problems somewhere. The ashram mentioned above was one such place.

The ashram turned out to be just the opposite of all that I was looking for. Every half an hour or so, somebody will enter the prayer hall and start singing a bhajan. What I wanted was absolute silence. I left the prayer hall and returned to the dorm where I was given a bed in the midst of a lot of holy-looking people with long hair and longer beards. One of them looked into my eyes, as I was packing up my travel bag, and said, “There’s something that’s seriously troubling you. No one can solve it but yourself.”

I carried that counsel in my heart. But there was no sign of any solution anywhere in sight as I sat in a KSRTC bus that took me to the union territory of Mahe. Alcohol was highly affordable in Mahe as it is even today. That was some solution!

It took a few years for me to discover the solution which was to stop carrying my self as a baggage. Let it go. I realized that I was nothing worthwhile. I reached a stage of mind that was just the opposite of the previous one. From a gargantuan ego to a stunning emptiness. That was my journey.

There was something that amused me even in that painful stage of horrifying self-awareness. It was the attitude of my college principal and a few of my colleagues. They were delighted by my utter lack of self-esteem. It was as if they had accomplished the mission that they had set on.

I couldn’t continue in such a place anymore. It’s all good to feel very humble, egoless, empty… It’s good only if you are a really enlightened person. I wasn’t. I had just allowed the circumstances to shatter my ego. Nothing more. That didn’t lead me to the discovery of anything worthwhile within me.

That’s how I left that place.

The new place, Delhi, did give me a chance to discover whatever goodness was there within me. To my surprise, Delhi taught me sooner than I expected that there was indeed much to be loved within me. But I had already internalised the lesson to never let my ego rise above that goodness.

The real humble self-awareness is not seeing you as a worthless person. It is being aware of your worth and to use all those qualities for the welfare of the people around you. Genuine self-awareness is a relationship with fellow human beings.

I live a very happy life now in a village in Kerala. But I know that my relationships are very limited. I stay aloof from most people. It’s not because I don’t want relationships. It’s because I’m afraid that my spiritual journey so far has not accomplished a fraction of what I wanted it to. There’s a long way to go before I can extend my arms in a gesture of welcome to the world. That’s why my profile descriptions have always proclaimed that I am a constant learner.

With my unfailing companion along the way that wasn't always romantic

PS. I’m taking a brief break from blogging for a few days. Feb has been too hectic.