Of the three days spent in Chennai…..
Of going along when my son who went to join B.Tech Computer Science at SRM, Kattankulathur…..
Apologizing to Rajesh, who tried repeatedly to reach me…..
Like in a gallery, we become mere witnesses at the heart of the city.
We become nothing, we become no one.
We see everything, yet it’s as if we see nothing.
It makes us ask:
When does a human become human?
When does anything become anything?
Apart from simply becoming, is there any deliberate effort involved?
Apart from simply becoming, is effort even necessary?
If effort is necessary:
Does one become as someone else has defined it?
Should one become as someone else has defined it?
Does every word become what its speaker intended?
Or does every word require effort to become what its speaker intended?
And yet, some things remain:
Unfamiliarity is the true relic, the true possession of life.
You too will become a mere passerby: the first and last lesson the city teaches you.
No one, nothing: no one to anyone.
The address of unfamiliarity, the address of no one going anywhere — the address that any city gives to anyone.
This non-address that is an address: it renders submission, pretense, and hypocrisy unnecessary.
The one thing that guarantees freedom and newness: this non-address that is an address, unfamiliarity.
What we claim as familiarity: a trap we set for ourselves. A trap within the definitions and compulsions that familiarity creates.
Beyond all claims, everyone is a stranger to everyone else.
Everyone is alone, each in their own solitude.
Given this, when does a human become the human we understand as human?
When connecting with one another.
When able to connect with one another.
The capacity to connect with one another, the ability to connect with one another — that is a human’s capacity for communication.
It is the capacity for communication that makes the human we understand, human.
The first quality of communication is familiarity — the smile that creates familiarity, the smile that builds it.
If one cannot connect through communication…..,
if the capacity for communication is lost….,
if familiarity and the smile cannot be established…..,
the human has died.
Even while alive, the human has died.
The one catalyst that yields gain without loss: the smile, the response given through smiling.
The smile, responding with a smile — this is the unique trait that makes a human human. A trait belonging to humans alone.
One who responds with a smile becomes positive themselves.
That positivity is the profit the smile gives them.
And the one who sees that smile?
They too profit.
Because the one who sees a smile becomes positive the very moment they see it.
Smiling back in return — that positivity is shown by them too, immediately.
This is how positivity sows, reaps, and multiplies positivity.
That it turns everyone who sees a smile into someone who smiles — this is the revolution, the continuity that a smile creates.
Familiarity and the smile sow positivity a hundredfold with positivity, and reap it a hundred-thousandfold.
It is the smile that makes one burning candle light a hundred thousand other candles.
The name for the process by which a single seed splits itself open, sprouts, grows, and produces a hundred thousand seeds — that name is smile.
This is also, in part, why it is said that man is a social animal.
The human with the capacity to communicate, the human who feigns familiarity, the human who smiles — is a social animal.
This is also, in part, why the human with the capacity to communicate, who feigns familiarity, who smiles, has brought about revolutions of change in the world.
Like waves, one after another, hundreds of thousands of changes and revolutions have been made continuous.
This is how being a social animal became the one face of humanity, the one definition of humanity, the foundation for all change and all revolution.
When do humans become human?
When they become one who responds.
Not just humans — every living being becomes that being, every human becomes that human, every moving thing becomes that moving thing, only through the capacity to respond.
A being, a human, that has lost the capacity to respond has, in effect, died — has ceased to be alive. The moving has become the unmoving.
Another word in language for response is answer, reply.
If one fails to give an answer (or reply), then that person (or being) has died.
The capacity to give an answer or response is responsibility.
(responsibility = ability to respond)
If you are not responsible (if you cannot respond), know also that you have become a lifeless corpse.
You are your own magnitude.
Your life is your magnitude.
The magnitude of life and living is magnitude — your magnitude.
Life and living reside in responsiveness.
One who cannot respond has lost life.
The magnitude of life and living is the magnitude of that responsibility called responsiveness.
The one being that stands highest in response-ability — in response-ability-conscience — is the human.
The one trait that makes a human human is that responsibility, that responsiveness called responsibility.
Know this: your success is your happiness.
If you are not happy, you have not succeeded.
Your success is your happiness — a measure no one else can take, a yardstick no one else holds.
You become wealthy only if you yourself feel it is enough.
If it is not enough, if you feel it falls short, you are poor.
Whether it is enough for you, whether it suffices — this too is something no one else knows, something that cannot be measured or understood by another.
That is why one person remains poor, remains a failure, even while living in a palace.
That is exactly why another person becomes content and successful even while living on the street, in a hut.
However great you may consider yourself to have become: it is right there that you become nothing, no one — that you find you cannot become anything or anyone.
A mango tree will not bear jackfruit. A kanjiram tree will not bear jasmine either.
The quality of the seed will always show itself, will always come out, wherever and whenever.
A wolf in sheep’s clothing is not a sheep; it is only, purely, a wolf — that is how and when this becomes evident.
That is how and when it becomes true that if there is no compatibility, nothing that exists matters.
If there is no compatibility:
Milk will curdle.
The egg will fail to set.
The seed and the plant will rot.
However much and however many things you may come to own, it is right there, right then, that you become poor.
When your identity becomes the illusion of the property, wealth, house, car, job, and institutions you own….
When your identity is no longer that of the life you live, the life you have lived…
If your identity is that of the things you own, know that you are not the owner — you are the slave.
You are the slave of the property, wealth, house, car, job, and institutions you own.
One who must labor for them, as they dictate.
You are merely a donkey, uselessly bearing burdens.
The burden-bearing donkey also believes:
that it is the owner of the burdens it carries.
that it too possesses the identity those burdens confer.
But the burden-bearing donkey never comes to know the content or meaning of the burden it carries.
It is a burden-bearing donkey only because it is forced to bear the burden.
In effect, we are exactly the same.
There is nothing to gain or lose that is not life itself.
Who lived well is something no one else can determine or define.
That is precisely why one who must live performing for others is merely a slave to those others.
One who gains respect is a slave to those who respect him.
One who lives to gain respect is a slave to those he must be respected by.
How he must live, how he must behave — that is decided by those who respect him.
Those who respect are the owners, the masters.
The one who is respected is the slave, the subordinate.
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