“O poor, unthinking human heart! Error will not go away. Logic and reason are slow to penetrate. We cling with both arms to false hope, refusing to believe the weightiest proof against it, embracing it with all our strength. In the end it escapes , ripping our veins and draining our heart’s blood; until regaining consciousness, we rush to fall into snares of delusion all over again”-Rabindra Nath Tagore.
Apart from being a novelist, poet, painter, socio-religious reformer and the first non-European to win a Noble Prize, Rabindra Nath Tagore, to me is a superhuman entity, who has the power to delve into your hearts and pen down the exact feelings you feel at a certain turn of life.
The above extract is the last few lines from one of his exceptional works “The Postmaster”. These lines refer to the feelings of a 13 odd years old, uneducated and orphaned village girl “Ratan” who, having lost everything , found solace in a lonely postmaster’s heart, and now that the postmaster is being transferred to a different place, Ratan can no longer constrain her emotions.
Aren’t we all “Ratan”s at least at one point of time ? Don’t we always hope to live, live to hope? We keep hoping till a point where it’s not even hope.....just meaningless fantasy. That’s what keeps most of us going. We go through a bad day hoping everything would be right the next day. We fall in and out of love, hoping, each time, ‘this is the one’. Once we fail to realize our hopes and dreams, we do not cease to exist, we simply cling on to another hope. We weave our own fantasies.....however fantastic they might be, and believe them to be true to the extent that we even tend to shroud our senses to justify our beliefs.
The ultimate example of “hoping against hope” is my mother. Being a sibling to a mentally retarded child is hard enough...but being a mother to one????....I don’t think I’d be able to stand it. But my mother could do it. I was around 9-10 years old when my brother was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). I kind of grew accustomed to the fact that my brother was different. But my mother never showed a sign as to what was going on inside her. My father tried his best to make life easy for her...but ultimately it is she who had to take care of “bhai”. We all have our own lives. I live in an entirely different world of my own....away from home. My father usually is busy with work...we both have an outlet to our frustrations. But my mother , in spite of knowing that “bhai” could never be normal, still has a little hope tucked away somewhere in her heart which keeps her going through the days.
I’m sure, there are other people in this world, who, like my mother, is hoping for a better life and living into eternity to realize it. So, never lose hope... if it’s a sunny day you are hoping for, keep hoping...if it turns out to be dark, hope for rain. ;)
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