by: Tushar Jain




Purpose. What is purpose? Drinking coffee when you wake up and making a habit of drinking coffee only when you wake up? No. Trying to drink coffee when it’s hot and trying conscientiously to make it a habit to swallow it hot? No. Blowing white, shivering steam off the surface and then, guttering it down immediately so that it’d fall lightly against the cylindrical walls of your gorge? No.


Purpose is about drinking tea.


It is not ambition. It is not about making money. It is not even about fame. In any of them, almost every human being will be privileged without any effort at all in some portent or another. Purpose is not borrowed or decided or concluded or made, for heaven’s sake! Purpose is extracted.


But how do we extract? Or do we need to worry, at all, about such concepts when our individual interests are being conflicted in the pandemonium of daily life and when there is nothing more we’d like to do than to sit beside a bonfire and have tea and crumpets with a rather chummy neighbor.


If we might have tea, we might as well, have purpose.


I wish to apprise you of something and let me assure you that it’s the most secretive secrets of all - there is hope. And if I said that it’s for mankind, it’d be too banal and I would be probably lying or talking in a sphere that I may not include myself in. I mean, that there is hope that we can still extract it out.


Every country, every city, every town, every alley, every home has a deep corroded, squalid and bacteria-encroached well somewhere on the near outskirts. Deep in this staling, chalk-dusted pit, down in a very small weathering corner, there is hope. And there, just besides it is – purpose.


If I am not being able to fool you with anecdotes and word-play and poor allegories, I might as well come out in the brave yellow of the constant open sun and feel it vibrate my flesh with humanness. People, I am taking of purpose.


Crude word it is, I know. And it means so little in this insensitive world. But I believe that it, hardly, has anything to do with the world or with humanity or cruelty or man, himself. Allow me to explain –


I never understood why any man who has nothing to or for the entire world, as a whole, would consider to amass it in himself everyday. What happened at the football match? Who won the election? What is the solar system? How does the knowledge that the earth revolve around the sun twenty four hours a day, we are made of cells which in turn are made of monosaccharide, Red Sox play better than any other team on the planet, there is a new movie on pay T.V. - supply us with anything but entertainment and how can entertainment provide us with anything except illusions?


It comforts and eats on vanity. The comfort, the temptation that our will is succumbing to every time, it provides not to our ignorance but to the bliss that is so attached with it.


But I believe, when a man who has shunned worldly advantage, worldly thought and worldly significance comes down like a deflating balloon, to the deserted island of the human being, he might feel alone. Eventually, he might feel bored and after a while of this, he might attempts killing himself which is, of course, the most appropriate thing to do for a man as him. But, just maybe, if he didn’t, if he waited long enough – soon he would start seeing the well. And if he dared to travel the harsh journey up to it and he cricked his spine, arched it and bent down like a folding safety-pin, he might find it down, pretty beneath – a fluorescent glare of metal. Purpose. Tea. Not coffee.


It is difficult. So hard, that many die without even discovering the pit; they die of the pathos, of the patience. If anybody asked me that what would we achieve with purpose and how could it direct a man – I would say that I don’t know, because, as of now, I am still trying. I haven’t even deflated enough. I like my Frasier and Friends, all the same. I’m trying. But coffee was always a bad addiction and a favorite.


I believe that when we dig holes, we don’t do it for the earth and certainly not for the mud, neither to get our hands soiled and nor to waste time. We dig because it delights us to discover. A better invention. A proper cause. A perfect reason. Some dig longer than others, some try and abandon, some tire and leave, a handful go on.


I dig because I need to have a more stated life and being. I want to know why I belong. I have already discovered myself, I just want to know what have I discovered and what difference it entitles me to. I want to dig because it helps me escape and through the thick, slime of mud and loam, I can see the soft finger of smoldering light trying to rise and touch me. I feel it… almost there.


I deserve Tea.

About The Author Hi. I am a teenager and i you cared to read it, I think that it was considerate of you anyhow. Thanking you dearly. T.Jain mosaics12@rediffmail.com