Ronin is a Japanese word that roughly translates to wanderer.
Actually what it translates to 'wave man' which I think is a way of saying drifter or social outcast.
It applies
to a class of samurai who do not have a
master or lord. This usually happens when their master falls or dies, or if
they lose their masters favour and are banished. They wander the land in disgrace looking for
redemption.
They were the original drifters of this world, vagrants so to
speak.
In current usage it is used to refer to salary men in between employers and students in between institutions
That's how I feel about my life right now, but then am I the only one who feels that way?
It has been nearly 5 years since I joined this college as a part of the 2011 batch. 5 years spent trying to gain knowledge that will hep save someone's life or at least make it better. I have become a different person, more guarded in my thoughts a little less rash than I used to be.
And with it come the feeling of wanderlust. Everything has changed, My city is different, my friends there have grown up. My home feels like a guest house. Little babies have become little shits, the little shits have become reasonable kids and the kids have become colleagues.
And I know Bangalore is not where I belong.
Most of my friends in other colleges seem to have pretty fixed goals, get into a college, earn a degree, get placed and and work in what ever city they are sent to. After a few years, a vehicle a house masters marriage .. Life more or less set.
What about the rest of you? Do you all have complex plans for the future. A set path? If so I congratulate you, I envy your certainty.
For the rest of us, what should we aim for? Do we attempt the ridiculous gauntlet that stands in the way of a post graduate course and choose a subject to which we will be limited to the rest of our lives or more likely have our hopes dashed because adding the letters MD and MS to the end of your name is the only way we can be marketable as doctors? Become part of the corporate culture and join a MNC corporate hospital? Or break away from the field entirely and get MBAs, take up IAS or even research.
or will you go counter culture and join the PHC system trying to do good in any small way you can while the ruling government blames you and your colleagues for the lack of healthcare? I must say there is some thing to be said for the life of an activist, a lone humans fight against the system!
Or will you do something even more risky perhaps to quench the thirst of danger in you and go to war as an army doctor or as member of aid organisations.?
For us the future seems as ill defined as a mist. Who know were we will end up?
And along with all these variations lies the chance of a failure, a life lived in dissatisfaction and frustration. That scares me.
Its almost easier not to make a choice isn't it because as long as we don't each possibility is equally possible.
But a choice has to be made, the world keeps spinning after all.
We are all on a journey to find ourselves, first as children pretending to be adults and then hopefully as a somewhat wiser version of that person.
Lets hope that we as Ronin find our cause and have the guts to live for it.
