Oscillations in the world of contadictions

I sit in the classroom, and the professor cracks a joke about the celebrity sports star or a legendary musician of the black and white times. I sit through the seminars and gaze in awe as the speaker throws at the crowd his words of intellect. I toss between being the impatient 'incomplete self' and an admirer of the "other-I-wanna-be". I sit with my friends as they discuss the most popular TV series, directors, actors, movies, and music. I hear boys talk about cars, cricket, girls and gadgets and girls’ chit-chat about exams, parents, clothes, and boys. I toss between being a 'dumbo' who is clueless about anything to a 'dude' who has something to say about everything. I listen to frustration of students over their career, jobs, supervisors, and their ‘nothing-is-going-on-in-life’ stories. I get news of my old friends getting married and make babies, some of them struggling with their jobs and some of them clicking pictures all around the world. I toss between hope and despair. Different people do different things. Somethings I very well know, some I attempt to know and some I ignore. Certain things interest me while certain things don't. 

It is difficult to disentangle what I think I know, what I would like to know and what I should know. It is a constant struggle to acquire the characteristics that are 'respected and expected' and to give up those that are 'unwanted and unappreciated' in the eyes of the others. I am an outsider as well as an insider to this process i.e., I observe/expect as well as participate/change as a response to everything that is happening around me.  I am a part of this larger crowd trying to be different among the same and trying to change yet remain the same. I am the ordinary yet unique, and I am the static yet dynamic. It is this constant process of transformation between the 'self and the other' that results in turbulent changeovers. 

I oscillate between sudden bursts of boredom and excitement, happiness and moodiness, confidence and confusion, ambition and aversion, fascination and repulsion. My thoughts wander here and there like a meandering river. My attention drifts and the imagination goes wild and swift. In the flash of a second, I disengage from the concrete and engage with the abstract and vice-versa; I disengage from the present and engage with the past and the future. Where things can never settle but instantaneously change, what a tiny thing is my mind and hence I realize the futility of the search for the ultimate certainty and stability. So, here I set out to bother not about the trivial but the profound, not the logical but the creative and not the convergence to the set boundaries but the divergence away from them. I, after all, live in the world of contradictions and therefore I progress.

The Naughty kid in Me

“She is naughtier than a boy!” Many ladies in my colony told my mother when I was a kid. Not wasting even a second once the school bell rings, I rush back home, pull out my socks and shoes, belt and tie, and choke some milk and snacks down. I go door to door gathering all other kids of the colony to play hide& seek; color-color; chain and what not. Deeply engrossed into playing, I have always breached all the deadlines set to return home. To escape my mother’s anger, I have often extended my play time so that I can wait till it is the time my father gets back from the office because he never beats me. Many times, I haven’t even returned home after school playing with the kids who come to sell guavas, candies, ice golas, etc. My mother says searching for me in the entire colony was her daily routine and at least a mischief a day was mine. I am sure it will be a tiresome exercise to count how many times my mother used broomsticks and sticks to beat me. My sister, however, has been one of those siblings whose obedience will only add fuel to the fire. Even at school, if I remember correctly, I was never punished for not completing homework, or not answering in the class or scoring fewer marks, etc. But, I have been asked to stand on the bench or outside the class, make ‘goda-kurchi’ and ‘murga’ positions numerous times for all the mischief I did. My mother and I can recollect endless stories about my most happening childhood. Today I sit in my lonely room and wonder when no punishments can ever bind me, what will it be like reliving the naughty kid in me.