'Probably I am no longer the optimist that I used to be earlier...': Umar Khalid Writes from Tihar Jail
Umar Khalid finds solace in Dostoevsky's prison reflections, exploring themes of hope and despair in captivity.
BY: UMAR KHALID
In this quiet, reflective essay from Tihar Jail, incarcerated PhD scholar Umar Khalid draws on Dostoevsky’s ‘House of the Dead’ to reflect on a life shaped by confinement, his time in jail, and his thoughts on hope and despair.
About hope in prison Dostoevsky has some reflections. He writes, “From the first day of my life in prison, I began to dream of freedom. To calculate in a thousand different ways when my days in prison would be over became my favourite occupation. It was always in my mind, and I am sure that it is the same with everyone who is deprived of freedom for a fixed period. I don’t know whether the other convicts thought and calculated as I did, but the amazing audacity of their hopes impressed me from the beginning.
The hopes of a prisoner deprived of freedom are utterly different from those of a man living a natural life
A free man hopes, of course (for a change of luck for instance, or the success of an undertaking), but he lives, he acts, he is caught up in the world of life. It is very different with the prisoner. There is life for him too — granted prison life — but whatever the convict may be and whatever may be the term of his sentence, he is instinctively unable to accept his lot as something positive, final, as part of real life. Every convict feels that he is, so to speak, not at home but on a visit. He looks at twenty years as though they were two, and is fully convinced that when he is let out at 55 — he will be as full of life and energy as he is now at 35.”
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