Despondency in the New Year ... Imagined and Real ...

It is now more than two months ago that I wrote my last post on my blog.  I went to Shimoga soon after that for a brief year-end visit with Shruti and Mamoon.  We visited a number of familiar places and I enjoyed these drives along familiar roads.  I took a lot of photographs and wanted to do a write-up with pictures once I returned to Hyderabad.  I usually come back from Shimoga slightly perked up.  It is the one time in the year that I meet my teachers and they usually tell me about new books, and make suggestions about translations and so on.  They indulge me and encourage me, so that feels good.  We returned to Hyderabad late in the evening on the last day of the year.   

The new year did not begin well for me … not that it should have … there was this strange despondency fuelled by monumental lethargy or maybe it was the other way … the thought of going back to the regular ‘college’ grind might have brought the dark clouds on … and then there is this back pain … pain and despondency is a bad cocktail … and so I got to experience the worst possible hangover and it goes on … have never woken up the mornings feeling fresh in the last few months … the moment I leave home, I am thinking of the time I would return … the college sucks the life out of me … it is like those dementors hovering cloudily above … it takes the pith out of me … I have repeatedly made my efforts to get out of that godforsaken place, but I somehow allowed myself to be persuaded to stay back by the highest-up … maybe I am a glutton for punishment … masochist … maybe I deserve it … maybe I am scared of change … known devil, unknown angel sort of thing … who knows … karma and all that … 

The upshot of all this that I inflicted more punishment on myself … sort of self-flagellation … I discontinued my drum classes, telling myself half-heartedly that I would be going back once the clouds cleared … I cut my hair, grown with great perseverance for over 6 months … he he he … my teenage dream come true in late middle age … that was the easiest and most harmless physically … and it grows back … and the thing is, I didn’t want my hair to go … it is gone now … I stopped going to Abids … haven’t met Vinod and gang for more than two months now … my home was my refuge … who was I hiding from … my own incompetence, I think … my own feelings of inadequacy … I stopped writing on my blog … I thought I’d announce a full closure, then a sort of short-term stop … I kept vacillating … I didn’t want to let go of my blog that I have been looking after since 2008 … so many words and stories that I had written over these years … I wanted to announce the closure of this blog in January this year … this blog would have completed 8 years of its existence … I don’t know … all this feeling of wretchedness … I shut down the blog for almost two and half months … all silly questions like the world will move on, who would notice, nobody would mourn and all that … I don’t know whether there is a turn-around now, but the fact that I am writing this disjointed account of my feelings of misery, maybe of my own failure to tackle things with firmness, some sort of fear and guilt, all sorts of complexes, sort of hints that I need to pull myself up by my bootstraps and that this is one such attempt … I owe this much at least to my loved ones … and a little bit to my own self …