This week I re-read the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s famous two-act play Waiting for Godot. It was one of those weeks that went perfectly with the long meandering aimless conversations between Didi and Gogo that take place under a leafless tree while they are waiting for Godot. They talk; they reminisce, and they ponder on life. But mostly they wait. For one or two moments, there is hope that Godot will arrive. The story ends. He never does.
Several critics have interpreted this story in many different ways, exploring some basic questions: who is Godot? Is he even real? Then, some even go on to examine extremes: is the story a political allegory, a psychological metaphor, or an existential question about the meaning of life itself? The Wikipedia page took me down a rabbit hole of interpretations that consumed a considerable amount of my time. By the end of this frustrating quest, I concluded that Beckett just wanted to play some cryptic mind games with our control-, speed-, and clarity-obsessed generation. And he may have well succeeded—he brought me back all the joy and frustration of being and not doing, existing and not striving, and asking but never knowing. On that note, and in the end, I will share what inspired Beckett—who dismissed every critic—to write this. As I promised in the beginning, let me share what Beckett himself felt about the play. He too was tired of interpretations that he thought were a source of ‘endless misunderstanding’. "Why people have to complicate a thing so simple I can't make out…It's all symbiosis,” he'd once shared. You see, the play for him was never about Godot but about Didi and Gogo chatting under a leafless tree. That was all there was to it.