Off the Cuff: All walls serve two purposes

Vikram's a paragon of practicality, but he also has this remarkable ability to laugh at himself. He is full of little nonsensical sayings, which I reckon he makes up on the spur of the moment, off the cuff, so to speak. If he suspects you are confronted by a moment of indecision he will say, when in doubt drink coffee. Or, when in doubt, reason's out. Or, when in doubt, instinct's your best friend. Strange things like that, that somehow stick in the memory, so perhaps there is more sense behind his nonsense than I give him credit for.

Vikram has a hundred different remedies for dealing with doubt. Vikram's friend Raj I have never met, so I can only judge him by what I've heard from Vikram, the doubt-curer. Vikram and Raj are here, in the Golden City, each amassing a fortune in realised dreams. But five years ago, Vikram and Raj were there, in that teeming financial hub on India's west coast, growing up next door to each other. They travelled the same route to the same school, later 'cut' the same number of college lectures, watched the same movies, sat the same exams and passed with astonishing credits.

When they weren't at college, they also mastered tennis ball cricket, played in the confined spaces of multi-storeyed buildings. Vikram it was who was first to a job, perhaps because of his practical eye (when in doubt, drink coffee!).

And it was Vikram who refused to permit Raj to develop a complex about it. He shared as much as he was permitted to share of his earnings with his childhood friend. Togetherness, by then, had become a built-in mechanism. Here was an instance of a dual organism surviving contentedly on the oxygen needed for one.

But the tug of life had set in, unbeknownst to each. Work has its demands and I daresay idleness has its demands as well.

On the odd occasion when Vikram forgot Raj's birthday, Raj sulked, Vikram fretted, then they laughed at the childishness of the whole thing and ignored the wedge that is the first sign of the greater divide.

The wheel of life turned. Raj it was who was first on the plane for the Gulf, to a job that still pays him more than he cares to count, or spend. Vikram followed later.

By then, of course, Raj had had a head start. Lifestyles had changed, courtesy affluence. Old dues were forgotten, the past erased in favour of a more glittering present and a shimmering future. The guys have reached a stage where they no longer feature on each other's mobile telephone lists.
Vikram, I sense, is building a wall around it all. When in doubt, build a wall!

But the point is this: when one builds a wall to preserve the last shreds of one's goodness, we might inadvertently be walling out a lot of goodness as well.

Because that is the nature of walls. They wall in and they wall out. There just could be a life-changing experience out there, waiting.