Acclaimed singer Babul Supriyo has never been afraid of being lonely. He has spent decades performing for thousands and navigating the noise of public life and speaks about solitude not as an escape but as a discipline, something he returns to every single day, by choice.

It starts each morning, he says. “After waking up, I try to spend the first hour, sometimes a little more than that, in silence. It is not any self-imposed disciplinary measure, but the quietness comes naturally. I listen to songs, do my riyaaz, and browse through notifications from news apps but only read the article if I want to. I organize my thoughts and arrange my day in my mind.

The conversation around loneliness reignited recently as India recently ranked second among the loneliest countries of the world in a survey. However, Babul firmly believes, “You never feel lonely if you love the person you’re alone with, and it could very well be your own self; hence, loneliness may not be something agonizing; rather, it may be a blissful avenue to attain solitude and be at peace with yourself.”

“You are lucky if, at some point in your youth, you get the opportunity to stay alone. It makes you a mature and confident individual, someone who is attached to his inner self, confident and comfortable in his own skin. In this highly competitive world, full of stress and pressures, with many making the grave mistake of allowing likes and comments received on social media to decide between happiness and despair, it is very important to search and find some ‘me-time’ to attain composure and solitude,” he adds.

And true to his own belief, he seems to have found his own ways to solitude and ‘being lonely’ pretty remarkably. “Whenever I visit the US, I make it a point to spend at least a week/10 days in San Francisco, my favorite city, completely alone doing nothing at all apart from taking long walks around Fisherman’s Wharf, the Golden Gate Bridge, and several of my favorite places in the city across the bridge. I do the same when in London. I walk around with no destination in mind, just moving in whichever direction I feel like going,” he said.
“Finding ‘Me-time’ religiously as a non-negotiable necessity, shall keep you grounded & connected to yourself everafter,” he concluded.