This piece is about loneliness and at once an anecdote comes to mind. A friend of mine was slowly slipping into the unenviable quagmire of being a confirmed bachelor. Weekdays were somewhat bearable. At the press he worked, colleagues provided company, cigarettes and silly jokes. But Sundays were all his own. The days stretched out like a strand of chewed-out-all sweetness-spent-chewing gum. As the grey misery wrapped itself around him like a wet, burlap sack, he took to visiting his married friends, a different family each Sunday. The hostile silence of his flat was replaced by homes that had the telly on, little ones screeching with laughter, tables groaning with food, and the mistress of the house tending to him with the solicitousness of one nursing back to health a stray kitten. Before he knew it, the children of his friends began to call him Sunday Uncle. It made sense, considering he appeared only on Sundays. But my friend was quick to take offence. He thought of the term as an epithet for being a loser, a tramp. The following year, he tied the knot with a pleasant, cheerful lady and it became an enormous source of satisfaction to have a confirmed bachelor or two sheepishly dropping in on Sundays to dine at his table.

But there is so much more to loneliness than an anecdote with a happy ending. A great tidal wave of loneliness, or social isolation is sweeping over the world, both in the affluent and the less-developed societies. Research has found that lonely people have disrupted sleep patterns, altered universe systems, more inflammation and higher stress hormones. Loneliness, call it isolation if you will, increases the risk of strokes and heart attacks. Cognitive decline, premature death, are all offset by individuals living in isolation, deprived of company.

But would you and I admit to being lonely? Wouldn't that automatically imply we are not popular, we are not loved, wanted, cherished? Would it not mean we have failed to find belonging, love, attachment? And so we perpetuate this conspiracy of silence, treat this human condition as a stigma, a taboo. And when we reach out for help, we are told to snap out of it, we are handed a bottle of anti-depressants.

Mankind as a whole is lonely. Sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke wondered if we are alone in the universe. We long for extra-terrestrials to break our solitude. We long to show them our AI, our music, our art, our nuclear plants, our bullet trains, our phones, our fire-power. We want their compliments, or even their grudging approval. But all we have is us and that chest-thumping will perhaps never take place.

Eminent Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami questioned why people have to be this lonely. In Sputnik Sweetheart, there is an agonised attempt to understand what makes people yearn for company and are denied it. No wonder Japan has the highest suicide rate in the world, with its own suicide forest where demented souls go and starve to death.

Christopher Fry, the British comic and actor is a manic depressive who famously said, "I want to be left alone but I don't want to be alone." Balzac wrote in the same vein that solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.

It then appears that loneliness is an adversary that creeps up on you without warning. Let there be a battle of wills between loneliness and you. Stare it in the eye. Dare it to do its worst. Think of the people who care for you and are ranged on your side. Some years ago, packing Junior's bags for his sojourn to a Delhi college, his first departure from home, I tearfully asked him if he would be lonely. He told me something I have never forgotten. "If you have books, you are never alone." So while the other half is hooked on cricket in the other room, I immerse myself in Manto and Alice Munro, Michael Cunningham and Yuval Noah Harari. People throng through the pages, multitudes of them, people who seem within touching distance, and every book is a journey down a rabbit hole.

There's a key difference between loneliness and solitude, loneliness is what happens to you, and solitude is that which you seek for restoration and balance. Bikers, surfers, artists, writers thrive on solitude. It provides them the space and atmosphere to do what their hearts desire. There are people out there who actually enjoy being alone, though they are not unsocial. Most famously, we have Gandhi withdrawing into silence, Thoreau in his cabin, Van Gogh alone in an asylum and Beethoven mired in stillness.

Can you imagine Michelangelo high up on the scaffold, painting the Sistine Chapel? It takes genius, or madness, to stretch oneself to such a limit. And he is supposed to have said, "If you are alone, you belong entirely to yourself." Great creators have admitted that it is in the stygian darkness of their loneliness that they have found the flickering flame of creation.

Enough about human loneliness. Why do we feel only we matter? Cats, dogs, gorillas, elephants - all feel lonely and miserable. Wolves howl to get back to their packs. In the 1970s, a "Pit of Despair" experiment was conducted by psychologist Harry Harlow. Newborn monkeys were put in isolation chambers shortly after they bonded with their mother. The duration of isolation ranged from one month to one year. Within days the babies stopped moving and stayed huddled in a corner. Harlow was widely criticised for torturing the primates by cutting off their social interaction.

In the end, loneliness is not a lack of companionship; it is the lack of purpose. Discover in yourself the resources to fight this silent evil. Don't hesitate to seek help.
Indrani Raimedhi