100 years of Solitude….

It was a sheer coincidence or maybe it was a game of destiny that I was reading “100 years of solitude – by Gabriel Garcia Marquez” on the eve of my 40th birthday. I turned 41 on 4th Dec. But since I kept the book down yesterday night at 1 am, I was haunted by the word “solitude”. Some books are just meant to be read and forgotten like Dan Brown’s latest which gave me company during my recent travel to Delhi and Chandigarh….but some books jolt you up, cajole you to look back in your life and remember fleeting moments of the past, ponder over the present and helps you to tone down your expectations from the coming future.

Occasions like birthdays have an elevated sense of celebrations all around the entire day, starting from the midnight surprise, to the early morning hugs and the secret glances going around the house when you know something is being planned but you dare not ask albeit you spoil the fun. And, of course the sms’s which start pouring in from 6.30 am (yes that’ when I got first the message).

So reading a book where revolution, suffering, struggle to survive, death and of course solitude was the recurring theme was probably a jolt to reality. By the end of the book I fell in love with the word solitude because I figured since the day I took my first step outside my home in 1987 and landed in a small village to do my engineering to the time when I landed in Mumbai to start work to the time when I was waiting outside the maternity ward to hear my daughter cry to this moment when I am writing this blog I had only solitude to give me company.

As I finished the book and closed my eyes last 40 years passed by me like a train of images linked only by my moments of solitude. And I felt that everything in life is like an event when you are experiencing it because you are enjoying the moment you want to feel the ecstasy or the pain but very rarely can you reflect at that moment.

As the years go by, lot of things will happen with you, lot of things will happen around you, at times things will happen and at times things will fall apart but the only thread which gives meaning to this life are those moments of solitude when you try and figure out “what this life is all about”?