Okay fellas.. Let me give a prosaic beginning to this post of mine :)4
Fatigue and my own temperament had receded me into the couch with my book and television today and as I was surfing the channels, I happened to chance upon a documentary in Discovery channel about a certain tribe in India and am extremely sorry to notify which part and et al details about them but that excerpt kept me pondering about…Life…and the various familiar anonymities that surround it……
Okay I know I am deviating into wayward philosophy so let me get back into the track…. It was about the lives centering around an old man called Hauro and his wife, who live an earning by making bamboo artifacts. Of course since I evidently missed a chunk of the show all I could make out was Hauro buying the colours to celebrate Holi , which has of recent become a part of their tribe’s culture. Of the tribe drunk and dancing around a bonfire and celebrating death (I am praying that you don’t ask me why death and Holi have been celebrated together by this tribe, coz as in the movie Mr.Woodcock that is going to be a rhetorical question) .
The question which set me thinking though, was not about how free, women were in that almost uncivilized and small society ,set in the backdrop of a jungle , when they could drink and dance just like men, in front of men and a bonfire to their bliss and hit their men on their heads if they crossed the lines (ahem this is not my creation or fantasy!) or their custom of hugging the souls of the dead ones by searching for them in the lakes where their ashes were immersed, which in my opinion was borderline Futile…
What set me thinking was how inconspicuous these people were.… A set of small, brown and hardened people whose faces never betrayed their emotions…the extent of the obscurity of their presence in this big yet small world where men and women are mad alike, trying to pull their children into a position which would be realistically beautiful yet more competent and crazier than their present situations tomorrow… Of how these people were happy despite of their nothingness.. And that made me ponder.. Are we happy with everything or nothing. Are they small in our big and anxious world or do we appear nothing in their small and happy world?? … Or do we strive a lot to achieve that sense of everything, when that is as Utopian as perfect man and world world and in the bargain lose the joy that even small things could bring us everyday just because we overlook them in our run..Of course so many questions remain unanswered and so many questions have an answer but cannot be made acceptable because they don’t make enough of meaning to us… To us sprinting in the tracks, jumping over the stones and hanging onto each rock desperatley trying to reach the winner’s point ….
Well living in a country like India can set any thinker’s mind into a constant state of contemplation mode because not only is India the land of colors and chaos alike but confusion too… Confusion in the name of paradox… Here is a country where people dump the day’s food under a tree because that would make it stale and not usable for the next day and have children in rags searching in that dump for a nice piece of fish! Or have you ever considered how “good” you felt after walking out from a mall with a Levi’s and Reebok bag in your hands only to see little muddy children running up to you, clinging and “asking” for change to spare for their meals( which of course is later on snatched from their tiny hands to feed the Bigger mouths of The Beggars Organization of that city!)
Of course if you haven’t, I am not going to ask you to stop and think and pause and ponder over all these a while because hey, who am I to stop you from enjoying and being happy… After all, Doesn’t life go on……..
But somehow I have been ,I think bought to this earth by God, at such an odd hour that I can never enjoy the pleasantries in my life without looking at the graying pages of it..It has always been like eating a gooseberry and mind you it is not just the big things in my life, which I feel I ,have rather, got undeserved, but the very trivial things that I have always craved for and which somehow loses its colors and glitters after a few days, not because they are old but because they fail to give me the sense of happiness forever…
Nothing is imperative in this world except for adaptation, maybe…. We all have dreams, illustrious ones, in the glory of achieving which sometimes we forget to make sense.Man lives covered by a veil of illusion until he tries and starts living and interacting with reality and its pressures… What Hauro and his people made me learn to day was that happiness is a much more frequent visitor than sorrow, except that we ignore it more than its melancholic cousin..Happiness is a state of mind… No matter how big or small we are, in the end we all die and life is too short to think about making happiness happen in our lives when it is already there… waiting for us… to be a part of our lives….
So people I really don’t want to continue being over-philosophical and ruining that little pool of happiness that’s already left in you( trust me am really good at it!) but all that I want to say is cherish every smile that you receive and every smile that you give, even if it is to a stranger, because these are the moments that make up that journey worthwhile….…