I’ve Walked Miles and Miles Alone
Posted: Thursday, July 14, 2011
by Drunken Mystic
http://drunkenmystic.wordpress.com
I’d walk a mile for anything that would be considered as a part of the natural process of life. The journey began right away when I cried because I couldn’t walk or even turn my body to my left or right and I was so tiny that I couldn’t even crawl. All I could do was waahh...wahhh....wahhh! Somebody had to cradle this walker who had just begun his journey.
I was only two and a half and my innocent mind hadn’t offered my awareness the fact that this boy would love to travel around and walk long distances. I always had the habit of disappearing from home. My mom would either send one of my sisters or my servant to call for me and then give me a good whacking. She didn’t whack me when I was two. The whacking started after I turned five.
To get back to the day of two and a half years old, the servant maid had forgotten to inform my mother that she had finished with the chores and is leaving and I was sitting in the hall and playing on my own and my mom just dozed off, and she just left with the door open. That was a good opportunity for me to just escape and have a nice outing and it was ‘Baby’s Day Out’. I just grabbed the suspenders which supported the railing of the staircase and slowly took one step at a time from the second floor of the building, and I don’t remember the rest as my sister said that our neighbour found me on the backside of the building (there was one more staircase over the gutter) sitting near a cow and enjoying myself in the green grass. This was just probably one hundred steps for my mom or sisters, but the distance covered was certainly a mile for my small feet.
I started over there and started to walk more and more between school and home every day and this journey didn’t seem as tedious as having to face the greater challenges of the stopovers during the teenage years. Trying to break away from the norms and run miles ahead of everybody else and wanting to catch up with some breathing space? This was an impossible task to achieve. I wanted to prove that I am different even though I flunk in school. Oh boy! Ask me. I even scored a zero many....many times and when I would see my mark sheet, I would just laugh the hell out while everybody else at home would be carrying expressions of anger, tears and what not.
They all said, “Shyam is definitely not going to be able to make it!” They constantly asked, “What are you doing to, do if you don’t score good grades? Are you even worried about your future? Why don’t you study? Why don’t you finish your graduation? What is it that you want to become?” They asked me the question and gave the answer themselves, “You should strive to graduate in engineering”. I had no passion for engineering, medicine or even business administration.
Firstly, I wanted to become a pilot. That was the first dream I had realized as a five year old boy when I had to write twenty to thirty odd words on any chosen topic of what I wanted to be. I just cut the picture of an airplane from a Tamil monthly magazine sitting beside my mom and said, “I want to become a pilot.” She just smiled and said, “You will.”
I was 14 and my mom wasn’t there anymore, and my passion had changed to becoming a cricketer. I faced the rebuttal immediately from my uncle with whom I had been “dumped” by my father, and he said, “You must first become a graduate”. All cricketers are graduates too. He was wrong. The best cricketer in the world today, Mr. Sachin Tendulkar, flunk by six marks in his finals in high school and was ineligible to get enrolled with any university.
I felt discouraged immediately. I was still walking miles of my life with a brighter hope that I will be somebody noteworthy someday and will definitely make a change, earn recognition, and feel appreciated. I fought against the entire “idea” of the society that a child must be appreciated, loved and cared and nurtured only if he/she scores good grades, otherwise they should be out-casted, or ostracized and even cornered from the entire group of elites racing towards distinction.
This treatment gave me even greater strength to walk further and I started to become a loner with time. I had become so reclusive that I started almost to enjoy living without friends or socializing. How many miles did I walk? I lost count now and still am walking regardless anybody walks in or out of my life.
Soon after, I watched a movie enacted by kids of my age and that inspired me to become an actor. I knew I had the talent to sing, and dance a little bit, and I always wanted to perform in school but again the opportunity went to only those kids who scored high grades. I even joined the dramatics class, and our teacher was too dramatic about us and never taught a single word on dramatics.
All we had to do was just sit and watch her draconian expression and suddenly she would say, “So, who is going perform today?” I would immediately take a gulp of air in my throat and could sense my heartbeat getting faster and I’d be biting my nails wondering, “Perform? How? What?” Finally, I realized, the class was only for those who "knew" to perform, and not for those who wanted to learn how to perform.
One fine day, she started casting each one of us in different characters and said, “Memorize all these lines by Friday, and I want to see a performance.” This was so uninspiring to me that I refused to obey. Years later as an artist I looked back at this episode and said to myself, “Oops! I have no idea about the character I am going to play? I don’t even know what he looks like, and am not even sure what kind of body language I am supposed to work upon and, excuse me.....what about voice exercises, modulation, facial expressions, hand gestures?” Who’s going to teach me all of that? I wasn’t even aware these terms existed then, until I started doing professional theatre.
The rest of the class memorized and did something, while I refused to do as I was told. When our group was called upon, I just simply stared at the “A” scorer and he was gaping back at me after each dialogue. He stood with his hands on his waist helplessly looking at our teacher. This really got her irritated and she just yelled at me and asked me to go back to my seat. I prayed to the Lord, “When is the bell going to ring so I can get rid of her face?”
I certainly wanted to go for a graduation in Theatre Arts and was also interested in becoming a filmmaker, and I had no knowledge about which university in India had a course in theatre. There is one renowned school, National School of Drama in New Delhi and that’s where all the renowned Bollywood actors come from. This school is known to produce the best of Indian actors and the criteria to get selected was a graduation in any discipline and I was lazy to just study three years something which I never liked. I hated math, physics, chemistry and I just hated sitting for an examination each semester and memorize some content or use my brains to work on calculus.
Finally, coming back again to Chennai in 1999 after leaving this city in 1994, I started hunting for a theatre company which would be willing to work with me. I didn’t know a word about acting. I didn’t even know the basics of stage movements, and dynamics. But I found a good one run by a passionate artist who later became a very good friend of mine. He saw me through thick and thin and worked on my confidence, pushed me negatively, crushed me and grinded me and honed me completely.
The process had started and that was the day I realized why an English teacher who knows nothing more than books should not attempt to become a dramatics teacher. She had absolute zero knowledge about theatre exercises and workshops for improving voice, body language and overcoming stage fright. I wish I could give her a zero in teaching and disqualify her today. The story is very long, isn’t it? From here, I decided to walk long miles in the mountains finally, seeking a true experience from a yogi living in the mountains and I found nobody.
Walking long distances and trekking through the Himalayas was not difficult for me at all except that my joints were not suited to it. I would immediately feel arthritic after a few treks. I enjoyed these long distances where nobody ever came and bothered my space. Just listening to the wind blowing across the tall pine trees which were at least seventy to eighty years old and the leaves would just start to whistle while the entire valley would resound with humming bees with thousands going together like the Buddhist monks chanting in a monastery. I used to find my spot on a single rock on the edge of one of these mountains and sit and meditate to experience the expansion of the Self which would encompass not only the valley, but everything beyond! There was no class, no teacher trying teach me to walk the mile with yardsticks set by the system. I was free!
I’ve walked miles and miles now, and am still walking. I have to now walk across Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa and America and then further into the sky reaching for the stars. It’s a dream. So, don’t take it too seriously, but it can be achieved!
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Hey buddy! Great piece, the life story of yours, your struggles and your joyous moments are inspiring for others...
Thanks for sharing your heart...
ChiradeepThanks, Chiradeep. Have a great time!
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