The
enlightenment of identities of the world is an outcome of the
quest for my own enlightenment of identity. As has been
mentioned, enlightenment of identity is preceded by a crisis of
identity - which has a trigger point – and mine was physical,
developmental.
I was born in Guwahati, Assam, India, on October 7, 1968. I
was an only child. I spent about the first 14 years of my life
outside Guwahati, mostly in the various towns of Assam, as my
father, a judge was in a transferable job. Eventually, I and my
mother shifted to our ancestral home at Guwahati, so I could
prepare uninterruptedly for my matriculation under the State
Board.
In my adolescence, the first signs of trouble ahead became
evident. Physically, my development was visibly lagging for my
age. Although my height appeared average, I was seriously
underweight - my muscle mass and skeletal structure was
underdeveloped; there was a lack of some secondary sex
characteristics as well. General physicians consulted at the
time preferred to see it only as a problem of underweight and
took a nutritional approach, but to no effect. Eventually the
condition became a full-blown crisis for me, once the normal age
of development was passed.
Concurrently, I was facing an intellectual crisis as well,
correlated with my developmental deficiency. I was beginning to
struggle to cope with the increasing demands of academics. Even
as I was keen on pursuing a scientific career – I was interested
in biology, especially that of the brain – my scientific skill
acquisition was not moving apace. My academic performance
deteriorated, and I barely managed to scrape through Junior
College. Although I enrolled in an undergraduate course in Zoology, my heart
wasn’t in academics any more, and I left college for good
sometime after.
I was now well and truly at the deep end of existence, where
one either sinks or swims. It all does come down to ‘beingness’
itself. Now in the quest to re-find one’s place in the world,
everything has to start from scratch, which is a state of
regression and reclusivity.
Meanwhile, as a rite of passage toward a re-invented
personality, I substituted my erstwhile formal name and settled
on my nickname as my formal name. But the search for a true
vocation was proving to be elusive. Sometime in the
mid-nineties, I began speculating about whether the present time
in history had anything special about it – especially with the
approaching millennium. And might that have something to do with
my future - even as I was aware that being in a lost-to-life
situation, there is the danger of grabbing at any straw and be
engulfed by ‘delusions of grandeur’.
Gradually I was able to deduce a ‘theory of history’, which,
though not a formal work of history and scholarship, is able to
make a precise prediction about the immediate future.