Solitude

I’m mostly a people’s person. I love talking and talking for hours at length. I can talk about anything and to anyone for hours. Given that it might seem that me talking about solitude should be very weird… should be something very alien to me. More than that, it must be painful for me. But I had a very enriching experience which makes me capable enough to carry on with this post.

I love to hang out and m quick at finding myself likely company. It was always easy for me to reach out to people and befriend them as my dad had a transferable job and in every few years we were thrown to places we had never been. It was tough, by the time you have frenz you get to know that it was time already and we were gonna move out soon. You need time to adjust in a new place, find frenz and get accustomed to weather, culture, food and all that. Then you eventually fall in love with the place, come on!! for how long can you loathe about being thrown into a remote place and keep missing the place you were in last and miss your old frenz. You learn to move on and you do it quick. Its very easy for people to misunderstand your needing a time off to adjust yourself with you being arrogant and snobbish. And who wants to listen where you were earlier, what kinda frenz you had there and wat you miss ? Who cares and who has time on this mean planet we call earth.

All this and more was the reason I became so adaptable. Now I love making new frenz and travelling. So I really never had time to be in solitude. But as I said I had my own personal experiment with solitude and it was pretty enriching. Now I love solitude.

Solitude might seem very painful in beginning but then you start falling in love with it. It gives you so much time to think over things you had been avoiding or had no time for, for so long. You can indulge in a very enriching experience and you develop a thought process unique to you. You have all the time on planet to read books you never thought you will. You have an opportunity to develop new hobbies. This was one thing that benefitted me so much. It was after this petty experiment of mine with solitude that I tried my hand at writing and wrote my first article at the end of it. To start with, my head was clouded with random thoughts. Then I stumbled upon an issue which I felt was pretty strong and very close to my heart too. Giving it some thought I got a better picture and in the end I was able to realize a thought so pure and so novel to me that the idea propped in my head to pen it down. I still use the same technique every time when I write. I don’t sit down to write as such. I spend some time thinking and when I have a point of view of my own I feel the urge to write it down. I’m not talking about funny incidents I shared with you in my previous posts. I’m talking about the articles I have written and most of them still remain unpublished. This is the reason most of my core creative writing comes to me when I’m pathetic with sleeplessness…. At odd hours.

It all started during my six weeks industrial training at Baroda, Indian Oil refineries division. Thanks to references passed on to me by my dad, I was put up in an apartment in the residential colony itself. I shared apartment with Piyush, an employee there. Bachelor that he was one, he had his own pack of friends which he introduced to me. They were all very interesting people and hanging out with them was amazing fun. But Piyush was quitting his job in a fortnight as was one more friend of his, Sachin Soni. Both became my best pals in spite of age difference and thus very obviously varied tastes too. The fortnight I spent with them was amongst the best in my life. Every alternate day we were sloshed with best whiskey, vodka or beer whatever we could lay hands on, given that we were in a dry state that Gujarat is thanks to Gandhiji and his fucked up ideologies. We went out to eat almost every evening or used to summa hang out together watching movies, at home on dvds or in cinema halls, as and when time persisted. That fortnight was amazing and unforgettable.

But that was not to stay forever. Soni and Piyush quit and others got busy with their daily work. So I had an empty apartment with just one bed (that too thanks to Piyush bhaiyya), my mattress propped over it and a cupboard remotely filled with my few clothes that I had taken along. I had lots of book to read though, some I had got from home and some I had picked from what Soni had planned to throw off as raddi while packing. At times I could borrow a laptop from Brahma (an employee there too, fresher actually) who lived just the apartment below mine. I had to depend on him for water too as I did not have water purifier or any other source of potable water. Plus not to forget, it was summers and Baroda is very humid. It was shitty hot there. You could sweat without doing anything, even while just laying down on bed. Every morning I got up to find that my pillow and my bedsheet was wet with my own sweat. I had too balconies in that apartment and I used to keep doors to both of them open at all times to allow fresh air in. Given that it was so hot, I used to take bath numerous times, sometimes even five times a day. It was very relaxing to take a cold shower after a tiring hot day in field during training. I had to walk several kilometers everyday in those safety shoes.

Plant was spread in a humongous area, 5 kms from end to end. At days when I was lucky, I got a lift. And I noticed that wearing a formal shirt made it more probable for me to get a lift. This was my observation and being an engineering student I could work out the math behind it. Probably people confused me with a new engineer at plant and were kind enough to stop by and offer a ride or respond to my waving my fist with thumb pointing towards the plant’s main gate. I used to eat in officer’s mess thanks to Manoj Sharma, one of Piyush’s frenz in production department who also shouldered responsibility of mess manager. If you have been reading this blog, you would find a post on him titled “Insanity redefined”. Brahma was kind enough to lend me his laptop at times so that I could finish up my report. I also had spare keys to his apartment, just in case I needed something. He even offered me to sleep in his apartment as it was too hot in my apartment and he happened to had an AC installed in his. But I hardly did it. I had my own happy world in my apartment up there, all to myself.

I started reading papers, actually spend hours reading it from page to page including cartoon strips and solving Sudoku and crosswords besides reading my favourite pages like international. I started reading a lot. I went for walk in evenings though my calf muscles threatened to give away any time as they delivered terrible pain owing to walking in plant all day long and my lovely safety shoes which were so fucking heavy as if I was dragging shackles or as if they were made of iron (which is partly true, they partly were made of steel atleast the tip I’m sure about). Calm evening wind helped me clear my mind and was very relaxing and took away all my weariness when it brushed past my close cropped hair on my head.

I used to go to movies alone on weekend in INOX. I always thought going to movies alone was the worst idea one can ever have. I still do. But a movie freak that I am and with nothing else to do it seemed stupid to miss watching a movie on big screen just coz I had no one to along with. N it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

A fellow trainee from Orissa came along with me later as he was lonely too. He being from Chemical department, he was assigned to process plants which I wasn’t assigned to obviously. So we hardly met in plant. But we went for movies couple of times later. He also introduced me to landmark. I discovered that the one in Baroda was pretty calm and reader friendly when compared to one in Chennai which I usually go to but despise very dearly. The one in Baroda was decorated with huge comfortable and inviting couches on which you can spread out and read. No one will bother you for sure. One corner of it had Café coffee day. You can enjoy reading books while sipping away merrily on your favourite frappe. I finished a complete collection of Calvin and Hobbes there in two hours and two huge heavenly mugs of frappe on one useless weekend. The collection costs Rs. 495 only for the record. So that was time well spent.

Besides all this I also started getting ideas to start writing meanwhile and tried my hand at it. The training had come to an end and I had very calm and thoughtful 3-4 weeks all to myself in solitude. I love solitude now and now I know its not painful as I thought it would be. But still hanging out with frenz is top priority. But I look at the prospect of being in solitude with a new light. I love being alone now, just me and myself and my solitude.

Its not bad and its not painful at all though to some it might sound so. Solitude has been for so long been associated with pain. But you don’t need to be in pain to be in solitude. You can be happy and still love it.

Give it a shot someday. Give yourself all the time one particular weekend. Listen to your favourite music all day, read your favourite book, go for a trek, long jog or walk, take long showers or go for swim and spend time fulfilling your long forgotten hobbies be it stamp collection, writing, painting, playing guitar or whatever. I’m sure you’ll love it.

P.S. Please do drop in feedback without fail. Constructive criticism appreciated.