‘It’s not me’

The night was enchanting. However, the only thing on the minds of Mullah Nasruddin and his two friends—the barber and the village bumpkin—was sleep. They were worn to the bone after an exhaustive journey. But since they were passing through a secluded place, Nasruddin suggested that they take turns to keep vigil. The other two agreed. After a lot of deliberation, they decided upon the barber as the first one to stay awake, followed by Nasruddin.

The exhaustion was evident as Nasruddin and the bald man fell asleep immediately. As for the barber, he found it extremely difficult to stay awake. However, there was no choice. As he sat leaning against a tree, he found himself repeatedly dozing. Then he realised that he never felt sleepy while working. But there was a catch. His experience was limited to cutting hair and shaving beards. How could he work in the middle of wilderness with no humans in sight, barring the two sleeping fellow travellers? He thought, ‘How about cutting their hair?’ The choice among the two was rather simple since the village bumpkin was bald.

It didn’t take the barber long to cut Nasruddin’s hair. Since he still had an hour to go, he took out the razor and even shaved Nasruddin’s head.
When the hour elapsed, the barber shook Nasruddin, who, true to his habit, swept his hand over his head. However, finding no hair to ruffle as he usually did, Nasruddin looked angrily at the barber. ‘You’ve woken up the wrong person. I’m the bald traveller. You need to wake him up,’ he said and went back to sleep.

While guffawing at Nasruddin’s outlandishness, do we realise that we are no different from him? Our external form is what is known to not only others but to us as well. There are layers and layers of us beneath our exterior that we aren’t familiar with. Most people identify themselves only through their body, looks, habits, mannerisms and thoughts that exist on the periphery of their minds. Sadly, only a fraction of humans manage to dig deep and unearth their true selves.

Like the Upanishadic seers who said, ‘neti neti’ (not this, not this) to everything till they found their true selves, we must also learn to say, ‘It’s not me,’ to all these erroneous signs. Let’s make a pledge to delve deeper into ourselves and find our true selves.