Skip to main content

One in Seven Billion

Some time ago, I came across a story  in which a girl loses her interest in life because she realizes that the wonderful times she has with her friends are experiences that are neither unique nor special, because they're shared by millions of other schoolgirls all over the world.

A similar thought struck me a few years ago. A vast majority of the experiences we have, both good and bad, have already been or are being experienced by millions of others.  However, my reaction to it was rather different. I was awestruck. There really isn't any other word for it.  There are over seven billion people  leading their respective lives all over the world. So here's how I see it, there is not one, but seven billion universes out there, with a person at the centre of each! (I'm neglecting other living organisms here for the sake of simplicity, just as one neglects air resistance while analysing the motion of a body in free fall- so animal lovers, please don't take offense =) )
Coming back to my original point, each person you see out there on the street- from that man in a suit driving a car and talking on the phone, to that security guard just sitting there, watching people go past- has a story of his (or her) own; has friends, family and worries of his own. For a few seconds, their lives intersect, as  the man pauses at the gate. And then, once again, they go their own ways.
Every time I see a stranger, especially when he or she is in a vastly different occupation, I try to imagine what his or her life would be like. What they'd do when they got home that day, what their goals might be...
Do you think it's a crazy hobby? It's a fascinating one, at the very least, and it's best side effect - something that makes it all worthwhile-is compassion.

Labels:

Comments

  1. C.P. Ravikumar8 June 2013 at 22:18

    Wordsworth wanted to get away from it all
    And thought the World is Too Much with Us
    But this wordsmith wants to stay connected
    "Take life easy, what is the rush?"

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tradition!

In India, the generation of the twenty first century is faced with a decision: to be traditional or  be 'not traditional'. Note that I have used neither 'modern' nor 'western' as the opposite of 'traditional' because it is not. The culture and tradtions we inherit from our ancestors form a significant part of our identity. People who disown their culture will need to start from scratch and build a new identity to replace something that took generations of experience to create. Now,considering that we are descended from those who created the traditions we follow, which means that we share genes, and perhaps a few common traits and interests with them, isn't our culture in some ways catered specifically to us and consequently, doesn't it have the highest chance of suiting us? Before you start to call me prejudiced, here's the other side of the argument. Times have changed considerably. Certain customs that came into being a few centuries ag...
Post a Comment
Read more

Perfection

There are lots of quotes out there about how imperfection is the true perfection and how having some imperfections makes one better .But like the fox and the grapes (don’t ask me why a fox would want grapes), I think that we just find it hard to appreciate what we can never reach. For a long time, even I never liked perfect things. For instance, I disliked traditional rangoli designs because they were perfectly symmetric. I couldn’t draw them, so I decided that I preferred free hand drawings.  However, my attitude has changed lately. The change started when we began to study circles in class nine. Circles are just so… perfect. Think about it- from the fact that every single point on it equidistant from the same single point, to the fact that the ratio between circumference and diameter is always constant, there are so many amazing results that can be obtained from that simple shape! That’s probably why I love mathematics too. It is a perfect subject. If a law exists, it al...
1 comment
Read more

Thoughts from lonely days

Some nights before I started to write this in mid-2022, I dreamt that I was in an aircraft that was plummeting to the earth. I was not surprised by this dream - less than a week had passed since a tragic plane crash in China. What did surprise me was that I had continued to hope that the plane would right itself until the very end. So when I woke up, breathing hard, still alive, what upset me the most about my nightmare was not that the plane had crashed, but that I had not made peace with my death in those final moments.  I've spent a lot of time thinking about death in the last two years; many of us probably did as we anxiously watched counters on dashboards, each uptick marking the end of another human life. On nights when my overactive imagination conjured up terrible scenarios, I protected myself by taking a mental step back and reminding myself that death was inevitable. But creating distance made me feel guilty. Was it not wrong to feel anything less than all the sadness I...
Post a Comment
Read more