Expanding The Horizons

From the 16th floor of my balcony, I can see a small machan standing quietly between the fields.

It is nothing extraordinary. A simple watch hut. A raised structure in the middle of open land. The kind of place most people would glance at once and forget. But I keep looking at it. Beyond it, the double-decker maalgaadis move along the Delhi-Mumbai Freight Corridor like great iron thoughts that never stop. Between that tiny machan and those long freight trains, my entire life feels suspended.

I run my life from this floor.

From here, I take calls, answer clients, think of court dates, draft notices, chase deadlines, and live by lists. From here, I continue being useful, responsive, dependable, available. From here, I keep proving that I am a man fully inside his responsibilities. And yet, every now and then, my eyes leave the screen, cross the railing, pass through the safety net, travel over the buildings, and stop at that machan.

And a strange thought rises in me.

What if I am waiting for the wrong day?

I often imagine that someday, when the work is wrapped up, when the pending matters are fewer, when clients need less, when money anxiety softens, when duty loosens its grip, I will finally go toward that inner machan of mine. Maybe not this exact one in the field, but some version of it. A place where I will sit without urgency. A place where I will not be needed for the next hour. A place where I can exist without producing anything.

But lately another fear has started haunting that dream.

What if by the time I finally reach that day, I have already lost my senses?

What if I touch things and feel nothing? What if I smell flowers and nothing stirs? What if the sadabahar blooming near a railing, or the evening light falling on open land, or the sound of a passing train, or the silence of a field hut means absolutely nothing to me by then? What if all the waiting hardens me? What if years of postponed living quietly train the soul to stop responding?

This is not the fear of dying. It is, in some ways, more frightening than that. It is the fear of surviving into numbness.

We often imagine burnout as tiredness. But maybe real exhaustion is something worse. Maybe it is the gradual erosion of wonder. Maybe it is when beauty is still visible, but no longer reachable from within. The eyes work. The hands work. The schedule works. The person works. But the inner instrument that receives life falls silent.

That is what I fear.

Not that I will fail.
Not that I will have too much work.
Not even that I will never make it to Amalfi, or drive along the Indian west and east coast, or sit one day in some forgotten patch of land with the sky above me and no one calling my name.

I fear I will get there and it will mean nothing.

That the coast road will become just another road.
That Amalfi will become just another location.
That friendship will become memory without warmth.
That flowers will become color without fragrance.
That rest will arrive after the ability to enjoy rest has already left.

And then I ask myself a question that refuses to leave:

Do I have to wait for the day when everything is wrapped up before I go to the machan? Or is that exactly how one loses the senses by waiting too long?

Because the truth is, life never really wraps up. Work does not end with ceremony. It only changes shape. One file closes, another opens. One payment comes, another expense rises. One responsibility leaves through the front door while three more enter quietly from the back. If I keep telling myself that I will live fully only after completion, I may be making a bargain with an illusion.

Perhaps the day of total freedom is a lie hardworking people tell themselves so they can continue postponing joy with dignity.

And perhaps the senses do not stay alive automatically. Perhaps they must be exercised, like faith, like tenderness, like courage. Perhaps a person remains capable of feeling only by continuing to feel while life is still unfinished.

Maybe that is the real lesson of the machan.

That peace cannot be kept as a retirement plan.
That beauty cannot be deferred endlessly without consequence.
That if I want to one day enjoy a coast, a quiet drive, a field, a flower, a friendship, an evening in Italy, or simply an hour that belongs to no one but me, I must begin protecting my ability to feel now and not later.

Not in grand, dramatic rebellion. I am not talking about abandoning duty. I am talking about smaller acts of refusal.

Watching the field for ten minutes without multitasking.
Letting tea be just tea.
Taking one drive with no agenda.
Looking at flowers without photographing them.
Sitting with my son without also carrying tomorrow in my head.
Allowing one evening to remain unmonetized, unproductive, and unanswered.

These sound like small things. But maybe the soul survives on exactly such small things.

Maybe the person who will one day stand near that machan is being decided right now.

Maybe he is being built each time I refuse to reduce life to utility.
Or maybe he is being destroyed each time I say, “Later, when things settle.”

