An Open Letter

Dear fellow Bloggers,

How has life been to all of you? Hopefully it has been nicer than it was to the inquirer! What is it that makes one patch of life brighter, while rendering yet another one full of a haunting darkness? My guess is that it is the fulfillment of our expectations, regardless of whether that fulfillment would stand the test of time and prove to be fulfilling in the long run. Even I, with my relatively insignificant lifespan, have found fulfillments that turned out to be terribly bitter in retrospection.

 

Anyways, the past few weeks for me have been a blur. It felt as if in falling I have reached the terminal velocity, though the end, the loud thud of softer bones and tissues on the hardened crust is nowhere in sight. However, as the cold war wisdom said, there is a silver lining in every cloud except the mushroom shaped ones found in nuclear explosions, being in the lowest point has its silver lines too. If one on earth is at the bottom of the Mariana trench, one can only go up from there, one cannot fall any further.

 

As an aspiring citizen of the capitalist cosmopolitan, being defined and validated by consumerism, my fall began in June last year when I resigned from my job and became a scoundrel. The word ‘scoundrel’ is a potent one with many connotations but “good for nothing” is the one that is closest to my intention. Now despite the sufferings I am grateful to my last year’s rashness because it allowed me to live through a completely different reality that would have remained virtually incomprehensible, otherwise. It has been a reality where not just the comfort of purchases is absent but at times even basic sustenance like food and shelter become uncertain.

 

I further compounded the situation by vowing not to get in touch with my friends until I have reclaimed my consumer status. The resulting effect was novel for the first few weeks but soon the novelty decayed and spending time started to become geometrically more difficult each day than the previous one. Fortunately, last month while discarding my old stuffs I came across a chest of books from my undergrad days and it contained Homer’s Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Trevelyan’s History of England and Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. As I started reading them I realized that I had not studied them as thoroughly when they were part of my academic syllabus.

 

More or less at the same time I also stumbled upon a few YouTube channels like Numberphile, Vsauce and Veritasium. Each of these is literally a goldmine of information and knowledge. The more I watched, more I became confident that if I could somehow integrate my fascination about literature, philosophy and history with this new form of expression, I might just end up with a job, which in serving the humanity can be called a service, unlike the service as we know in the phrase, “service holder”, which is mostly serving the owner and so at best can only be called ‘servitude’.

 

So, in brief, I am planning to launch a YouTube channel where I will try to contribute my two pennies in the form of discussions on literary works, philosophical outlooks and historical events. I hope you will continue to support my endeavors there as you have been kindly doing here in WordPress. I will also be honored to have your suggestions on the contents and issues that can be discussed but more about that in the coming days.

 

I hope all your expectations that will stand the test of time keep coming true and as always, thank you for your patience.

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