Life is a long walk. Almost always, one walks alone. The hardest walk you can make, of course, is that walk you make alone, but that is also the walk that makes you the strongest. I have been on that long walk for almost sixty-nine years; rushing and strolling, always holding my head high in good and bad weather.
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During this lonely walk, one chooses his own path at every intersection and does things differently from others according to his own belief system developed over the years till death. Martin Luther (2)  once said, “Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.”

 

Ernest Hemingway (3), the recipient of the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, once stated, “Every man's life concludes in the same manner. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

 

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” Hemingway remarked in his acceptance speech for the prestigious award, in absentia. My view on life is also not entirely different from that of 'writing', like Santiago’s struggle with a blue marlin in Hemingway's  “The Old Man and the Sea.” In life too, often, the fruits of one’s efforts would go to unworthy people as Santiago felt, when he finally caught the elusive large fish after a long and lonely struggle. But one must walk on with an unextinguishable positive spirit as Santiago mused, “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

 

My lonely walk began on the seventeenth day of August in 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. My thoughts and experiences during my long walk I share with you here, briefly.