The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Sunday 2 September 2012

LIFE IN MONOTONES AND THE FLICKER OF HOPE FOR THE PROSODY OF LIFE

Keeping hope when you know the very pretext behind is dead – have you lived it?

They have everything to confuse even the most enlightened souls. They try to accommodate the subtext that life for them is a lost battle, yet, the very next moment they ask you to take them back to its vigour.  

In advancing years of life, defined in high praises and in words of gloom, they sound like monotones talking to their own ‘self’ in multi-syllables; trying to talk to you looking for that lost prosody.

Some call it golden years of life; some call it senility. It all depends on circumstances, the phase of life they have been thrown into, which no soul expects for itself.

It is cruel to write that they have been lucky for getting a shelter, for numerous homeless and abandoned elderly don’t even get this sort of roof to spend their advancing days. After roaming quite a bit and observing things, it can be said good Samaritans with honest intent to serve the elderly are a rarity.

Many of the so-called temples just stink by the way they present the pomp and show while slowly killing the subjects (the old-aged residents). My apologies here for writing them as subjects but it is what has become the case in every other case, I tried to undertake. Every time, whenever a funding party approaches, the subjects are prepared to look jolly and satisfied. It is done at any cost, that involves intimidation too. Spend a little time and give a little ear and this realization is not very hard to come.

Its money that rides on the cause that rules the roost in most of the cases. If we leave metros and big cities and scan rural areas and smaller towns, the sham is audaciously evident. You can find buildings, you can read the information board on the welfare measures being adopted, but on a random visit, you can easily see how everything is taken for a toss.

Once the charade is done, it’s all the routine business again. But every new face is like a new ray of hope for every elderly who has lost his way to his home or to say has been abandoned or has been made to lose his way. The glint in their eyes, the body language, the hope that shines on the contours of their facial expressions, simply sinks the heart on the apathy, that, we, the civilized and progressive lot is extending to them. It is really soothing to sit with them, trying to understand them, trying to understand if they could be helped out in any possible way.

It is somewhat peaceful when I find elderly in an old-age home where people understand this psychology of hope visiting in flashed midst the sea of hopelessness and sensitively handle this daily battle of high hopes and abject dejection. But such precedents are very few.

In most of the cases, one feels so helpless that life gets its every lyric distorted. Why can’t we be able to bring change to many lives in one go I feel at times and rue at my inability. Holocaust killed millions in one go but places like these or streets that become home to the homeless kill many by giving them a slow poison every passing moment.

Like every malaise of the so-called civilized world, we need to fight it out. A lot depends on what sort of words most of us chose to form the language to reach out.


©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/