The title is a line from a Charles Bukowski poem – Layover.
I dont think the words “the living” is about people or living beings but it refers the “living the life”, it refers to life in motion, life as we are experiencing, or the experience itself because it is in motion, not in a moment per se.
Ofcourse I do not read a lot of poems but whenever I do find something I really love, I try to refer it over time.
Tomorrow – 20th April 2026 – marks 16 years since I left my first job. It was 20th April 2010. I was 26. I was in that job for 4 odd year. It was also the last time I would live in Pune properly. I did live there for a few months again in 2011 but that was too erratic.
I fell in love with Pune the first time I visited it. I had been to Mumbai many times before that but still I felt something I never felt in Pune. Mumbai felt like a city beyond my reach, with high rises and rich people. Pune felt like I can become a part of it. It felt like a city I can call home.
I don’t know where I am going with this post honestly. But I want to write about how I fell in love with Pune, how I fell in love while I was in Pune, and how I left Pune never to come back again. There was always a longing in me to go somewhere, and that longing took me everywhere but not back to Pune. That longing is still there, and I dont know where it will take me.
In a way I want to find that longing that I had in all those years in Pune. It was not just about Pune, the place, but rather the age, the time, the journey and to a large degree the feeling that something more is achievable.
31/May.. realised I kept this post in drafts and forgot to complete it and publish. So I am just going to publish even though it is incomplete.
On life and time 