The balcony and the machan are not merely two places. They are two states of being.

The balcony is height, pressure, perspective, ambition, management, distance.
The machan is nearness, stillness, exposure, simplicity, and enoughness.

I need the balcony. It is where I have built, earned, struggled, and held together what must be held together. But I do not want to become a man who only knows how to live from balconies above life, overlooking it, organizing it, but never arriving inside it.

I want to still be able to descend.

I want that when the day comes whether it is in a field nearby, on a coastal road in India, on an evening in Amalfi, or in some ordinary hour I once would have ignored, I still have enough untouched self left to feel wonder.

The machan teaches me this from a distance: do not wait to finish life before you start inhabiting it.

Because one day, if I am not careful, I may finally have the time I begged for and become a stranger to the very peace I wanted.

And that would be the saddest success of all.

Later.

Lately I have started believing that my life should not be described as a routine. It should be described as a case status. Routine sounds far too stable, far too civilized, far too respectful of human limits. My life is not a routine. My life is listed, passed over, mentioned, restored, urgently circulated, partly heard, and then fixed for next date.

There are people whose mornings begin with yoga, sunlight, gratitude, and perhaps a calm cup of tea. My mornings begin with a negotiation between my soul, my sugar levels, my phone battery, and the accumulated nonsense of several fully grown adults who should have made better choices before involving me. By the time some people are choosing between oats and poha, I am already mentally preparing arguments, replying to messages, remembering which matter is in which court, locating one missing document, cursing one impossible litigant, and wondering if my own endocrine system has also filed a counterclaim against me.

I do not live one life anymore. I live a group litigation.

On paper I am a lawyer. Which sounds elegant, respectable, and intellectually refined. In practice, it means I spend a good part of my existence translating chaos into paragraphs. Somewhere, at any given hour, one client has discovered betrayal in a property transaction, another has discovered that cheques bounce more honestly than people, a third has suddenly remembered an important fact only after filing, and a fourth wants me to destroy the other side while also keeping things “amicable.” The Indian legal ecosystem runs on documentation, delay, drama, and a level of optimism that should be medically studied. And in the middle of this national theatre, I stand with a file, a pen, and the increasingly faint belief that justice and pagination can still coexist.

A normal person, after such a day, would come home and rest. But God, in His administrative wisdom, did not create me for normal. So after law comes family, parenting, planning, health, bills, social obligations, unresolved property irritation, occasional emotional collapse, and the permanent feeling that I am running a small republic whose departments are all understaffed.

Being an adult, I have learned, is largely about being interrupted while trying to solve another interruption.

There is no single theme to my life. It is a badly moderated panel discussion. One part of me wants professional excellence. One part wants financial stability. One part wants to be a present parent. One part wants to write novels full of longing and memory and unfinished love. One part wants to lose weight, regulate blood sugar, walk daily, and eat like a wise person. And one part, which I consider the purest and most evolved part, simply wants to sit in the mountains with tea and momos and never hear the words “urgent matter” again.

That mountain fantasy has now become less a travel preference and more a constitutional aspiration. I no longer dream of luxury in the way influencers do. I do not need a yacht. I do not need a wine estate. I do not want the French Riviera. I want a place where nobody says “Sir, just one small issue.” I want cold air, warm tea, and the radical freedom of not being cc’d on anything. I want to hear birds, not builder disputes. I want pine trees, not police inaction. I want clouds, not litigation strategy.

Unfortunately, I live in a reality where there is always one more application to draft.

The thing about being a lawyer is that people assume you understand conflict. This is wrong. I understand paperwork generated by conflict. The conflict itself remains as baffling as ever. Human beings continue to surprise me with their creativity in selfishness. Someone lies badly. Someone lies confidently. Someone lies in writing, which is a level of commitment one almost has to admire. Someone hides documents. Someone invents memories. Someone suddenly becomes emotional when facts fail. And I, like a public servant of suffering, must collect these fragments and present them before institutions that are also tired.

It would still be manageable if law were my only subplot. But my life has side quests with the ambition of main characters.

