A Solitary Scribble, by Swapnil Srivastava

This article has been submitted by Swapnil Srivastava for the CLATGyan Blog Post Writing Competition. If you think this article is a good read, ‘Like’ this article on Facebook (the button is at the bottom of this piece) or post a comment using the ‘comments’ section below.

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All my life my parents have compelled me to socialize and to oblige to the norms of the society. And all my life I have paid no heed to this particular line of thought. I never really understood what the fuss was all about. Then a few weeks ago I had a very interesting conversation with a friend of mine. She was worried that things between her and her best friend might not be the same. She went on to explain how important her best friend was to her and how she feared loneliness. I consoled her, like any normal human being would do. However, her elaborate words had planted within me a seed of doubt. Was solitude a bad thing? I had been a loner all my life and never once had I felt lonely. But seeing her so shaken up by the thought of being alone made me question if all was well with me.

So I started observing people. I started noticing all the fake smiles, and all the phony concern. The revelations were such that my head would reel for hours at a stretch. No matter how hard I tried, I failed to comprehend all this make-believe. It was then that Aristotle came to my rescue. In his words, man is a social animal, and these were the words that made me see light. I realized that all this drudgery was to connect with other people. It was what my parents would call “socializing”. Once I had put my initial doubts to bed, I realized that I wasn’t exactly a gone case. I was just one of those sorry souls who were attempting to connect to themselves before they began connecting with others. I had always found solitude rather empowering. It was in these recluse moments that I became conscious of the sound of my heavy breathing, the rhythmic thumping of my heart. In those hours of isolation, I learnt to appreciate the little things that we were unaware of. Things that we generally neglect because we are too busy indulging in the cacophony of companionship.

I sat myself down to write this article in one such lonely hour. And now that I reach the end of my period of detachment, I realize that my confinement is what set me free. I realize that solitude is not that a bad a thing after all.

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For the past two years, the eighteen-year-old Swapnil Srivastava has been fighting to keep up with the never ending demands of being a science student. He occasionally picks up a pen to vent out his anguish over the ignorance he sees around himself. He has often been tagged as obnoxious, insensitive and often impetuous. He’s a hardcore Barcelona fan. An avid debater. He has also tried his hands on a few MUNs (with no substantial success!). He has a blog that is never updated for he is too lazy to do so. All in all, he is the modern day slacktivist who has nothing better to do than be cynical, skeptical and sarcastic.