Dawn, Azazeel, Indigo, and Inquilab

It was a blue dawn. The muezzin would call the faithful to prayer in an hour's time. A few morning-walkers were already up and about, initiates of the select, tranquil order of those who know the city in a way unknown to citizens of the evening and the afternoon. There had been rain overnight; cleansing pavements and streets, lending tree-leaves a fresh layer of green, suffusing the air with the unlike-anything-else smell of rain-soaked soil. A few years ago, when my dog Pluto was still with me, we would have gone out walking together on a morning like this.

I had been up all night, reading and intermittently pacing around the apartment. As ever, it was proving difficult to banish a sense of hollowness and consequent melancholy — always, always haunted by the guilt of living a complacent, comfortable bourgeois life willfully blinding myself and averting my gaze from the lives of an immense number of people who simply do not have the time to contemplate, romanticize, engage with the morning and the day ahead with the sort of numb, selfish complacency I euphemistically justify as aestheticism. I walk to the balcony and burn my way through one more cigarette.

If you listened intently, in the distance you could hear the first commuter trains staccato whistling their way into the city, electricity and diesel fuelling hypnotic rhythms of iron and steel. Typically, their compartments would be furnished with ruthless minimalism; with barely functional benches and berths of unadorned wood, creature comforts a distant dream. And yet, all of them filled to the brim with the nameless majority without whom the city's cogs will not turn – construction workers building another corporate high-rise sheathed in garish concrete and glass; farmers taking hopeful baskets of home-grown produce for the discerning palate of the calorie-conscious urbanite; women tirelessly doing daily housework for multiple bourgeois families for monthly salaries that would buy you one measly meal at your local KFC; or the ones who dig up miles of roads and earth under a scorching sun to lay fiber-optic cables for your high-speed broadband network.

Despite all the hardship, you can tell that the people of this Other India (the 'have-nots' who literally build the prosperity bubble in which the elite live ensconced), they engage and reconcile themselves to life with a resilience irresponsible, gutless, self-indulgent losers like me can only ever aspire to. I think one of the fundamental reasons for their unwavering commitment to what they do is an awareness of responsibility understood and remembered with crystal-clear clarity. The responsibility of ensuring a better, secure education and future for their children; the responsibility of looking after the comfort of their parents; or the responsibility of supporting a husband or wife who has chosen to spend their entire lifetime with you, trusting you enough to make what probably is the most important decision a person makes in her or his lifetime.

Just what do you say to someone who knows these responsibilities all too well (having had the privilege of a relatively prosperous familial and professional position, a higher education guided by excellent teachers in elite educational institutions, impeccably honest and hardworking parents, a younger brother who would do anything for him, and a partner who stands by his side like a rock through all vicissitudes), and yet is drawn at every given opportunity to the dark orbit of nihilistic, soulless hedonism?