Humans of Planet Earth

Quantum mechanics and philosophy tell us the spaces between us don’t really exist. Life tells us exactly the same thing… maybe it’s time we started listening.

We generally learn lessons as an afterthought. While the lesson is being taught, we aren’t really aware that life is imparting some valuable information to us. We just go along for the ride as we mostly don’t have much of a choice. It’s only later that the lesson hits home in a blaze of enlightenment, or it dawns on us gradually, like gentle rainfall that coaxes flowers to grow out of stone.

One of the things I’ve understood from my twenty-five years of globetrotting is that we humans, regardless of our cultural baggage, bank balances, passport power, personal talent, or whatever ideology was bequeathed to us at birth… we are all the same. We are all in the same boat. It’s a boat that carries billions of living creatures and travels at roughly 220 kms per second to an unknown destination, and only the universe gets to decide when we disembark. Our human experience of this cosmic Noah’s Ark is infinitesimally small and insignificant. Yet, we waste it on petty rivalry, defending artificial boundaries, and serving our own egos rather than making the journey a pleasant experience for our fellow travellers.

It was in the UAE that I was given the first chapter of this valuable learning; that looking past differences and looking for commonalities with my fellow humans was one of the greatest experiences of this travel package called life that I had been given. I landed in Dubai some two-odd decades ago, still steeped in my small-town India ways, still conditioned by the legacy of my misspent army brat youth and my Hollywood imaginings of what life outside India would be like. The towering buildings, the smooth cabs, the shopping malls, the sparkling waters of the Arabian Sea, the glitter of the city line at night… the parched traveller that had always existed in me soaked it all in. I drank as deeply as I could from the cup of life.

I ended up PGing with a Pakistani family in Sharjah, something I was a little hesitant to do given the history between their nation and mine, and thus began one of my greatest life lessons. They were a family of five. A father who I called Bhaiya (elder brother), a mother I called Didi (elder sister), and three gorgeous girls between the ages of 4 and 8 that all called me Maasi (aunt). I payed them rent for only a room but yet I got fed – a lot. The little girls would clamour around me the evenings I was home and share their chocolates with me. The littlest one figured out that running her fingers through my hair relaxed me and took to combing my hair for hours on end whenever an opportunity presented. Didi would wake up at midnight if she heard me come in late and warm up food and sit with me to make sure I had eaten one proper meal in the day. Bhaiya was always respectful and kind, asking after my work and how I was faring, and there was zero judgement or any sense of the fierce political divide between our nations. They cared for me with a gentleness and affection that has stayed with me despite the inexorable march of time.