After a fairly long time, a topic
had struck me to be worth writing about and then again after a long period of
dilly-dallying I could muster the interest to sit down to write. Please don’t
question me about this time of hiatus, as it has mostly to do with my feeling about
being some sort of good-for-nothing and of course some minor distractions like
work.
Now-a-days whenever I look at any
adult face, I try to locate the face of the child within. What would have this
man or woman looked like when they were a school going kid, in their pre-teens.
Then I correlate their present face, their present behavior, to their child
face and thereby deduct their child behavior. It has kind of become a game for
me. The genesis of this game has been my own awareness about what I was during
my school days. Try it, you will never be bored irrespective of whether you are
sitting and waiting for a scheduled appointment or you are in a bus, train or
plane journey or just sitting in a park.
I realized two interesting things
about myself one fine day. First one is that I am a very different character or
person today from the one I was during school. The second one is that though this
new person calls all the shots in my life, the initial person, mutilated,
disfigured and ignored, still lives inside. I had successfully fooled myself
into thinking that I had evolved, had grown up, turned mature and have started
behaving in tune with my responsibilities vis-à-vis the expectations of family
and society. The truth is that this second person, whom I didn’t know till
then, simply jumped into my life and took over the reins. I just
morphed from being one person to another. The fact that this new person was
acceptable to everyone including my father, helped. Yet sadly this change wasn’t
organic. Woes upon me, it was a crime of snuffing of identity which I didn’t
even protest but rather tacitly supported. However inspite of all these years,
thankfully the first person is not dead but yet alive. It takes a bit of
introspection to distinguish and identify these two personalities. The first
one still is a child while the second one is the so called worldly wise adult.
At times I am blank, smiling for
no reason, sitting and staring without a thought at the horizon, trusting
someone to arrive and love and take care for me, wondering with amazement about
events around me, without any notion about etiquettes and cunning, engrossed in
a song or a comic or story book and satisfied with its most intriguing and
rather more interesting world, and remembering the laughter and fun times with
friends. This character is the child, the first me. The kid has not grown up; it
still lives for the moment, the same as it always was, even though life has
changed.
Then again at times I am worried,
critical of self and others, temperamental when it comes to mistakes, planning,
thinking about the future with expectations, thinking about the past with discontent,
rolling from one thought to another without concentration or focus, never
satisfied even if something remarkable happens as it dwarfs in comparison to
the expectations, living and exercising and generally taking care of self. This
character is the second me, the hard working adult. This commercially fretting person
is the one who chose my profession albeit the wrong one for me.
The thought did cross my mind
that would I be able to pin point the exact time when this usurping took place.
I guess, and it’s just a guess, that when I was in the 11th
standard, after having secured some low second class marks in the 10th
Board exams, when I realized that I am at the threshold of adulthood and was
not going anywhere, the child in me gave up and passively withdrew for this new
alter-ego to take charge. I was sixteen years of age and pretty much a dumb
wit. But from there onwards a sense of responsibility crept in. In the 12th
standard I joined a Mathematics coaching class and my world changed thereafter.
Even a blind bat can sense that
both these persons are not exactly compatible. The child didn’t grow up while
the adult didn’t have any childhood. While one is meek the other is pretentious
nonetheless both are cowards. If you ask which one is the true me, I would most
certainly be at a loss to answer honestly. The child appears on the surface
with some very close people and generally stays in the shadows. The adult takes
most of the decisions. I am the union of a divine mix-up; together both these characters
have come to represent me. They are both ruled by my life’s bandwidth. They are
both the cause and the victims of everything that has happened in my life.
Today whatever I am for x, y, and z reasons, it gives me some satisfaction to
be able to place events and their aftermath in the right perspective, and to
understand the how and why of it, with some amount of humility and gratefulness.
I recognise and reclaimed the child inside and am proud of it. I recognise and
know the adult too and hope and pray that it can take me to my destination.
