By Ramit Malhotra

Ramit Malhotra is Vice President at Becoming I Foundation since June 2010. 

2nd June, 2012.

Becoming I – Season 2 Finale.

That the journey has been expected would be a blatant lie. That the journey has been enriching would be an understatement.

I look back, and I feel amazed. The surprise comes from the movie reel of the last 2 years playing in slow-motion in my head, making me relive the smallest of moments that make filming this metaphorical TV show a passion that transcends petty impediments and feels as natural as getting up in the morning.

A journey is usually described by its two indispensable and distinctive characteristics; the destination, and a mapped-out route to reach it.

Retrospectively, I question both these descriptors.

Two years ago, a bunch of passengers came together wanting a destination. The common denominator was one. Absolute cluelessness brimming with youthful passion.

And so they started out with no clear destination and no defined way of reaching anywhere except by following directions from an instinctive internal compass lodged in one of them. A compass that worked more on emotion than magnetic force, that strangely managed to usher them, through doubt and cynicism and disillusionment, into a path that, now, most definitely seems to be thoroughly rewarding.

At times you just need to take a step back and marvel at the wonder that has been the journey and forget all about the destination. You marvel at how treading a particular path becomes a way of life, and how your life acquires meaning and purpose at every turn. You marvel at how one path unites people that normally would not, at how you come to see the change, to be the change and suddenly, to instigate the change.

But mostly you marvel at how you grow to learn and live on that path and are able to look back and witness everything in your mind’s film in third person, which makes all the marveling possible.

So what has been the third person me’s analysis?

Some days I wake to find myself an actor,trying desperately to get his act right;

On other days I peep through a viewfinder, looking for the perfect light.

There have been moments when I have squirmed uncomfortably in the director’s seat,

and still some moments, when I have questioned my changing identity.

I have been the designer, the writer, and even the coffee guy,

I’ve donned every possible role, strangely, all to Become ‘I’.

And that, for me, has been the biggest milestone. Settling into a groove and achieving ‘clockwork’. The knowledge that the show will go on, even if you can’t.

The absolute surity that the journey will find a destination, and that you must chug on with the faith that the sound of each step you take will resound in someone’s life magnificently, giving them strength to carry on forward in their own journey with just a promise that their footsteps too can resonate similarly.

A few left the path to find their own during this journey and some others joined anew looking to find the only thing that this journey has always offered to all its passengers: Themselves.

To those of you who have walked with me, even if it was just to show me around a particularly treacherous fissure, and to those who keep soldiering on with me, deftly negotiating their own fissures; I thank you.

To Becoming I, the old, the new and the transitionary: A tribute.