Ramblings on my mobile through a late night train journey

Quiet small-town station. Very late night... Stationary trains. Sleepy passengers waiting. Waiting for the white cliffs of Dover where they are going. Waiting with a single-minded aim of getting into the train - the first step to Dover. A ghostly voice shrieking out names of hot beverages fills the station.

Wee Willie Winkie walks down the station...

Are all the children now in bed, for now it is 3 AM...

Mosquitoes, coffee, train announcements, bedraggled people, drowsy faces, a million reasons for going, a million reasons not to go, a million hopes, a million worries, a million white cliffs of Dover. Me a part of the whole... Waiting for my own Dover. Me a microcosm representative of the macrocosm. Here comes my train. Here I come…

The white cliffs of Dover - a scrap of memory wedged between gusts of life, refusing to be blown away.

Somerset Maugham is where I read it many moons ago when I was in school. That creation of hope and longing and wishful thinking for a desired object that cannot be attained – an object imbued with all the aspirational qualities mostly imagined. Maugham used it with reference to the British expatriate in South-East Asia yearning for retirement and seeing the white cliffs of Dover before reaching the mainland.

A doomed yearning, for the place would not be as imagined and yearned for, the people wouldn't be the same, the customs neither... And most of all, the person returning wouldn't be the same. He went out as a wide-eyed man eagerly anticipating adventure and change. He returns a much changed man, pockmarked by experiences and the death of idealism. Thus he is fated to live his life out, in the midst of his ruined cliffs. The less resilient succumb to bitterness and despair. The survivors build other white cliffs of Dover, this time around the place left behind – haven’t we all met retired career army-men and the like who love to recount tales from the barracks?

Dark night. Trees, water, interspersed with dark shapes of houses, some unlit, some lit by a bulb outside, streetlights at places, through it all the train hurtling through, cutting the fabric of the night with a shrieking clattering... Constant wind in my face, a bite in the wind, hand gripping a clammy metal bar, the smell of metal in the hand, thoughts of countless houses, people in them sleeping, myriad dreams being dreamt... What might they be dreaming of? Dover tomorrow?Each one's life tomorrow will be different, thoughts different, priorities different...

Unknown to them, there is one commonality to their lives - I have passed through all of them while they slept...

Trishanku in Cargopants

Now who is Trishanku?

Trishanku is a character straight out of Hindu mythology. He was apparently a king who wanted to go to heaven in his mortal body (can’t figure out for the life of me why though...). So he toodled up to his Guru Vashishtha and requested him for help in achieving this. Vashishtha declined since it would upset the natural order of things. So he went to a rival of Sage Vashishtha and requested him to for help – this was Sage Vishwamitra. He promptly agreed, given the rivalry… Of course, when Trishanku began ascending to heaven in his mortal form, the Gods got quite nervous. Indra, who was quite parochial from the looks of it, used his powers to push our friend back to earth. Trishanku again prayed to Vishwamitra - an angry Vishwamitra stopped the fall and decided to use his powers to create a parallel universe with a heaven for Trishanku.

A high-power delegation of alarmed Gods flew down to the Sage and explained the situation to him upon which he acquiesced and backtracked, but didn’t know how to handle our pal Trishanku who was hanging around mid-air, with nothing to do. So he arrived at a compromise with the Gods that Trishanku would be allowed to stay in his heaven – the only proviso (to ensure that he wouldn’t be able to take Indra’s position) being that he would reside in his heaven upside down!

This is the story of Trishanku who belonged to Earth but desired Heaven on his own terms and hence was doomed to live suspended between both – a make-believe world where he had neither... Quite a tragic fate, what say? Sounds familiar?

All that is fine, but who is the Trishanku in me?

Well, methinks, the Trishanku in us is a creature formed out of social conditioning we have been subjected to since childhood…

From the time a child is born there is pressure – pressure to get into the best schools, pressure to be the first among our peers, pressure to top be it in sports or in academics, pressure to have the most friends of the opposite sex, pressure to be seen going around with the most sought after girl/boy (or at least someone), pressure to get into the best professional courses, pressure to land the best and highest paying jobs, pressure to marry the best girl, pressure to stay ahead of the batch in terms of job/designation/salary, pressure to have the best kids… and thus the pressure on the new generation… and the cycle continues.

So, we all follow the dictum that one should never rest on one’s laurels… the effort is to keep striving for more. When one landmark is achieved, don’t pause – fix the next landmark and move… Blokes like Alexander the Great are the role models – keep pushing the frontier. Wonder what young Alex would have done if he had actually conquered all of Earth and still been alive… Add to all this a dash of sayings like ‘Aim for the stars and you’ll at least get the sky’ and what you get is a race that will never be happy with what they have. The urge is to constantly strive for more…

A kind of shifting heaven that we keep striving for – ‘if only I had xyz, I would be really happy’ and when xyz is achieved, the finishing line shifts to elsewhere. And our heaven keeps moving further away as we move closer. And thus I believe we all live in a kind of ‘Trishanku Lokam’… A kind of suspension between where we are and where we desire to be.

Is this worth it? Is Trishanku-like striving worth the effort if the end result is suspended animation? Isn’t Heaven where we are? Can’t we make the present into a Heaven? Can’t we find bliss in what we have? Do we have to pawn the present, at the altar of social conditioning for ambition, in order to try and achieve a possibly-illusory ever-changing future heaven?

But will cessation of this constant race defeat ambition? Will it retard movement? Shouldn’t the river keep moving? Wouldn’t it flood and destroy whatever is on its banks (the very lives on the banks that are dependent on the river) if it ever stopped moving? Or is the concept of movement in our heads all wrong? Should we be moving and growing mentally rather than materially?

I don’t know the answers to these questions… Am struggling with them over the last few weeks ever since I have been forced to confront the illness of someone very close to me… someone with whom I haven’t spent the kind of time I would have liked to, because of this mad ceaseless movement...