Who Am I in a World Full of Extremes?

In a world full of spiritualists, rationalists, believers, skeptics, devotees, cynics—and everyone in between—who am I?

I’ll start with this:

I’ve been listening for as long as I can remember.

Interviews. Speeches. Award shows. Podcasts (once they became a thing). Lyricists. Cricketers. CEOs. Miss Universe winners. You name it, I saw it.

Not because I agreed with them. Not even because I liked them.

I just listened.

I think I was hunting for something I didn’t have a name for.

And now I know what it was.

A worldview.

Because my world—like everyone’s world—is limited.

It’s big, but it’s still mine. It’s everything to me, but it isn’t everything.

And when I listened to all these wildly different people, I wasn’t trying to become them.

I was picking up pieces that clicked with my own morality, my own chaos.

I was building my own world—one stolen perspective at a time.

One of the people I always came back to was Javed Akhtar.

Not because I agreed with him blindly (I don’t believe in blind anything anymore),

but because he does something I admire deeply:

He never tries to overpower.

Even when he debates, he doesn’t try to win.

He explains. He reasons. He presents his worldview and lets it breathe in the room.

He never shoves it down your throat.

That kind of restraint is rare in a world addicted to noise.

And maybe it’s also because he’s a writer—

a lyricist who knows how to sneak a punchline into a lullaby.

Once, when asked if literature and poetry are fading in the modern world,

he didn’t go on a rant about Gen Z or digital attention spans.

He told a story about fishing.

He painted a scene:

You and your friends on a quiet lake, beers in hand, peaceful, casting a line.

Then he switched the perspective:

A fish, entering her living room, seeing food, biting it—

only to have a hook lodged in her throat, yanked out of her home,

unable to breathe, scraped to death, her body consumed.

And then, he brought it back:

Art, poetry, literature—these are the fish. The quiet voices pulled from their world before they even know why. The ones we silence, romanticize, consume.

That’s the kind of answer I crave.

I also listen to people like Sadhguru—polar opposite world views, same hunger to express.

I’ve seen their debates. I’ve watched the contradictions.

And then I’ve turned to the mirror and asked:

Who am I?

And here’s what I say now:

I’m not an extremist.

Not in the way that counts.

Yes, personally I can be extreme—it’s either do-everything or do-nothing for me.

But when it comes to belief, to faith, to truth—

I don’t subscribe to all-or-nothing.

I’m not a spiritualist who’s blindly devout.

I’m not a rationalist who believes the heart is a scam.

I’m neither.

And I don’t want to be either.

When it comes to God, I live in the maybe.

Is there a divine being?

Maybe.

Does that idea help me survive some days?

Definitely.

And if believing that someone up there is rooting for me

gets me through a day of uncertainty, then I’ll take it.

But if the next day, I’m reminded of a two-year-old girl

raped and murdered—

with no justice, no closure, no karma in sight—

then no, maybe there is no god.

And that’s fine too.

Because blind faith is as dangerous as blind denial.

I’ve read the stories. I’ve read about Ram asking Sita to prove her purity.

I’ve read about Draupadi being passed like property.

So no, I won’t pretend my gods are flawless.

I respect religion. I don’t worship it.

And the same goes for logic.

You can’t live entirely in your mind.

You’ll lose all the poetry of being alive.

So that’s who I am.

Not someone with the answers—

just someone who keeps asking the question,

without needing to pick a side.

In a world that loves extremes,

I’ll take the middle ground.

Not because it’s safe—

but because it’s the only place where I feel like myself.