April 2010 Issue
We are back and this time with an “Empty Box” . You heard us right, we are themed “An empty box” this month of april. Find yourself reading a whole bunch of entries around this abstract theme and see the different manifestations these boxes take. Read, enjoy and tell us what you think 
Click on the link to read the magazine
Unclaimed Baggage
By Aditya Srikrishna (Time wasted capsule)
How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life…. You start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks. Then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV…. The backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office … and then you move onto the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents, and finally, your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake—your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake—moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star-crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.
Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) in Up in the Air
What could the full-time corporate downsizer, also a motivational speaker, possibly be talking about? Obviously not about finding a huge bag that can physically hold all the stuff he mentions. Not the minor fact that we are all sharks and definitely not swans. Ryan Bingham is talking about the baggage we carry. In the forms of people—minor, unimportant, major, important—wealth, dependencies, liabilities, compromises, successes, failures, regrets and so on. And how we don’t need to carry it. Or probably should not. Ryan Bingham lives his life that way. He wants you to live it that way because that makes it easy for you and everybody around you. He wants you to carry nothing but an empty box.
What do you get when you draw up a pros and cons list of travelling with the baggage? You put up with people, whether you like them or not. You put up with everything they dole out to you, whether you like it or not. You get to share your joys and sorrows with them. You feel your happiness grow many-fold when shared.
Or you could be someone who doesn’t like sharing even the not-so-intricate details of your life with other people. You are better off being left alone in that case. You may be a loner. You probably keep to your books, your music, your car, your pets, your computer and so on. And you really don’t find life worth living for other living things. Apart from your pets. That’s why the whole baggage theory cannot be blindly followed.
It’s an extremely individual perspective. The importance of people in life comes from an individual’s need for acceptance, love, care, and mutual respect for one another. And yet there are individuals who think they are better off without any form of emotional human interaction. Their relationships are not layered but are born out of a mechanical dependency on one another. And it is opened and closed as easily as opening and closing a bottle. One such seemingly innocuous relationship is explored by Alex (Vera Farmiga) and Ryan, but that is until Ryan realizes that he got too sucked into the relationship, ignoring the agreed albeit unspoken disclaimers.
In real life, Christopher McCandless tried something—though not entirely similar—that was not in the realm of what is generally considered to be civilized human interaction. He moved away from people, away from a life of trivial pursuits, and inched closer to nature. In the movie adaptation of his life, Into the Wild, Chris says he wants to face the blind death stone with only his hands and his head for help. We don’t know for sure what he learned and what he realized. But conventional wisdom has us believing that ultimately the reality must have dawned on him—he must have realized that happiness is real only when shared. The movie adaptation leans towards this interpretation. But we will never know the truth. And even if we did, it might make little sense to us, for we would never know the real McCandless.
Christopher McCandless died alone in the Alaskan wilderness. In Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham believes that everyone dies alone ultimately, and so there are no incentives to take away from things like love, relationships, and people. Sometimes you are defined by the company you keep. But what if you keep no company? Do you become a statistic? Someone who also lived. Someone who had no one to live or die for. The question is whether that someone can be replaced by something. It’s an automatic choice to go for flesh, blood ,and soul instead of something metaphysically intangible. Ryan Bingham lived for his frequent flier miles. Five million miles was his target and that was the only focus he had. Chris McCandless lived to embrace nature in its rawest form; that gave him his high. The question we need to ask: would you rather be defined by a desire that involves you and only you, or will you go for a greater collective good born out of relationships that, in this day and age, come with all that baggage. The Holy Grail would be something that combined the best of both worlds.
Ryan Bingham and Chris McCandless were not conventional men. They obviously were not for conventional wisdom. That is why both of them are perfect case study material. The secret to living without baggage is to find that one thing that gives you the feeling of home. Some people spend their whole lifetime trying to find it. Some people don’t experience any enlightenment even after finding it. For Chris, it was in the wilderness. For Ryan, it was all about being up in the air:
The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places, and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over.
