My unvoiced rantings

Something that seems to be out of the pages of my diary…But it was infact what I had written for one of my terminal exams back in Grade 12… sure I went off-topic and failed to complete it , but I guess it was one of things I had to do…Well, I would have labeled it as private but here it is…

 

 

It is not by what we learn from books, but real experiences, that have a lasting impact on our individual lives. Having said that, I feel that on more than one occasion I myself have come across situations -which at that moment of time had seemed unfair, but after they subside, you realize that it has left you a stronger and perhaps a more mature person; that’s something that no book can accomplish.

 

            It was during the summer vacation this year, when most of the others had left Dubai in order to escape the suffocating heat that I, stuck at home, reflected upon the past few years of my life. What I recalled were memories that astounded me. I realized that I had changed. I used to be quite different

 Each situation moulds us and brings in us a change, but my change was brought about by a self-inflicted situation.

 

            It is probably quite common for most of us to grumble about our misfortunes, when we fail to see that all our misfortunes are actually the result of our imperfect knowledge. It is only when we see the man without any legs that we realize how content we should be of wearing our old, outdated shoes. My situation was something similar. I felt that the whole world had turned against me and that everything that had happened to me was unfair.

 

            Having been physically ill for more than three years, I envied my other friends. And it was perhaps with this very frame of mind, that I started counting my misfortunes. I will not claim that I was over-exaggerating my condition but yes, I was not looking at what I ‘did’ have.

 

            Without, my own realization I had turned myself into an immature being, vulnerable to her circumstances. I considered myself unlucky having born less gifted than my sister- who was outshining me at every step. I thought it was unjust that I should be made to suffer so many medical check-ups with needles and doctors hovering over me. That I should be made to suffer of problems that I shouldn’t have been weighed down by at my age. That I should have weak muscles that couldn’t even support my spine for long. That I should have hormonal imbalance and be threatened to get cancer.

I thought that God was robbing me of my childhood!

 

            Then, at the beginning of the school term, I failed to re-connect with my earlier friends. Perhaps, it was the change in me or my negativity of character. All the things I had been so desperately passionate about and thought shaped who I was were gone. And I was still there. Regardless of the reasons, I felt that my life had reduced to ‘nothingness’ and that I was trapped, flooded with emotions which no one bothered to notice.

 

 

I started wonder what would fade next. Can we control our fate? Because I really don’t think I could. All these things kept happening, and my spirit just got tired. I lost a bit of my boldness and fiery tenacity. I became more timid. Shockingly, I stopped speaking up in my classes. I changed somehow, someway in the last four years. I let the others wear me down.

 

            It was at this peak, when I took a short trip to India during the Eid-break. What I saw there, in my homeland, marked a significant change in my thoughts and character.

 

            Being born in Kolkata, I had known it to be called the ‘City of Joy’, but I could never understand the reason. 

 

            It was on this trip however that I realized the full significance of that term. I was waiting in the car, handycam in hand, recording the Old Side of Calcutta as the trams went past along the cobblestone-road. Raindrops dripping, the roads looked revived after the monsoon. The camera focused on a family that was working on the other side of the road. The father, a food vendor, was sitting on the pavement and seemed to be grinding spices that he would later use at the nearby stall. His children, whose age varied between three to nine, were helping him. While I sat recording all this, unsure whether I was perhaps invading their privacy when I saw a girl who had been pumping the tube well by throwing her whole body on the handle; looking at me.

 

           

A second later, the whole world seemed to have shifted; she smiled, waved, tidied her hair and posed, calling out to her brothers to come and see. I failed to comprehend her excitement until I heard her telling her mother animatedly that “I am in a photo!”

 

            I still cannot express what happened to me over those few moments. What I do know is that it changed me. The children who were slum-dwellers, who probably had never eaten to a full stomach, probably never gone to school were satisfied with what they had because they aspired for a better future by doing something themselves. They perhaps had hopes and dreams of their own and even if they never got fulfilled- they never lost their joy, their faith. All around people no matter how poor, no matter how unfortunate- smiled.                        

 

 

And so I find myself, at the end of an important phase of my life, picking up from where I had left off. More strengthened and renewed and perhaps a little more geared up to face the world, while somewhere that little girl continues with her own life, ignorant of the transformation that she had brought in me through her innocence.