All alone in this vast universe that I cannot comprehend

My grandfather left his village (which my mother claims has always been a small town and never a village!) deep in the southern part of India to go study in Varanasi.

This was back in the early 1930s, in an India where most people hadn't even seen a light bulb and where outdoor dry toilets and manual scavenging were the norm.

After days of train journey, grandfather would reach his student quarters.  If he didn't send a telegram informing his parents about reaching Varanasi, he wrote a letter that would take days to reach his parents.  This was the practice through all the years of his undergraduate studies in metallurgy.

Two decades later, my father, an engineering graduate in a newly independent India,  decided that exciting industrial projects were beginning in places far, far away from his village (which was and is a village, he agrees) and went to join the dam construction projects, modeled after the US' TVA.

Typically, it was four to five days of travel time from the village till father reached his bachelor quarters.  Upon reaching, he penned a letter that typically took a week to reach grandma.

My father and grandfather did not even pause to think that these were nightmarish conditions.  After all, had they thought that way, they would not have ventured out at all to places far, far away from their homes.  Often alone by themselves, and in places where the language, foods, and almost every aspect of culture was different from what they were used to.

Yet, they did.

Now, we live in a world that is hyperconnected.  We Facebook where we are, what we eat, what we do, where we travel. We tweet where we are, what we eat, what we do, and where we travel. We Instagram where we are, what ... well, you get my point.

Loneliness is no longer a part of life anymore, it seems.  

Loneliness makes us think about life and our own place in this universe.  In the old country, those bent on this inquiry went into the forests so that they could be alone to contemplate about existence.  Of course, such meditation was in the contexts of god and prayers, but there was a conviction that loneliness helps.

If we are hyper-connected, then when do we have the time to think about our own existence?  After all, even when we are "alone", we are no longer alone, it seems.

There is something seriously wrong, don't you think, when all these decades of "progress" has only led us to how we are afraid to be alone because, if alone we might have to think about important questions like who we are and why we exist?

My grandfather and father used their alone time to reflect on life.  They read, listened to music, and communed with their gods.  This atheist believes that was a far better existence than the current way of being afraid of inquiring about the human condition itself.

Whether or not one believes in any god, surely there is more to life than posting a Facebook status update, right?!

Source: seriously, you can't recognize this as from the New Yorker? ;)