Chennai, 8.46 am – en route to the office.
I sat in my car with the engine idling, the air conditioning purring like a lullaby, streaming Love Is Blind and laughing at its own paradox: searching for love without sight whilst cocooned in perfect isolation. A family glided past on a lone motorbike – a man, a woman, a toddler pressed between them, faces gleaming in the harsh sun. No helmets, no protection against dust or heat, just the relentless pulse of the city bearing down. They dissolved into traffic, and that image burned itself into my mind.
He pedalled along invisible rails laid down by years of schooling, a secure job he could not abandon, marriage vows bound by tradition, a child to raise, a mortgage to service and bills stacking up each month. Those duties never arrived as conscious choices at dawn but as inherited codes he obeyed without question – debt layered upon debt so that his child would not suffer, even at the cost of exposure to heat and pollution. His sacrifice went unnoticed in the morning rush, because that is what men do: shoulder unseen burdens and keep riding.
I existed at the opposite extreme – apparently cruel for resisting the obligations of marriage, notorious for refusing to work beyond a certain point, a black-clad maverick who mocked every convention of family and debt. I traded the bondage of lineage for financial independence, swapped mortgage shackles for borderless freedom. I refused to borrow happiness from tomorrow, choosing passport stamps over EMI schedules, even if it meant my legacy lived only in boarding passes and blog posts.
The moment felt ripped from the climax of Vikram Vedha: Madhavan emerging in white, the embodiment of society’s conditioning over generations – duty, sacrifice, the unquestioned right thing to do – facing Vijay Sethupathi draped in black, the outcast who lives without guilt or remorse, sculpting his life beyond social conditioning. Beneath Chennai’s glare, the man on the bike became white, anchored by debt and obligation, whilst I sat there in black, untethered by expectation and driven by my own design.
Yet neither white nor black holds the final word. Society offers only a binary script – settle down, procreate, provide, or be selfish, rootless, adrift. That framework blindsides us to personal bandwidth, emotional fit and the hidden cost of comfort. Responsibility is not a verdict or a moral scale but a vast spectrum where duty and freedom, debt and discipline, lineage and solitude converge.
On that stretch of endless road, I realised there is no single way to live and no universal right or wrong. Each of us carves our path in shades of grey, weaving our own legacy from the choices we inherit and the rebellions we embrace.
Choose your colour – but, above all, embrace it without guilt for what might have been.
Cheers until the next one.
