Waiting For Godot

En attendant Godot, a 1952 exceptional masterpiece drama by Samuel Beckett which meant in English, Waiting for Godot. For a person not having much knowledge or interest of Literature, it may be a shock, or far from understanding because it belongs to Theater of the Absurd. And Absurd, the human life is. If not the human life in general then at least many of our behaviours are. Waiting is one of them. We all wait. Sometimes realistically for a cause but more often without any. Waiting is in the essence of human nature.

In this world almost everyone is waiting all the time. Some wait for sunrise, unable to sleep at night or too eager to not to miss the daily local train to go to work, others wait for sunset, to push back inside their houses to pray, sleep or even to drink. Some wait for a girl or a boy to come in their life, and some for one to go away for good. Some wait for marriage, though it may prove disastrous later, while some wait for divorce, which doesn’t come easy either. Some wait for a new job or promotions, while others eagerly await their retirement, and that too at times prematurely. Some wait for a new baby to come, than to see him walk, talk and go to school. Some wait for the stock charts to go up, while some wait for them to crash, and even if it happens as per their choice, they book profit and wait again for the situation to reverse. Some wait for a train to come, while others wait for it to reach its destination. Flights don’t come, people don’t fly but they do wait. People wait everywhere, at home, at school, at office, at cinemas, at airports at bus stations and mostly, especially in India, at railway stations.

Most of the waiting is done in some hope, even though there is no surety of it getting materialized. People even wait for God or His Incarnations and Angels to come and uplift them, or save them from their worries. Many are not sure about such happenings to ever take place, but they wait. They wait in temples, in Jungles, on the mountains, or on a riverside for the miracle to take place. Definitely they do wait.

Humans can’t help it, they have to wait. It is deep inside them. Mostly people are optimistic or overoptimistic in their waiting, despite of knowing that the person or event they are waiting for is unlikely or not likely to come, or at least not likely to come before the destined time. Some wait pessimistically too, for an event to get over. Some even wait their own deaths or for the world to come an end. That doesn’t happen and they keep on waiting, living life full of anxiety.

But world doesn’t end, nothing in the world ends, so doesn’t the waiting. We will wait, sometimes even without knowing what we are waiting for and some times even knowing well that such a wait is of no use. Still we wait. We are humans after all. Mr Beckett did capture this human nature very well in his play. The human absurdity has been well covered in his Theater of the Absurd; Waiting for Godot.