On a quiet Monday, when the nation was in bandh mode, I went along an interesting stream of thought. I believe it was Albert Einstein who said that the simplest questions have the toughest answers. My thoughts went out to the genius when I was adding a new wrinkle to the eternal metaphysical question: Who am I?
I came across an interesting response which said, “I am a collection of memories.” Indeed, it was a very unusual interpretation to the age-old question, because in every sense, we are our memories. You realise the implication of this thought only when you see senility in the elderly. The man or the woman is the same person physically, but what is the person in reality when he or she does not remember who they are? Such people are not even allowed to sign legal documents, so who are they?
There is another wrinkle to this version of reality. It is very beautifully explained in the context of the caterpillar and the butterfly, which I notice is a favoured symbolism of Buddhist philosophers. “Just because the butterfly does not remember that she was a caterpillar, does it mean that she was not a caterpillar?”
In a similar vein, we often wonder if we were infants, because we have no memories of those days of when we crawled on all fours and took our first stumbling steps. But we have to rely on our elders, and photographs, to understand that we indeed were toddlers once. There is a further philosophical reference, a brilliant one, to the butterfly, which takes the breath out of the ‘Who am I’ question. It is a Japanese haiku which says, “Last night I dreamt I was a butterfly. How do I know that now I am not a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?” The conundrum in this alarmingly simple question stumps me.
The point of going back to the original question once in a while is that it is a humbling thought and it brings us closer to ground reality. In essence, we all don different avatars through the day.
As a parent, as a spouse, as a son or daughter to our parents, as a staffer in office, as a person in society — we effortlessly flit in and out of these personalities. But sometimes there is a grinding of gears. We take out our anger, suppressed on the work front, on our children. Or we unleash our troubles with our teenaged children on our helpless and aged parents. It is during these times that we would do well to ponder, Who am I, really?
It is a precursor to a more detailed review we should have every week; a sort of audit of our actions which will help us come on track. The Catholic clergy do it annually by retiring into a secluded Retreat. We too could profit from such periodic contemplation. It could help tell us who we really are.
The writer is a renowned
film and theatre actor