Your Mission
Life is a mind-boggling suspense thriller. No murders here. And there are no killings. There are no slimy double-faced traitors and there is no scope for spies. Life is indeed a rather unique thriller where we are always trying to find the real person within us.
The real person within us? You mean I am not me?
Yes, you are not you until you’ve found the real you. Haven’t we seen people who have spent years working as economists realising that their real calling was writing a column in a newspaper. There have been doctors who finally found themselves as actors. There are administrators who ended up as politicians. So like them we all get into accidental disguises that we adopt as our profession or fad or a medium of earning… but are always restlessly searching for something that at a point even we are not able to identify or pin-point. To be whoever you are is the biggest mystery in life.
I remember reading about a police official who decided to get out of his uniform and wear a sari because the real you within was Mira, a Lord Krishna devotee. There are males who spend years trapped within a genital mesh that releases them only when they undergo a sex change. Similarly there are females who start as tomboys and finally decide that they no longer want to remain females. There are lesbians and homosexuals who hide this fact and remain miserable… and yet there are those who finally decide to be whoever they are. What is important that you accept who you really are and make effort to make it easy for others to accept who you are. To be whoever you are is as important as opening the doorway of acceptance.
Your mission
What can be a nobler mission than to be whoever you are and to make sure that this truth is accepted by you as well those who are around you?
I believe that life is like a thriller and we are the writer. Yes, there is this wonderfully creative writer resident within each of us… and it is this writer that helps us discover the truth about our own self. This writer lets loose a 007 or some such glamorous agent to go into even the most inaccessible nooks and corners within and find out who we really are. The real you loves an intense game of hide-and-seek and barring a lucky few who make this discovery early in their lives, the rest go on struggling in alien identities until the time is right for them to say, ‘Phew! So I finally know who I really am.’
I wish I had a magic wand
Well, I actually wish there was some magical chant or a wand that would awaken whoever we are so that this lifelong search doesn’t torture the teeming billions of us. As I wrote these lines, Specky, my wife came and stood behind me. This was a difficult part and I stopped to gather my thoughts without realising that she was right there and racing with my thoughts to find and catch the solution. Well, thrillers are like this… and in this particular thriller, Specky was the one who finally identified the winning formula.
She said, ‘I know what will make us discover whoever we are faster.’
‘Really? I mean, is there a real solution in real terms?’ I was actually surprised and thought that life is indeed full of mysteries about which we know so little. Specky nodded and went on, ‘Technology.’
‘Technology?’
She said, ‘Yes, technology. The abracadabra is technology. Have you seen how people suddenly change when they are holding the right kind of smartphone in their hands?’ She then explained that she had watched a shy kid hold the right smartphone and was suddenly transformed into someone who connected superbly to memorable photography. There was another person we recalled who would hold the right smartphone and then put the voice recorder ON… and the moment this was done, this reticent prosaic fellow was transformed into a poet who uttered sentences that rhymed.
No, this isn’t magic. This is the truth. Magical transformations are possible when we are with the right gadget… and thus technology does help us discover whoever we are. Specky then clarified that the only catch here was that it has to be the ‘right’ gadget in the hands of a person. I mean, if this magic has to happen when you are holding an OBI mobile, then there is no way you would experience a transformational moment when you are interacting with some other gadget or device.
I then carefully asked, ‘So can we call this OBI mobile some sort of a magician?’
‘You can call it whatever you want to,’ said Specky, ‘just remember that to be whoever you are is our mission.’ And so I told myself, ‘Thank God, life is a thriller… it leads us all into a mystery that only we can solve.’
Be #WhoeverYouAre
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Arvind Passey
13 October 2014
