Events have moved along
fairly rapidly in the three months since I handed over my responsibilities at
NSRCEL. As I slogged away for long hours
on winding down at the Centre I conjured up grand visions of how I would spend
the twelve months of sabbatical that were to follow. I even wrote this post on my flight of
fantasy. http://sgchalayil.blogspot.in/2015/11/anticipating-wandering-life.html
Pessimism however sounded
warning bells all the while. It reminded
me of the many times that my plans had come unstuck in my fairly long
life. It pointed out to me the somewhat
precarious position that I was in because of my advancing age and that of the
many people in my immediate family.
While some of those fears about
the health of older members of my family have materialised, the real surprise
has been the nearly clinical depression that leaving NSRCEL seems to have cast
me into.
At one level I am glad that
there are no more emails screaming for attention piling up in my inbox. No more meeting requests that I am struggling
to schedule however much I may not look forward to meeting some of those
individuals. No more fine balancing of
the political consequences that I had to do in the name of growing the Centre.
Depression it is, I think,
going by the many symptoms. I do not
fancy meeting people any more. The heart
screams to be left alone, aching for solitude even as the head says that there
is no reason to crave for it.
Worse, perhaps, says the
head, that it is a dangerous sign for someone who will not find too many people
wanting to engage anyway, given that at 57 I am older than nearly 90% of the
Indian population. Stated differently,
if age is a determinant of common interests, nearly nine out of ten people
that I run into in a statistically random sample are unlikely to have anything to talk about in
common with me after polite pleasantries have been exchanged!
At the end of some internal
struggle I have decided that it is time to come to take the craving bull by the
horn. I have accepted solitude as a way
of life.
It is not the kind of
solitude that the yogis of India seek in the caves of the Himalayas. It is not the kind of solitude that led Napoleon to
make the famous statement, Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba, an often quoted
palindrome. Nor is my solitude about to inspire
poetry as enduring as the solitude of
Alexander Selkirk did:
And much less am I likely
to pine like Selkirk is said to have:
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Society,
Friendship, and Love
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Divinely
bestow’d upon man,
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O,
had I the wings of a dove
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How
soon would I taste you again!
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But I am well on the way to
what I see is the inevitable denouement as I can only grow older with every
passing day. That the world around me will
inexorably shrink as various layers of family move on, seeking their own lives
and destinies, until my sons who are the youngest among them all, grow wings
and fly off to build their own homes, leaving Lakshmi and me in an empty nest.
In preparation for that
ever shrinking world I have worked out the following formula. I intend to divide the rest of my academic
life across three silos and nothing more.
Family, immediate and proximate, comes first. A quick reckoning places those numbers at
seven and eighteen respectively. A
little bit of religion – I wish I could say spiritualism, but that would be a
pretentious lie - to remind myself that there is a larger purpose beyond all
this, even though I may be too puny to aspire for that purpose. And whatever time remains will be spent
reading, teaching and hopefully some writing and whatever minimal socializing is
required to “remain in business”.
As for the world beyond those
silos, I would hope not to be a curmudgeon in the unlikely event that anyone
seeks me out, as long as it does not come in the way of my three
priorities. But going by my unremarkable
social life to-date I would treat that as no more than a grandfather clause in my
new “social contract”.
Nanni….Namaskaaram…
PS: I initially thought of giving this post the title My Experiments with Solitude. For two reasons I decided in favour of the present title. First, it sounds a bit like the Mahatma's Autobiography. I did not wish to insult the memory of that great soul by giving such a title to this piffling post. Second, I am not yet into those realms of deep solitude that such a title might suggest.
