As I walked along the dreaded sidewalks of my locality, hurrying towards my office shuttle, I glanced upon a sight that was uncalled for. I call it uncalled for, because it stirred something deep inside me and that something put me in a state of delirium for the better part of my shuttle commute.
What I glanced upon was rather banal and trivial but what it triggered inside me was quite catastrophic. I saw a kid who was perhaps 9 to 10 years of age waiting patiently across the street. He stood there with an innocent smile on his sanguine face with his mother by his side, waiting for his school bus. He was wearing an oversized shirt accompanied with similarly oversized trousers and black formal shoes. You see Indian parents live for and in the future, so when it comes to buying the kid's apparel, how could they not? They make sure that it's oversized just enough so that it lasts a couple of years more. Longevity is very crucial for Indians, both in marriage and clothes, even if those long years are insufferable.
The kid also had a multi-colored Doraemon-inspired backpack on his almost limp, bent-over back, with both straps of the backpack safely secured around his meek shoulders. It almost seemed like the contents of his bag far outweighed his own body mass. Laden with various textbooks for different subjects alongside notebooks with homework to be duly submitted to respective subject-teachers. A water bottle dangling around his neck suspended by a synthetic green colored strap. His hairdo was precisely the way every Indian child's hairdo is supposed to be like. Flat, well-oiled and a metaphor for his parent's deep-seated desire for their child to be a civil-servant one day. His shoes were sparkling clean and shiny, judiciously polished with the world famous cherry blossom shoe-shine.
Now to the thought that besotted me. I see kids like him every day but what distinguished him was his uncanny resemblance to my own younger self. It seemed like that kid stood for everything that I had once stood for. Obedience, subordination and surrender. To surrender oneself to the world's whims; to be practical. Not to be idealistic. I was once that exact same child. Dressed the same, spoke the same and lived the same. I was constantly turning my glance inwards and realizing that those ideals over there lead to this.
I was almost chiding the child in my own mind, reprimanding him for following that path blindly, expecting something brilliant at the end. I was dressed in much the same fashion; a white casual shirt, a pair of blue jeans, semi-formal shoes, only that mine didn’t bear a school’s logo on them. I had a similar although “not-Doraemon” inspired bag on my back as well. Mine didn’t have books but instead a laptop. I too had something dangling along my neck suspended by a synthetic strap but that wasn’t a water bottle, it was my office ID-card. My hairdo was a bit more stylish than his, but only a bit. If you removed the size and age difference between us we were practically the same person. Both waiting for a bus that was always running late, to reach a destination that I dreaded but he rejoiced. The only difference between us was that the child was still filled with churlish optimism. He’d been told to stick to the process and eagerly wait for amazing surprises; I’d grown past all that jazz.
I knew something that he didn’t. I knew where that path led to. Whereas the boy across the street possessed some sort of wide-eyed optimism about the world. He was hopeful of the future. I wasn’t. I had seen and heard things he hadn’t. I was cynical, he was almost biblical. I climbed aboard the shuttle and started reminiscing my own childhood. Waking up, watching Cartoon Network, wearing my uniform and leaving for school. No sense of anxiety or stress. The only thing I was anxious of was not getting “full marks” in my exams, it was my only preoccupation.
I was much the same like that kid across the street, I thought; playing furtively at the playground, running and falling, without a care in the whole wide world. All children are pretty much the same. They study, they play, they watch cartoons, they finish their homework and then they sleep. I was much the same, like Tyler Durden remarked in fight club “We are not beautiful and unique snowflakes, we are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world”.
An average day in my life when I was 10 years old, like the kid across the street, was this: Wake up, brush, bodily ablutions, shower, cornflakes and cartoons, bus, “study”, come back, lunch, play, homework, some more cartoons, dinner, sleep. My life is synonymous even today. Textbooks were replaced with self-help books. You name it and I have read it. These books dictate that the only way one can succeed in life is to read these books (creating a vicious cycle), and then go on a spree of drinking an egregious amount of coffee, slog your ass off at the office, be determined, perseverant and dedicated (attach a million other adjectives associated with 'motivation'). We put in all that toiling and strenuous effort, so that some child-molesting billionaire can buy himself another yacht.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said in ‘The Great Gatsby’, “I was all at once, simultaneously, within and without, enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life”. Our lives are similar but in our case it is “I was all at once, simultaneously, within and without, disgusted and repelled by the inexhaustible monotony of life”.
“I am an office-going schoolboy”, I laughed, turns out I said it out loud instead of saying it in my mind. Everyone in the shuttle looked at me in a weird, disparaging manner, as if I said something deplorable. But deep down even they knew that they were nothing but office-going schoolboys and schoolgirls.
My mind raced from ‘Fight Club’, to ‘The Great Gatsby’ and while I was lost in my own world, I realized the shuttle had stopped abruptly, so I had to get down quickly, recollecting my thoughts.
That boy across the street was going to become like me one day. This mere thought shook me up and all I had ever believed in. All that optimism, hope and potential within him were going to get wasted writing mindless programs to automate mindless tasks in some mindless packaged software, preparing excel sheets to categorize those mindless tasks so that he could portray his ‘hard work’ to his manager during the year-end reviews to get that next sinecure attached to his name at some multi-nation conglomerate. He is a product on a conveyer belt with no will and freedom of his own. A colony of rats like him plague every nook and cranny of the office, with disgusting ID-cards wrapped around their necks resembling a convict condemned to 'death by hanging'.
“What a shame” I thought.
I went in, sat down at my cubicle, and started preparing a to-do list for the day, all of a sudden I realised, that there had been a welding workshop across the street from where I boarded the shuttle, and the workers there don’t allow anyone to stand nearby as sparks fly off the welding machine constantly, so who the hell was I seeing there all these days?
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