Termite life

Life in a cosmopolitan city has an attraction that one can remain faceless amidst a vast ocean of people, a luxury denied to those from villages and small towns.

Silently sitting in a corner, in a pensive mood, watching the teeming life whirling in endless circles has its own charm. Watching the weary faces, tense looks and endless toil to bear the cross of their existence, while remaining unnoticed; bring us much closer to an understanding the life.

Their lives tend to convey a message of triumph of humanity against nature but at the same time, it's humbling to realize that a time will come when all this suffocating rush of humanity milling around us would be no more.

This has been a fait accompli for millions of generations before us and would be so for millions more to come in future.

 For how long? No one knows.

The life seems like a conveyor belt, slowly inching us toward final destination, crushing and grinding not only individuals but civilizations mercilessly. 

This contemplation is humbling realization of fickleness of life and puts an intriguing question. Is there is any method in this madness?

Can we make this apparently senseless life more meaningful and if so how and why?

People have been preferring wilderness to contemplate on philosophical questions of existence, but the same degree of nirvana can be achieved by introspection while just sitting in the center of suffocating markets.

For an 'urban monk’, apparently doing nothing except savoring buzz of humanity matters much more than so many hours spent in emotional deprivation in what Wallace Stegner called, "the termite life we have created."

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