Most people are either depressed by the darkness in their little cell or busy making it more illuminated than the cells of the rest. I don't know why we don't realise that an illuminated cell is also a cell. Probably all of us have stayed in those cells in our childhood, where our parents would tell us that if we didn't get the resources to buy LEDs and tube lights, our cell would become dark, and we would have to suffer. They forgot to tell us that even if we gather all the resources to buy those LEDs and tube lights, we will continue to stay inside those cells. That's why we are facing so many issues related to stress and depression among people in their 30s and 40s. I don't know why parents, in particular, and society, in general, do not tell them to come out of the cell and experience the sunlight. Why is there so much division in society? We may give hope to the children living in a dark cell that their cell will be illuminated in future. We may teach them 100 different skills, but will that help the children come out of the cell and experience the sunlight? It's difficult to break free from the societal narrative that life is all about maximum illumination within the cell. I wish that more and more children could experience the joy of sunlight.
While walking in the morning, I was just thinking about hope in despair. This weekend, I am going to meet the children passing through despair. Some of them are lost in the trains and do not know the whereabouts of their families, some of them are mentally challenged, some of them are struggling for resources, some of them are in juvenile reform homes where their freedom has been curbed to a significant extent, and the entire ecosystem is depressing. Some of them have been evacuated from the red-light area and now live with the constant burden of that social stigma. During my previous interactions, we focused on hope that seems too distant to these children.
We are sitting inside our AC rooms during this massive heat wave, feeling worried about climate change and talking about world politics. We are very concerned about rising oil prices, job uncertainty due to the AI revolution, and geopolitical turmoil. We get worried when the stock market falls and the number on our mobile screen reflecting the value of our portfolio drops. We get worried when a few people in the Big 4 are given a golden handshake. As if we are operating in two different worlds. Yet, when I meet the children in those reform and juvenile homes, I get carried away by the enthusiasm some of them show.
There is probably something fundamentally wrong with the way we have grown into communities. Ideally, everybody should be free to roam around in the Sun. Sunlight, air, and water are available to everybody. Only a mad person will try to store these for their future consumption. But a few of us are confined to a dark cell with no sunlight. We crave the sunlight. When we remain deprived of sunlight for years, we become desperate to illuminate our little cell. Somehow, we unconsciously develop a competition with the Sun. We fail to realise that we may illuminate the little cell with lights of great luminosity, yet we will remain confined to the cell. Any amount of illumination inside the cell can't make us free. We taste the freedom only when we come out of the cell and face the sunlight. We feel humbled. We know that we are too little.
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