Time, Space and a little Beer

If you're lucky, the ride from central Bombay to Marve (one of the dirty beaches around the city) takes a little over an hour. Rush hour prolongues your travel time by a good hour. Vijay and I, who drove down on Friday evening itself, to get the place ready for the workshop participants who were to arrive on Saturday morning, had average luck. We took a little over an hour and a half to get there, not counting the stops to pick up nourishment for the weekend ranging from bread and tomatoes to tea, sugar, milk and beer.

The best part of the evenings is of course sitting down to watch the night sky, sipping cold beer. As luck would have it the first bottle was flat and we had to pour it down the sink. The second bottle, since we had not stuck it in the freezer, was not cold enough but what the hell. Once we started on it, it drew us into our favourite topics - time, space, reality and the universe.

Away from the cacophony of city life, under a clear black sky filled with stars it becomes easier to plunge into the depths. We talked about how weird it felt to have known each other for ten years. Sometimes it felt like a hundred years and sometimes it felt like we had met yesterday. So what is time, really! And what is reality? And do we really know anything at all about life really, or is it that our need to feel secure persuades us that we have everything in control?

At some point V and I decided that life was a total mystery. All one could do was sit and watch it unfolding. The trick is, that to do that, one needs to feel at least materially and physically secure. One needs a roof over one's head. One' s stomach needs to be be filled. Otherwise, one's attention is concentrated on these basics rather than on anything else. So it is to help each other go deeper into the process of life, that we need to support each other, to take care of each other, to ensure an environment that will make it possible for each of us to enjoy the miracle of life.

The beer helped. The stillness helped. Our understanding and acceptance of each other helped, to bring us a mite closer to something quite indefinable that you could only sense, if you happened to be in a state of alertness. It was one of those moments when I had the feeling: so this is what friendship is really about! Simply, this being together, this watching of life together, this implicit support of each other.

Group website: http://basicindia.typepad.com/basicindia/