In my search for reality, I failed miserably. Except this planet, there is nothing real could I feel or see! The mirror of life got tainted with thoughts - thoughts of desires that how comfortable I can be throughout this journey between birth and death. I could see not my face, but my desires. Life became a bundle of desires, fulfilled and unfulfilled, just to throw away into the vastness of time and merge into blankness. Everything I see is myth, skeptical and incredulously non-existing matters. Yet life is life. Universally, life is precious enough to stretch it as long as possible between the extremes of birth and death, the two realities. - irrespective of one's geographical or religious attachments. And there remains one universal principle, which formed the firm foundation of my life: One has to travel the length and breadth of life so long as he is alive and one has to and will be alive. But, how? This is where I stuck up during my childhood. 

I had the opportunity of spending first five years of my life in a town, enjoying all facilities that as a child I wanted. A fatal attack of typhoid brought down my father back to his village and that was the beginning of my real life of swimming against the odds. I still wonder, how my father could manage to lead an easy life, we eight children and our mother around! He used to say: "Do not think about tomorrow. It will also be yet another day like today." If today is gone, it is gone. And another today will come tomorrow. With the same sun rising from the same direction. 

I had no one to guide me, where to go. I have been my mentor. All my father wanted me was to learn bookkeeping, typewriting and shorthand. He had a few examples of men, who learnt these three subjects and were occupying high offices. And they were drawing a decent three-figure salary in those days. Education was not that cheap and he must have realised it. Even for his threesome formula of education, after completing free secondary education, was costlier and not affordable for us. With his meager earning, running the home was a great thing that he did all the way with a smile! Never he had worried about morrows. And surprisingly, the life has been smooth. May be because I learnt what is a contended life from him. No unwanted desires. We had a roof to live under, we had sufficient clothing and food. What else a man need? 

I was contended with what I had, but there had been ambitions. I was always thinking about unknown future. Sitting in the old chair, peeping out through the window, I thought of what, as a child, I could think. 

The village had narrow paths all leading to houses situated here and there. Transportation was out of question, for, people used to walk down the distance of two or three kilometers without any fatigue, as it had become the way of life. Only to go to the town, roughly ten kilometers away, they traveled by bus. Towards the interior, canoes were the means of transportation. This too, for the rich. The master would sit in a specially built wooden chair placed in the middle of the boat, with an umbrella to save him from the sun, while the oarsman leading the boat. The trip might be to his coconut farm or paddy field to oversee the labourers. 

The rich loved work. They could sit and watch it for hours! Even today, I am not convinced, why this historical discrimination continues. Of course, there is a change in the tendency of human, but the change is not able to bridging the gap, even on simple humanitarian ground. Investment is more important and not how the investment was generated. Life is precious, but the magnitude of preciousness differs as it is seen by the society around you. Rich and poor lives! And about the society around me, I have my own conception about the character, the conduct and the nature of such society.  The rich make the poor more poorer and the poor make the rich more richer! The simplest way I understood this phenomenon is that a poor cannot suck the blood of a rich, for he is poor and weak in all respects, but a rich can with all his power! These thoughts were not deliberate musings, but a depiction of the happenings around me, reflected on my pensive little mind. 

Sitting in the chair, staring aimlessly through the window, my little mind was free to think. Or was forced to think? The latter would be more appropriate, for, it is a depressed mind that always thinks.