Freedom Has Many Faces
As the subject in this story might suggest, I am not exactly here today, sulking on a Sunday afternoon, disrobing rather unveiling the many faces of freedom. In fact, I have just had an hour long happy noon day siesta and woke up with a very funny thought! Could be the aftermath of a forgotten dream that I can't quite trail back! It was like someone whispering in my ears in my sleep a one-liner punch line. "Like fantasy, freedom has many faces!!"
Oops! What a heavy thought! Jokes apart, my divine message (laugh if you will, but if you wake up with one single line echoing in your mind, you do infer a divine interference from another world), left me thinking for a while and me thought, “Hey come on, get up, go and write what you think now. Someday it might make sense."
Have you ever wondered that just like fantasy, freedom has many faces? And its definition and form change with time, opportunities and convenience? Not necessarily in that order!
Just for example, a close school friend of mine had categorically told me some years back, while graduating out of The Indian Institute of Technology, that his definition of freedom was essentially proportional to his financial independence. Just like all freshmen out of college, his interpretation of freedom was related to his liberated potentials to fulfill his materialistic dreams. Like all fresh Engineering graduates out to make it big some day in the corporate world, my friend had a dream..."I want to earn my own living, make my own life, lead my own decisions; I want to be free". Just within a couple of years, while his basic priorities remain the same, I see him now slowly treading towards a more spiritual definition of freedom.
For instance, over a drink and dinner in Calcutta one summer, he told me that he would like to invest his time, energy and money in something more creative, more philanthropic than becoming a CEO of a MNC after he is thirty five. In a way again, I now see him looking ahead to a more free life, without having to haggle over trivial but essential materialistic pleasures! Was he also indicating that after a few years, he wants to be free, as in an absolutely changed definition? Free to do whatever he wanted to do, free to perform his role as a good human being and a socially conscious individual, free to shun the rat race of the corporate world and live a more meaningful life instead? For this, my friend told me that he was ready to slog through the next few years to buy him the comfort for the rest few decades!
The priorities have not changed. But the perspective has. And somewhere down the line, hides another meaningful gradient. My friend wants to be a millionaire in the next five years, so that he can be free to take the leap. His sense and perception of freedom has changed, or must I say grown over the years, and this transformation from material freedom to spiritual liberation is I presume…what they call stalking towards Moksha. Who ever thought, that in a buzzing city of sky scrappers and high ambitions, the search for nirvana still co-existed??
To freedom and all its images,
In awe and reverence
Ananya
