Hope you will digest it

If you meet one new person every day, then in your whole life, you would come in contact with 30,000 human beings. That’s 0.000004% of the earth’s population.

99% of these 30000 humans would be absolute strangers, making a brief appearance in the movie of your life - as the guy you talked to in the metro for a couple of minutes, or as the biker who gave you a lift, or as the cute girl you met at the mall. You’d meet, talk for a few minutes and drift apart on your own unique paths in the cosmos - paths that would never intersect again.

Remaining 300 would be the lucky ones, for they would unlock the next level. They would become what you call ‘acquaintances’. These are the 300 contacts that you have in your cell phone, but the call histories next to them are empty. You only realize they exist, when on a lonely two-thirty in the dead of the night, you are wishfully scrolling through your phone book, desperately hoping to find a single number you could call, just to have someone to talk to - just to have someone to come home to.

As you count down from 300, the definitions start becoming a little fuzzy. You can never tell where the ‘acquaintances’ end and the ‘friends’ begin. But if I were to ask you to list all your friends, you’d come up with a list of about 20 names. It’s only then, that in a moment of sheer realization, you’d embark upon the truth — that out of seven and a half billion human beings on your planet, there are only 20 you can call ‘friends’.

And out of those twenty, there are perhaps only 3 or 4 who you can actually call at 2:30 in the night!

Correct me if I’m wrong, but on average, you’ll visit two new places every year. These may be random trips with friends, or family vacations or religious pilgrimages. Integrate that over eighty years of your life and you have around 150 destinations. 99% of these would, of course, be within your country.

Take a big globe. Or better still, imagine one! And since you’re imagining it, make it really big. Now take a very sharp pencil and put a small dot on all 150 of those locations. You have a big sphere, with an unimaginably enormous surface area, and about 150 sharp dots scattered randomly, most of them concentrated near a central and seemingly special dot that you call ‘home’. Those dots right there - that’s your footprint on earth.

On average, 2 million new books are published every year - novels, comics, sci-fi, autobiographies, criticisms, thrillers, drama, erotica - on every theme and topic imaginable. Integrate that over a century and you have more than 100 million books that you have access to. And at 4 books a year, you’ll perhaps read 300 in your lifetime.

Out of a million television series, you’ll watch about 20. Out of five hundred thousand movies ever produced, you’ll watch only about 100. Out of more than a hundred million songs ever sung, you’ll hear less than a thousand. Out of the trillion possible experiences that you could possibly have on this beautiful beautiful planet of ours, you’re going to have only an infinitesimal few.

You don’t live on earth!

You exist inside a very small subspace within it - confined by the spatial and temporal constraints that your own humanity puts upon you, but even more importantly, by the mental barriers that you bind yourself with.

This tiny subspace is your home.

It is your prison.

It is your Sphere of Existence