Going home reminds us of what we left behind in search of newer pastures. It is a time to rejoice with loved ones, enjoy each other's company and remember why you left in the first place. Nostalgia is always more appealing when tinted in sepia, the kodachrome reserved for a more recent vintage.

In my travels, I met a hermit. Leading a reclusive life while living in the heart of a major metropolis is'nt something you see everyday, but there he was in his splendid isolation, grey curls blowing wistfully in the breeze, wearing fashionably faded denims and spouting the essence of every major religion as gentle raindrops glistened in brief sunlight and bounced off green leaves. He told me tales about the universe, how it all began, the reason for existence and the next level of evolution. He was'nt a messiah but he made me want to believe. Man, he said, is born an animal in his natural state. Social conditioning and knowledge help him to evolve into a human being. The goal is to carry forward this natural process of evolution and take it to the next level; man becomes superman. The definition of superman is not necessarily what G.B.Shaw or DC Comics might have imagined, but as I understood it, it is an attempt to attain a higher level of consciousness, one step closer to perfection, one step closer to the divine inherent in all of us.

Easier said than done. We live in a society where we all have individual and collective goals and responsibilities. What would happen if every individual decided to become a hermit and emabark on a spiritual quest? Possibly, world peace, the end of hunger and inequality and eventual communion with God (for want of a better all-encompassing term). There would also be anarchy along the way, a breakdown of life as we know it and serious bouts of self doubt. The trick has to lie in fulfilling your personal quest while living within this man-made boundary. With my limited knowledge of theology, I believe every religion says that the highest form of worship lies in fulfilling your duties to family and society while leading a decent and honest life. The problem arises when we stray from this simple path.

There is way too much out there to comprehend and assimilate in one lifetime. Imagine yourself standing on this earth all alone. Makes you feel really small. Now zoom out and see the earth in relation to the other planets that make up our solar system. How small are you now? Now zoom out a little more and look at our solar system in relation to our Milky Way galaxy - there are literally billions of other solar systems out there, and thats just in our galaxy. Now zoom out a little more and see our galaxy in relation to other similiar galaxies - again another few billion! How small do you feel? Now go into your own body - skin - blood - RBC's and WBC's - zooming in further into atoms, molecules and finally quarks. Look up at the immense universe around you now. How big do you now feel? It's such a splendid contradiction - the universe is way bigger than we can ever imagine and we are such a small, tiny, insignificant pixel in it, yet when we look into our own self, from the viewpoint of that quark, we ourselves are an entirely self-contained, self-sufficient universe. In the Bhagwad Gita, it is written that God is that smallest quark inside us all as well as the entire universe with all the suns and stars and planets and galaxies and black holes. He is in us all and we are all in him.

Can light travel around a corner? If a sound is made and no one hears it, is it a sound at all? Is it possible to travel through time? Will the theory of relativity and nano physics ever reconcile to give us the ONE unification theory that will answer all questions and validate Stephen Hawkings? In my mind, all these questions have one common affirmative answer, but that's for another day, another blog, another vent. For now, I am just trying to come up with more questions - the answers will hopefully reveal themselves someday. As Moulder so famously said, "the truth is out there". We just hope to find it some day, somewhere, in Avalone.