[Personal blogs are meant to be, well, personal. And this post is as personal as anything could get, just that it wasn’t written by me. But some sweet soul decided that this place is where he/she wanted it to be. And so, I decided to put this up without any second thoughts, proud as a duck!]

It was in my first or second grade that I’d my first encounter with death. A car accident, the driver survived, the woman passenger did too. But the children, two of them, by the looks of it, as old as I was then – were dead. One of their bodies was pulled out of the car in pieces. It is a very distant memory, the encounter, in that very moment, even more distant. Death made very little sense to me as a kid, it became an inherent truth as I began to grow up, by the time I was 12, I had come to view it as routine.

But that is for another day, for now, I think, the question that so many of us should ask ourselves is whether we still confront truths or make them seem routine, treat them with this wonderful tool of apathy. I have come to do the latter. Because my life’s been, erm, too random. And how do you confront the truth that your life is strange? That Sunday night was spent in a lockup, and Monday morning you attended school? It is to routinize. This word is used by academics studying the institution of prisons. Prisons.

We are in them. You can resist, you can create passive acceptance or you can use your indifference.

And indifference does not necessarily mean acceptance. It is to bide your time where you can’t resist and are unwilling accept. It is to outlast all of the jailors, the inmates and the rapists. It is to exist till all of them are subdued. Time and Pressure. And this is my greatest truth. The greatest lesson.

I have also learnt that despite the general air of scepticism that I live my life with, hope is necessary. I’ve found it in people sometimes. And when you hear stories of what your friends have ‘done to you’, you also witness, yourself, that what your friends have ‘done for you’, and it is no insignificant contribution to how you will view your life.

‘Standing up for you’, ‘being there’ – rhetoric. But those random acts, gestures – they are immensely important. Because they teach you that your existence as an island is not in isolation, it is an archipelago. And while you might not owe anything to the others in return, your existence is suddenly relevant and for as long as you are fighting those prisons, within yourself, you can do with some humour and some company – not consistently, not even reliably, but it’s around.

Thank You, random people in my life, for telling me that death is not the only truth. And that in moments, there is a world.

Anonymous.