“The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn’t a search for meaning. It’s to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually, you’ll be dead.” ~ Mr Peanut Butter

There is a prominent skywalk in Borivali, one of the terminal stations of the western line in Bombay. It’s connected to the skywalks on the stations and also runs above the main roads in the area. Standing there and looking down at the city, a city that isn’t just its sea, local trains and vada pavs, made me feel the same kind of inconsequential and tiny that you feel when you look at a million stars in the sky on a dark and quiet night.

There’s something about the people in Bombay that collectively seem like one unit even though they are vastly different from each other and live largely disparate lives. Maybe that is what makes them so similar, their differences. There is something in the air, something that nobody can quite explain, something they call the life of the city. Its ability to never sleep and all of those things that you have heard about the city. I feel it is the collective buzz of all its people, people who never want to leave.

Looking down at the tiny people on the street below me and on the busy platforms at the Borivali station, I felt that the minds and limbs of these people weren’t quite connected. The mind could be elsewhere, dreaming of bigger things, while the limbs, a slave of habit, walking and working and moving in an unexplainable and indescribable hurry towards where the mind cannot.

Time flows quicker here, nobody will stop and look and absorb their surroundings. If we do we will most probably write a poem or a song about it later. Almost as if we do realise how insignificant our lives are in this universe and our poems are offerings to this all-powerful city. Or maybe we want to tell ourselves, how we’re above it all, watching from a distance, observing the city whizz past as we think and write about it.

I cannot stop for long though, my feet have got me to the platform and I must board the train. Unfortunately, even the realisation of being small and inconsequential doesn’t make us any better. We’ll still remain one of many, taking our lives too seriously one day at a time, to keep ourselves sane. Filling our days with unimportant nonsense and ambitions so we never have to question the futility of it all. And if we ever do, we’ll call it a crisis, an existential crisis, one that will soon pass if we find something worthwhile to distract ourselves from it. And we’ll write a little something about the stars and the cities that we live in.