“May the odds be ever in your favour”
On hope, the human condition, and learning to live, despite, despite, despite.
A few days after my admission into this mammoth of an academic institution (in terms of both size and repute), I made a remark to my newly minted friend, roommate and fellow English major, about how IITs are a lot like “kindergarten, but for techies”. She laughed. I do not feel like an “IIT-ian”, she said, yet here we are. Here we are, indeed.
As someone who abandoned her dreams of pursuing medicine at 17 to take up English Literature, I always assumed that I had bowed out of the “rat race”, but now, freshly 21, I realise that I am still a participant of said rat race, but now I am a different species entirely, maybe a duck, or something just as ill-equipped. My point is that there are very few places I would have ever imagined myself to inhabit, and this institution might top that list. Yet somehow, here I am — was this predestined, or is it due to my own free will?
This is a question I have continued to ask myself, especially in the last few years. People around me constantly talk of hard work rewarding those who are deserving, yet it all seemed like a farce to me. In my first semester of undergrad, I came across the figure of Job, from the Bible. My suffering is unreasonable, Job cries, and God shouts back to him from the skies, to have faith, an abstract notion to find comfort in, meaningless in the face of all the losses Job has experienced, his family, health and wealth. His predicament finds no resolution, it only posed the question — “why me?”.
Funnily, I could relate to him. My life, too, felt like one long series of unlikely events thrown at me by some “invisible, arbitrary mechanism”; and while Job called it God, I liked to call it fate, or perhaps, the “human condition”. My favourite yapper i.e philosopher of the 20th century, Albert Camus called it “the absurd”.
Camus theorised the concept of the absurd in his 1942 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”. All of humanity stands facing an irrational world, from which they seek happiness and reason. We have all wondered at least once, “Why me? Why us? Why not her? Why not them?” and so on. The absurd is born from precisely this conflict between “the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world”. As per Camus, absurdism sanctioned the “difficult wisdom” which was the awareness that everything we could possibly do, all of our life’s work is essentially ‘for nothing’, and that it could all be destroyed in a day.
So then why do anything at all? Why live even?
I saw a post online recently, which I quote here: “If life is a never ending loop of dirty dishes and laundry, then that means life is a never ending loop of home cooked meals and comfy clean clothes”. To arbitrarily suffer, is the human condition, one might say, yet this also makes possible the simultaneous existence of deliberate joys. The only way open to the absurd creator, Camus says, is to give the void its colours. We live a life fated to die an inevitable death, and thus we choose to love, we choose to make art, make music, make love, we choose to remain creatures of habit, we choose to keep pushing the metaphorical boulder up the metaphorical hill, not so unlike dear Sisyphus. What mattered was that we continued to do so.
This brings me back to why I wanted to write about such a roundabout topic in the first place. In today’s capitalist world driven by its predetermined notions of success and failure, one struggles with situating themselves and what they might be entitled to, what they might deserve. I for instance, find myself incapable of participating in the kind of hustle-culture that extremely saturates my immediate surroundings. But at times of great self-doubt, I return to Ursula K. Le Guin’s words on the notion of “deserving” in The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia: “For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger… Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”
We might only really be here to exist continually, to create meaning out of a life that is solely meaningless, that is finite, and hence limitless. I try to take up whatever excites me, whether that be choosing to pursue an English degree or watching the sky turn pink. I do what I am passionate about with the awareness that I am trying to exist fully in one moment, and not in a future far away where I might be something more. Friends think I am pessimistic, but I say I am hopeful, hopeful that I am making the most out of a day I am given, that I am at peace, while chanting to myself words spoken by a cherished character from a much adored book: “…things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realise that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
Edited by Oishi
Design by Lakshmi
Article 19 