Monotony
I just finished watching The Lunchbox (2013). I remember watching the movie as a kid, but, after over a decade, I had no recollection of the details of the movie. (There have been movies that I can still recall, even after a decade of watching them, the most striking one would be The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, but perhaps that would be a story for another day.) I finally took away a moment to sit down and watch it.
It was a beautiful movie. And has left me penning my thoughts down here. I wouldn’t spoil the movie for any of you who want to go and watch it. But what I do want to talk about, is the emotions that it instilled in me throughout the watch.
It was an amazing portrayal of lonliness and monotony, I think. Throughout the movie, I could see how the characters’ lives had lost the spark that they once had and their daily routines just kept going off now, like the monotonous ticking of the clock.
It reminded me of another one of Irfan’s Khan’s movies, Life in a… Metro, set in the similar setting of Mumbai.
As well as it’s recent spiritual sequel, Metro… In Dino.
Both of which were also movies that I really enjoyed watching and had left me with a tornado of emotions.
Perhaps I am too young as of now and am yet to experience the true forms of these emotions, but I think, being a student abroad - in an environment where I had known no one to begin with, I have at least seen a glimpse.
I often sit down and think to myself how I would be with my friends all the time back home, playing, chatting, laughing, having fun - a luxury I don’t have here. I have friends here too. Great friends. We go out, we spend time, we have fun together. But there’s something that is different. And maybe I don’t know what. My guess would be that that connection of being brought up together - that is something I would often miss. Perhaps anyone would, eventually, so I am no special case in that. But something just doesn’t feel right.
It is also the monotonous nature of college, as it seems to happen, that may be causing me to feel a little off. Classes, Homework, Research, Working out, and then repeat. Indeed, things become very repetitive.
And to me this is very strage. For I often see people chase stability in life. I see people trying to get away, as far away as possible, from the uncertainty of tomorrow. I myself, may have been troubled by it in the past several times. But, thinking about it, I feel like it is that uncertainty, that out of routine things that make life interesting. And make it fun!
Of course you can enjoy learning about something or meeting someone, knowing prior that you are going to do that. But it is, in my opinion, the most wonderful feeling, to be bumping into someone or doing something, or talking to your loved ones, in the most spontanious, unplanned way possible.
It is that thought that often leads me astray from what I would once have thought of as my “goal” in life, perhaps in a good way. For maybe what I do enjoy doing today, I would not 10 years from now. Maybe that spark that I have today, would not be there 10 years from now.
Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it - that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
On the other hand, that also feels wrong. For if I were to be hesitant to commit to something, what about Love? Is that not what love is? That what remains, even after your hair turn grey? Perhaps, again, unlike how I believed, I do not know the answer to that, and wouldn’t, until my hair turn grey. Perhaps their isn’t one single answer to that, and the answer may depent on person, place, time. I do not know. Another, perhaps less important, but still rather curious question, would be: without commitement, how does one get good at doing something? Again, I do not know.
Maybe, if you were to ask this to me 2 years ago, I would have a very definitive answer to both these questions. But, as I grow up, I seem to have lost what I know, and have been uncertain about a lot of things. I have certainly been thinking and reflecting on these, but I guess I have a lifetime to figure out the true answers to these questions, at least for myself. Perhaps.
What I do know (I think), is that the uncertainty is what makes it all interesting. Again, I am not sure about that either. For I have seen many people at peace when they’ve been told exactly what to do and they have no worrying questions in their mind about why they would do so.
Indeed, as life goes on, I would be eagerly pondering over the questions, and with the people I meet and share time along the way, I would be thinking it through together.