Health, for example, has become a full-time administrative department. There are medicines to remember, meals to manage, sugar readings to interpret, energy crashes to survive, and the daily comedy of trying to be disciplined in an Indian household where food is both love and sabotage. Every health plan begins with vision and ends with someone saying, “Ek din se kya hota hai?” This nation has delayed more diets with affection than disease ever could. I have learned that the body is a very sensitive institution. It reacts to food, stress, sleep, emotion, and the number of idiots one encounters before noon.

Then there is parenthood, which is perhaps the only department of life more exhausting and more beautiful than litigation. A child can reduce a grown adult to tears with one hug and destroy the same adult’s schedule with one sneeze. There is no procedural law in parenting. There is only improvisation, love, exhaustion, guilt, laughter, and the humbling realization that the small person you are trying to raise has greater emotional range than most fully briefed advocates. A client may lie to me. A judge may ignore me. A system may delay me. But a child asking for affection at the end of a terrible day can dismantle every cynical structure the world has built inside me.

And because madness apparently respects no professional boundary, I also write. Not just notes, applications, objections, notices, and arguments, but actual stories. Fiction. Novels. Emotions. Memory. Desire. Regret. Dark magic. Lost love. Human complexity. This means that after spending the day in the company of facts, I voluntarily go home and spend time with imagined people who are also troubled. Perhaps this is not creativity. Perhaps this is simply my mind refusing to accept a genre limit.

The great irony is that in court I am always searching for coherence. In writing I am searching for truth. In life I am searching for parking.

There are moments when I look at my phone and feel I am holding an archaeological site. Messages from clients. Messages from family. Court updates. Medical reminders. Half-written ideas. Screenshots of orders. Grocery concerns. Social media thoughts. Bank issues. Travel longing. Child matters. Random emotional debris. The average person has a life divided into categories. I have a WhatsApp that looks like the aftermath of a constitutional crisis.

And yet I continue. That is perhaps the most ridiculous thing of all. Not only do I continue, I continue with intent. I still want to do things well. I still want the draft to be stronger, the argument sharper, the family happier, the health steadier, the finances wiser, the story deeper, the future better. This is either admirable resilience or untreated delusion. At this point I am open to both interpretations.

I have come to suspect that competence is not a blessing. It is bait. The moment the world senses that you can handle things, it starts throwing extra things at you. Need a complex draft. Send it to him. Need someone to think clearly in a mess. Call him. Need emotional support with legal strategy and formatting suggestions. Definitely him. Need someone to be practical, composed, emotionally available, financially aware, medically disciplined, creatively alive, and spiritually stable. Why not one person. Why not me. Why not also before lunch.

There should be an award for people who remain functional despite never being allowed to finish one thought completely.

Sometimes I think my real superpower is not intelligence or drafting. It is recovery. The ability to go from irritation to usefulness. From chaos to structure. From disappointment to work mode. From stress to tenderness. From absurdity to another numbered paragraph. There is something deeply comic about a person spending one hour thinking about criminal procedure and the next thinking about whether he has had enough protein. This is the true modern professional identity. Not balance. Not mastery. Just rapid emotional switching with decent formatting.

If an outsider looked at my recent life updates, they might say I need rest. This is true. They might say I need boundaries. Also true. They might say I am doing too much. Obviously true. But they would miss the central fact. This is not just overload. This is devotion wearing the face of chaos. I care too much to become casual. That is the whole problem. I care about the case. I care about the outcome. I care about the family. I care about the sentence sounding right. I care about the future not collapsing under present carelessness. And caring, unfortunately, is not a peaceful hobby.

So here I am. Lawyer. Parent. Planner. Patient. Writer. Occasional philosopher. Full-time responder to unexpected developments. A man whose dreams involve mountains but whose days involve mentions. A man who wants simplicity but keeps choosing responsibility. A man who is trying, in his own messy way, to remain human while being useful.

This, then, is the latest update from my life. Nothing is under control, several things are pending, health requires supervision, the heart wants the hills, the files want attention, the child wants time, the body wants discipline, the mind wants escape, and the world keeps arriving with fresh paperwork.

In conclusion, I would like to state for the record that I am not exactly living life these days. I am conducting it like a prolonged hearing with intermittent emotional evidence. The matter is complex. The parties are many. The record is bulky. The issues are not framed. And adjournment, as always, is unlikely.

Later