Life is a long walk. More often than not, one walks alone. The hardest journey is the one made in solitude, yet it is this very walk that shapes one’s deepest strength. I have been on that road long enough to know that one may rush or linger, but never truly stop—always moving forward, holding one’s head high through both calm and storm.

During this solitary walk, one chooses one’s own path at every intersection, guided by a belief system shaped over the years and carried until death. As Martin Luther once observed, “Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.” (2)

Ernest Hemingway, recipient of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, echoed a similar truth when he said, “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.” He also remarked, in his Nobel acceptance speech delivered in absentia, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.” (3)
 

My view of life is not very different from my view of writing. It resembles Santiago’s struggle with the great marlin in The Old Man and the Sea. In life, too, the fruits of one’s labour often fall into unworthy hands, just as Santiago felt when his hard-won prize was lost after a long and lonely struggle. Yet one must continue the walk with an unextinguishable spirit of hope, remembering Santiago’s enduring thought: “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
 

My own solitary walk began on the seventeenth day of August, 1955, in a remote village of Travancore-Cochin in India—under the auspicious star of Ayilyam, on the first day of Chingam, the Malayalam New Year. The thoughts and experiences gathered along this long journey, I share with you here, briefly.