The Notebook

Why?§

This article began with a single question and an absurd thought.

I was on my way home on the bus one day when I passed the local Gurudwara in Bhavnagar. There was a convenience store where a homeless mother was buying her child a packet of chips.

This wasn't the first time I'd seen something like this. I'd seen it hundreds of times. But this time it hit different because I considered a different approach to looking at the homeless. I did not look down upon them with pity, nor disgust. I looked at her half-clothed child that she was holding and thought:

Damn. I wish I had hair like that.

Except, the child was homeless. And that was the strange part. Why did that matter? The hair was beautiful regardless of who it belonged to. So why did my brain find the thought absurd? Why do we not expect this? After all, they are all humans. Then why do we treat them differently?

The simple way to explain this is because of what we, as a society, have made normal. We have made a stereotype of people living in poverty, associating them with filth, ripped clothes, vulgar language, illiteracy, and so on and so forth. Most of us usually look down upon the poor and homeless because this is what we see.

When we are born, our mind is like a clean notebook. 500 pages. Crisp and untouched. Initially, we don't know what to write, so people write in our notebook for us. Later, we learn how to write, but we still do not know how to erase. By the time we learn how to erase, the things we wrote very early on become incredibly difficult to erase. If you do manage to erase it, there will still be a remnant, or faint mark, of the writing unless we manage to rip out the entire page. If we do rip out the entire page, we might lose something important or ruin the binding of the other pages. This is life. Now I saw this stereotype. I have seen people look at homeless people with disgust. They throw things at them. They swear at them.

I felt pain seeing this. I wondered:

Why do people do this?

Because people wrote in their book. But a book is not written by one person. As we grow older, other people begin writing too. Friends. Teachers. Strangers. Even people we meet for only a few seconds.

I remember riding around on bicycles with a friend and sometimes stopping to give money to people living on the streets. It wasn't some grand humanitarian mission. We were just two kids on bicycles who saw someone asking for help and decided to give what we could. I like to think that, for a brief moment, I was writing something in someone else's book. Perhaps they forgot about us the moment we rode away. Perhaps the money bought them food. Perhaps it didn't. I don't know. But I knew what I had written in mine. I had chosen to help. And that night, I slept comfortably knowing that at least one page contained something I wanted to keep.

Perhaps that is what karma means to me—not some cosmic accounting system, but the idea that what we put into the world eventually becomes part of who we are.

Sometimes, I wonder how much of what I believe is actually mine.

Which is a slightly terrifying question when you think about it.

I mean, I didn't exactly sit down at the age of five with a notebook and write:

“Today, I have decided what I think about poor people, success, failure, and the entire human race.”

No. I was busy trying to figure out how to tie my shoelaces.

Most of the things we believe arrived much earlier than we did. Someone said something. We heard it enough times. We watched someone else do it. We accepted it. And eventually, it became ours without us ever remembering where it came from.

And that is where the notebook becomes interesting.

Because eventually, you have to ask yourself:

After a certain point, there comes a time when you buy your own pen and pencil. An eraser of your own and an extension to your notebook. You become the author of your own book. Sure, people may contribute to it, but after a time,

it becomes yours.

This is where you are given a choice.

Do you preserve everything in your old notebook and keep adding to it, fearing that if you try to rip out a page or erase something, the other principles will be affected?

Or do you become ballsy and create a new notebook? A notebook in which you create the best version of the notes from your previous one—extracting what feels right, questioning what feels wrong, and leaving behind what has become old and outdated.

I think we spend too much of our lives being afraid to erase.

We inherit beliefs from our parents. We inherit prejudices from our surroundings. We inherit ideas about success, failure, poverty, and so on. Some of them deserve to stay. Some of them deserve to be questioned.

The important thing is that we eventually realize we have an eraser. Because the things written in our notebooks may explain who we become. They do not have to decide who we become. And perhaps that is why I thought that day:

Damn. I wish I had hair like that.

Maybe the thought wasn't absurd.

Maybe the absurd part was that I ever thought it was.

Why?

Maybe that's a question worth asking more often.

-Vihaan "Victor" Vaghela.