The Toughest Time of my Life

Let me begin this post with a couplet from my favorite Ghazal:
सुर्खरू होता है इंसान ठोकरे खाने के बाद
रंग लाती है हिना पत्थर पे पिस जाने के बाद

I grew up in a joint family that had five families sharing one big house, with more than 25 family members of three generations living together. When I think about those times, fond memories of childhood engulf me. The most interesting part was that while these families were independent and distinct, the close interaction made us resemble a joint family. I am not sure how to paint the picture for today's gen Y of nuclear families. As kids we were always surrounded with siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents - a scenario that you get to see today when the extended family gathers at a wedding.

We kids had a lot of love, affection, company, advice, and guidance at our disposal all the time. There was always someone available to pay attention to your needs, be it for playing, listening to you, answering your question, providing help, or just hanging around. This gave rise to a healthy social interaction within the family. As a result, I did not get to know what is it to be alone and could not learn to handle loneliness.

At that time, I could not imagine that I can be all alone anytime in life. In fact it may sound funny now, but I distinctly remember a scary nightmare I used to get frequently, in which I found myself all alone and lost, crying and running around to find someone familiar, and then I used to wake up in the middle of night - scared but thankful that it was just a dream. Little did I know at that time that this nightmare would turn into reality one day and I would have to live all by myself for 6 long years.

When I came to Mumbai in 1982 for my first job in Tata Electric, I was all excited about the new job, the city, the end of study and so on. After the initial excitement wore off, I started realizing the enormity of the situation. I was all alone in a big city, with few friends, and very little connection to the family that I loved so much. This was a time when there were no mobiles, email, Facebook, BBM, Viber or WhatsApp to help you keep in touch. An annual visit, exchange of letters, and occasional trunk call were my sole means of staying in touch with family.

I can still recall vividly the first time when I got this scary feeling. I was re-living my dreaded nightmare - with a minor difference that I could not wake up and shake it off any longer. I have no doubt that 1982-88 has been the toughest time that I ever faced in my life. Here was an ordinary youngster at a turning point of his life, trying to find his place in the world, full of doubts about himself, full of worries about his future, and afraid of the huge challenges ahead. The situation gets only worse when you have to face it alone, far away from the comfort of a loving family. I get a shudder when I remember the gloomy situation even after so many years.

Looking back, I was away from the comfort of home at IIT Roorkee hostel during 1978-82 as well, but I did not have a strong attack of loneliness at that time. It is difficult to say for sure now, but this may be due to following reasons:

• The hostel environment was not very different from home with so many good friends around. I never felt I am alone there. 
• The new found joy of living independently and trying new things overshadowed the feelings of separation from the family.
• The focus on my goal to build a career did not leave time to worry about it.
• In any case, Roorkee was not far from my place, and on every possible opportunity, I used to rush to Meerut or Saharanpur to address the feeling of homesickness.     

Walt Disney said, "All the adversity I've had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me", and I fully agree with him. In hindsight, I can say that this difficult time was also the golden opportunity for self-development and to strengthen myself in several areas:

• The very first and the most important benefit of this solitude was to help me change myself. Earlier I used to resist any thought of change, but being in this extreme situation helped me get rid of my rigidity making it easier for me to bring about desired changes in my thinking and behavior. 
• Out of sheer necessity, I discovered positive thinking to keep my sanity. I got interested in reading books and following gurus and thinkers that talked about the power of mind. I exchanged these ideas with like minded friends and experimented with positive thinking in day-to-day life. The results were encouraging and it gave me a clear understanding that I could be happy if I choose to think positively.   
• I learned to make close friends and nurture the friendship. I had friends earlier as well, but the need for friendship was not that strong earlier due to the presence of extended family. Many great friends that I came across in this period helped me overcome the loneliness. I also found relatives in Mumbai and kept in close touch with them.
• I found that the fear of loneliness is a bigger problem than the actual loneliness itself. As a result, the first step was to convince myself that it is fine to be alone. I learned the technique of controlling my fear, relaxation and meditation skills to help control the fear reaction. This is a vital life skill that has application in all walks of life. I still practice these skills and use them very often in numerous situations. I wouldn't have felt the need to learn them had I stayed in the comfort of my home.
• As I stopped pitying myself for my loneliness and concentrated on finding development opportunities, I started getting pleasant surprises of self-discovery. I found strengths that I did not know about. This replaced the feeling of helplessness with a new found confidence. 
• My experience shows that the best way to counter loneliness is to get really busy. Have no time to feel miserable. I immersed myself in my work at job, and took up interesting reading and hobby work to keep myself busy after office. It may sound weird now, but there was a time when I joined a local library and started finishing two books every week. Though these were mostly fiction books, still this left me with a good habit of speed reading. 

So, the moral of my story is that adversity acted as the best teacher in my life, and hence I thank God for making me go through this golden period. All of us go through some rough patches every now and then. There are times when we handle them well, seeing them as a necessary evil that needs to be endured, and in rare cases, an adversity in life shatters us completely leaving no hope. My purpose of writing this post is to urge you to see such adverse situation as an opportunity for development.

Papaji would have explained this idea very simply with the following verse:

सुख में है व्यसन प्रमाद भरे, दुख में पुरुषार्थ चमकता है
दुख की ज्वाला में जलकर ही, कुंदन सा तेज दमकता है

---

Trivia - The idea of this post came to me while working on a post in April.  The post said that I was a loner, which brought back a flood of memories and I decided to write in detail about it.