Avinash’s father was a strict disciplinarian. He believed in the conventional path of studying well, getting good marks, completing education to secure a stable job and living a mediocre life. Avinash obviously had different ideas. He wanted to become a photographer and follow his creative pursuits.
At the crossroads of his career, the tension between them grew so much that they stopped talking to each other and started living separately. Avinash always felt so rejected, discouraged and oppressed by his father that he gave up on life. Surrendered to his fate, he did become an engineer, took up a job his father wanted him to take and lived a boring life, killing all his dreams, hopes and aspirations. He was listless and lifeless.
So cold, Avinash became towards his father, that even when the father died, cremating him was just a bloody chore. But there was one complication. Even after death, the father had decided to teach him a lesson. Two dead bodies had gotten exchanged. And Avinash had to take a journey to retrieve his father’s body by exchanging the one he wrongly got, that of an old woman’s.
Journeys are always interesting. They often open us up to the vistas within, connect us to our core and complete us in many ways. On this interesting journey, Avinash befriends Tanya, young grand-daughter of the deceased old woman. While interacting with Tanya, Avinash meets his alter-ego which is a reflection of his father, full of rigid ideas, shoulds, oughts and just so’s. Avinash is stunned to meet his inner patriarch and it’s normative ways. But he is definitely more stunned to realize that it was reflected upon him by Tanya who was a symbol of his exiled inner self, a care free person, high on life who always made her own choices and faced consequences whatever they were, someone who was never meant to be bound by the self depleting, senseless concepts of appropriateness.
Holding his inner partiarch in one hand and his exiled self in aother, Avinash is staring at the polarity between who he has become and who he wanted to be. Struck by this, Avinash’s real journey now becomes clear to him. It’s a journey of integrating the inner polarity. Sadly it had to coincide with the search of his father’s dead body.
Strange are the ways of life. While alive, he did not let Avinash live and upon his death he sent Avinash out on a journey to find himself, to find life.
I am also curious to know what polarities we hold within ourselves? How has our inner patriarch shaped us and how does it impact our lives? What journeys do we need to undertake?
I simply love stories and myths. Like Campbell says, stories are just plain events, we bring them to life with our meaning making processes. Each story holds a hidden meaning for us. I love this process of exploration.
