The Treadmill

Five weeks through the Michaelmas without much reflection, without much introspection have been quite perplexing. I was trying to juggle between a whole plethora of things, making thousands of friends and thousands of people who would shout ‘Hi Jalnidh’ to you on day-2 of stay in this foreign land – it has been an incredibly beautiful and overwhelming time too, in some sense.

And so all this while, a certain degree of disappointment always lingered deep down my heart. Things just didn’t connect. I was here for a purpose and here I was, meeting a whole lot of people whose only purpose in life seemed a transitory ‘enjoying Oxford’ cliché.

At our Rhodes farewell dinner, I was quite touched by the words of one of the earlier Rhodes scholars, Rohan Paul. ‘For me, Rhodes experience was about engaging in a dialogue – an internal and an external one’ he had said. And now every time I would face questions of ‘what I was doing here’, those words would come back and stir a whirlwind of emotions. Rhodes is not a mere source of funding but has a higher purpose to it – and for me, the purpose though not defined exactly, it brings back to my mind, faces of Bhoora, Keshu, Arjun and loads of street kids for whom I want to do something more substantial.

I write this post so flushed up by the Rhodes Conversation at the Rhodes House today – I am overjoyed at the discovery of so many people who seem to be circling in the same orbit as me and for whom, a life without introspection lies incomplete. The conversations hovered around everything to discovering who we are, who we are trying to be and how we relate to others and to Rhodes.

Somebody mentioned about student life as being ‘life on treadmill’ – of endless and continuous and perfunctory striving. I feel I have been on the treadmill for five weeks and now I am off. The internal and external dialogue just began. I found a great cohort, finally. Eureka!