And Then A Pilgrimage

Collins J Peter of II BA English Copy Editor 
asks what a pilgrimage means. 

Read and reflect!

                                                     

The train was moving from trashy scenes to surprises. I was in it. My mind moved much faster than the train. In the midst of fiction readers, I made a quick search in my pocket dictionary. My intention was to find the exact meaning of the word ‘pilgrim’ and an answer to the question whether I am on a pilgrimage.

The dictionary defines a pilgrim as a person who travels to a holy place for religious reasons. Life reveals its meaning through the course of one’s own lifetime, which is sometimes a matter of his/her meaningful existence in society. At certain phases of life we live to generate wealth, popularity, and self esteem. At certain other phases we live in order to dump those possessions which make for nothing but a barren life.

The probability for human beings to create unique spheres of life is higher than in other animals. Spheres of acquaintances are what we create mostly. It includes family, friends, colleagues, and all those intimate relationships. These spheres are a necessity because they produce meaning and worth to our social living. In families we share duties, love, bonds and friendships, where the exchange of our experiences become colourful and lively. But there is a strict law for all this to take place. If that law is violated, those social spheres get converted into a hellhole towards which we drag ourselves and stop living. The law is - never allow the worldly pursuits to creep into your intimate social spheres. If it does, families will have to move to family courts and friendships to break-up parties.

Now, where does the pilgrimage begin and where does it end? It begins when all our ignorance, mistakes, negligence, wrong choices evolve into deadly weapons against us and when refuge and shelter become mere question marks. We begin to reach out to where we went wrong, to the people to whom we did wrong , to the memories to which we were unfaithful ….all by ourselves. Reaching out in order to rectify and cleanse in places where we were mistaken and wasted; to live the rest of our life with the happiness of a thousand sunrises. And now, where does the pilgrimage end? Is there a clear answer to this question?

The happiness of a thousand sunrises never comes as a whole and thus we have to pursue it, through a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage that never ends.

The train is heading towards Maharashtra where I must go and reach out my hands to a destitute centre. A centre where I left my parents ten years ago just to cherish my marital life, which breathes no longer.

The New Normal

Are you ready to face tragedies in life without losing your dignity?
What does it take to be a true survivor? 
Collins J Peter of II BA English Copy Editor 
shares his views on the topic.

                                                                     

Recently I read a book  titled  Touched By Suicide by Michael F. Myers and Carla Fine. The book deals with real life cases of suicidal trauma, but I tried to glean something else from it.  Among the series of events described in the book, a father’s plight caught my notice.  

‘A father who had returned from work found his daughter hanging from a back yard tree’  - this was the incident that caught my attention. This was cited as an illustration for a particular topic.  Later, through the course of reading,  I realized that this incident was narrated by the same father who had witnessed that traumatic scene.  What made him live after this ? How had he coped? ... Optimism ?  Hope?

The very evolutionary trait of homo sapiens equip them to cope with or adapt to the cosmos and its variations. When technology helps us transcend our physical limitations, we achieve a great deal of progress.  Then, what is our coping strategy towards social issues when we are on the verge of complete deterioration of social  rapport?

Nobody wants to be confined within a particular social institution such as family, or religion.  ‘Leaving home' is the norm of today’s social world.  The fact is that, as distance advances between the individual and social institutions, there is more chance of being entrapped in various ‘anti’ behaviours.  Perhaps this idea is closely related to the views of the humanist scholars of the 15^th  century:  ‘Man makes a constant attempt to strive for good but often finds himself caught in a trap of evil.  At a time he is caught between the desire for immortality and of earthly fame’ (quoted from Shapers of Destiny by Susan Varghese).

The realisation that one is far away from home often leads to ‘self-disintegration’ which may manifest in the form of suicides, now mostly among those in the per-adolescent age.  The trouble- shooting ability of our younger generation has been lost in the ‘e-world’ which caters them a virtual environment for anything and everything.  The risk factor is when ‘e-world’ depicts the life on a screen where problems could be solved with a single click, it is not at all possible once the system is shut down. 

The reason for the girl’s suicide in the incident, at the beginning of  this essay, is not mentioned in that particular book.  Later, her father begins to reach out to others who undergo a similar trauma in their life.  He is now adapted to a life without his daughter.  You might have noticed that your pain or  a mental anguish gradually tends to cease as time moves on.  At first with minutes,  then  hours, then days and as this goes on, your worries dwindle to nothing.  When the year draws to an end,  a few  wish for a normal, better start. All we need is a ‘brand new normal’, more than a normal, where we study to live along with the past trash and future surprises.  May be, that desolated father had learned this very tactic of life at the end.

Reference

Varghese, Susan. Shapers of Destiny. Print. Trichur: Current Books, 

     2010

Myers, Michael F and Carla Fine. Touched By Suicide. Print. Gotham 

     Books, 2006