Eating the Cake

 
Sometimes, I stop and I look, and I then think to myself just how much better your lives have now become, and I smile --I am happy for all of you.

Your lives are now rid of such monstrous academic torment, free of all the unduly pressure and ridiculous stress, emptied of all the painful, obscure, mind-boggling theory, calculation and hundreds of years of humanity’s accumulated knowledge.

I see it in your eyes. I see it in your faces. I hear it in the ways you talk. All of you look so much better, so much more at ease, so much more relieved, so much more cheerful, and so filled with life.


All you who have jumped out of this wretched hell-bound train live better lives now. But on this flaming carriage, there is little life.

In fact, beyond that of academia, there is no life at all.

Many times, I do wonder if I too, should jump. Sometimes, I wished that I too, had called it quits.

But I have already threaded so far down this path —one that so many have said that I neither should or could all those years back. But then again, I am neither closer to the end nor farther from the beginning.

Guess this must be how it feels like to be stuck between a rock and a hard place!