Waiting for Godot!

Those who have studied American literature would remember the title, a modern English play, belonging to the genre of ‘abstract drama’ by Samuel Beckett. This is considered as a prototype of the abstract drama, which captures the absurdity of life in modern times. The entire drama revolves around a person waiting for another person named Godot! There is no forward or backward movement in the drama, at the end of the play, the audience are exactly in the same place where they were at the beginning, and so also the characters.

While on the one hand, the modern world swears by speed, on the other it is typified by endless waiting. Every moment of waiting has been added to the quest for better speed. We want quick solutions, and waiting as it were becoming a thing of the past. There is no one who really wants to wait. Waiting for three hours to get the parts of computers we have paid for, is not just a thing we can take so easily. People taking their own sweet time to pull out the required parts from the store, and placing them together so that they could pack off the customer in half an hour is an art which is alien to the boys working in this biggest computer shop in the whole of Eastern India. But who will teach them the art of getting things faster than they are used to?

But is it not time that we just throw our watches and clocks and just flow with time, following the course of the sun and the moon? Some years ago, when I decided to stay with the Santal tribals, I did the same, and I was happy without knowing the time, while staying in a village, where there is no way of knowing the hour of the day. What I could say was night and day, morning and evening and noon. I would look at the sun, and would guess the time for my meals. It gives a different feeling when we forget for a moment the human-made indicators of time. Time and space cannot be measured in human terms and categories; one has to let oneself to flow in the current in order to feel the cosmic flow.

Waiting is associated with a lot of pain and suffering, and every waiting reminds the persons concerned that there is a great expectation, though the expectation may not end up with a positive result. Like in the case of Waiting for Godot, at the end no one might turn up. The entire waiting might come to naught, but then the waiting per se has a meaning, which cannot be separated from the act itself. Fortunately when I went to the shop today, I had not worn my wrist watch, and so was less conscious of every passing hour, but then there were wall-clocks which reminded me that I had already spent four hours waiting in that cozy room, with a lot of men and women crisscrossed, each one minding their own business.

Waiting is a sweet and sour candy that we are given, even when we are not in a mood to chew it. The taste however is not in the candy, but in the tongue and the mind which provides the taste. If your waiting is on someone or something that you would be delighted to, then the candy would taste sweet; if you are waiting to meet a bad news, or bad person, whom you would have liked to miss, but are forced to meet, then the candy would taste sour. You cannot throw the candy altogether, because each moment of our life comes with a waiting, with a sugar coated candy, and it is for me to make it taste sweet or sour! Waiting after all is not a physical phenomenon, but very much a psychological one.

Waiting is Wanting

Believe it or not, there is a lot of thrill in waiting, mingled with certain amount of anticipation, colored with a dose of anxiety. Waiting for something new is all the more exciting; for instance waiting to meet a friend about whom I had heard a lot but had never met him/her is something that cannot be adequately expressed by words. We imagine things – long hair or short hair, fair or darkish in complexion, introvert or extravert, jovial or serious, and the list is quite endless. But at the time of meeting, all our expectations and imagination of the person fade into oblivion, and we never recollect what we had imagined. Every waiting has the potential to either put us in sheer joy, or drown us in perpetual sorrow. The longing that we anticipate in waiting for a person, can only be experienced, and it might be hard to verbalise the feelings that accompany the waiting.

Those who had the privilege of being introduced to modern English literature would have come across a play Waiting for Godot, which is included in the category of Absurd Theatre. In fact it would be quite hard to say even a few words about this play, which had brought Beckett to fame in literary circles, because it portrayed reality as we encounter each day; Beckett need not tell us that our lives are full of absurdities, whose meaning and significance we can never fathom. Waiting for Godot is basically about waiting for no one, because Godot does not turn up, and was Godot a real person or just a concept we take it for granted? Those however are questions that literary students can crack their minds with, and we on our part can only say that it was a different kind of waiting, quite contrary to the kind of waiting that we have just mentioned in the first paragraph. You may ask me, but can there be two kinds of waiting in reality? Isn’t reality one and undivided? Every sage worth his/her name in India has said something or other about this undivided non-dualistic (a-dvaita) nature of reality. But let us quickly say that reality is one, however our perceptions can be deceptive, and we may take a rope for snake, and we may blame ignorance (avidya) as the root cause of it all.

Waiting… can be excruciating; there is a sizable amount of anxiety that this waiting arouses in us; what if… is the phrase that keeps flickering in our mind. What if the person does not turn up? What if the train is cancelled? What if something were to happen to my friend who is to come to my home for lunch on the way? It is not easy to put up with these questions, often unrealistic, but the mind does not leave any possibility outside its domain; it is true that it often projects only the worst and we have to fight a fierce battle to complement the mind’s projections. It is often said that it would be better not to expect anything in such moments; expectations are bad, we are told at every important juncture of our life. Don’t expect too big things, because when such things do not happen, you are thrown into pits from where you might find it hard to climb out. But sadly waiting and expectations are wedded to each other, they cannot be separated.

When conducting short sessions or seminars or workshops, sometimes we ask the participants, what do you expect from this session; a good many of them would frankly say their fears, anxieties and apprehensions. But a small group would often say that they don’t have any expectations, and unfortunately such a situation cannot arise. All of us have some expectations or other, positive or negative. In order to hide the negative or destructive expectations, we would cover them up with no expectations. On the other level, we can also realize that we are sometimes not aware of the movements of our heart, the direction of our minds; what it thinks, where it goes, when it returns and who accompanies it.

Today I am going to freeze two minutes from my daily schedule, in order to capture my mind as to what it is thinking about a certain waiting… expectation, that is to take place either today or tomorrow. We often wish to by-pass such waiting or expectations, and try to divert our attention to things which will make us forget about the things that zoom into our selves. But today I am not going to run away, but wish to stand and watch these waiting and expectations cast a magic spell on me. That is reality and I am here to embrace it, without any attempt to run away from it, even if it drowns me into swing of moods. Because I am here to know and understand that behind every waiting and expectations is there a good tiding, a fulfillment, completion of a task assigned. When I begin to stand erect and face reality as it approaches me, I am proving to the world that I am in control over reality, whether it is positive or negative. After all, I cannot forsake my own shadows!