Freedom - a feeling, a right, we were born with. I wonder if a self-centered soul like me, would have sacrificed my blood and life for a free India during the British Raj. May be, if I were born in that age.
But isn't freedom a way of life? Ask a bird, who's just learn to fly or a child who walks out of the school for his summer vacations. Freedom for such innocent souls is a much awaited moment. But for a prisoner who yearns to be free, after spending more than half of his life behind bars, "Freedom" may well be a question to be answered.
A question that must have haunted him, day and night, wondering of the life that awaits him on the other side of the wall.
Ever since I was in school, I prayed there were no more homework or uniforms. I wished for a freedom from the nuisances - from those rules that we, as children, failed to understand. They say, “Patience pays”, so it did. School was soon over, but then the shackles of higher education soon gripped my feet. “Homework” was soon relabeled as “Assignments”, which were even more gruesome than what it was back in school.
“Grass is always greener on the other side” – an idiom that made more sense to me now, than it did when taught during literature classes. With school and college years soon to be over forever, I was ready to jump into the open sea of the corporate world and be free to dive and swim the way I want. I only wish it were. The freedom of bunking lectures and going for movies, the freedom of sipping chai by a small tea stall in the wee hours of the morning, and many such freedoms were soon to sink deep under the sea bed. Amidst this, it would give me the “financial” freedom, one that I had longed for; ever since I learnt the meaning of being ‘financially independent’. But now I question myself; “Can money buy you that freedom?” A question best to be left as “optional” in our exam paper called “Life”.
But now I am tied down by project dead-lines. My cubicle is my new home, and my home, my new guest-house; where there’s little I do beyond eating and sleeping, in those few hours that I spend there.
I, like many, have learned that freedom always comes at a cost. The cost of giving away the freedom you had earlier. The boy who walked out of school, the college student who sipped tea by the tea-stall, the IT consultant who can now buy a car whose poster he once had in his dorm-room, all of them have given up their freedoms in pursuit of freedoms of the other kind.
Can we ever attain freedom from freedom? Or is it a state of mind that gives us the pseudo satisfaction of being free? I wonder.
Awesome !!
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