Have you ever thought about the concept of inheritance?

In a world where no one guarantees about the events of the next day, people love to inherit. A father’s property, a mother’s favour, a brother’s approval, a sister’s concern, people are eager to inherit all sorts of things and people are not ashamed to ask for it. An inheritance has to be a two-way process. There has to be a giver and there has to be a receiver. One cannot give without a receiver and one cannot receive without a giver. In such a case, where one of both is absent, it is not inheritance; it is felony, cheating, theft, robbery.

A son has chosen to stay in exile; he has chosen to live among dark shadows of loneliness. He does not want to be judged by his parents. He does not want to inherit any sort of conceptions from his parents. Ah, one can inherit conceptions and misconceptions as well! The word has got a new life, a new meaning. The inheritance does not always meaning getting the possession of materialistic things. Somebody gifts you a mobile phone, or a watch, you become the inheritor. You not only inherit the gift, you inherit the feelings of the giver attached with the gift, and inheriting someone’s feelings is a big thing. You cannot play with it. You cannot take it for granted. You inherit the responsibility of taking care of their feeling towards you. People fail in taking care, I have failed too. I failed because I put my feelings at the centre stage always. I feel that is what everyone else does too.

I inherit ideas, I shape the ideas into words, and I shape words into sentences, paragraphs, prose and poetry. I love to attach a meaning to my inheritance. My inheritance comes from the world around me. The way people walk, talk, and get on with their lives gives me an idea about what they want from their lives. What degree of importance does everything hold in their lives? “Everything” means love, money, success, friendship etc. Most people just wake up and find themselves in a routine and most people complain of not having a normal routine in their lives. Nobody ever thinks that this is what they have inherited from the actions they have committed in their lives so far and to change certain things in the future, they will have to change certain things in their present. They will have to let go of the inheritances they are clinging to from a long time and make space in their lives to inherit new things life has to offer to them. I am among the people who have a routine life, who have a Monday to Saturday job and a Sunday to rest and get rid of the week’s tiredness. But, that routine is only a physical factorial of my total life. My physical life is in a routine but it does not, in any manner, affect the randomness of my mental life. In my mind, I am a different person every day. I am a possessive lover, a loving friend and a friendly human being. I get along with different people pretty easily because I want to know about different people and their different lives. Oh yes, I am looking for different lives but I am left disappointed every time. Outside, everyone looks different, but inside, everyone is just the same.

Let me share my inheritances with you. When I was born, I inherited a father, a mother, a grandfather, two grandmothers, two uncles from my father’s side, three uncles from my mother’s side, four aunts from my father’s side, two aunts from my mother’s side, four cousins and one world. Excluding the world, everyone else remained my world for quite a long time, say two decades. In two decades, I inherited countless friendships, countless enmities, countless relatives and cousins, a brother and a sister, but there were two constants during my period of inheriting and disinheriting. Those two constants were my family and the world. Everyone else was coming, staying momentarily and leaving, but my family was there and the world was also there, for me.

Then, after two decades of my birth, something unexpected happened. My family disinherited me. I was left only with the inheritance of the world. I did not understand it this way back then. Though the world was available for me to conquer, I was thinking the exactly opposite. I was thinking that I have to inherit everything in life on my own. There is no one who will stand by me forever and tell me the difference between right and wrong. I also understood that the concepts of rights and wrongs depend upon how different people inherit those concepts. What was right for some people was wrong for others and vice versa.

The game of life is played on the stage of world every day gloriously. Moreover, there are no rules. Everybody is free to play their part, whatsoever. Everybody has an equal chance. And the way I see it, nobody loses in this game ever. We all win. We all learn lessons. Some of us might decide not to share what we learn, what we understand from this game of life, but learn we all, something or the other, and in a way, learning is, too, an inheritance.