Riding the hate-train

You know what makes us emotionally screwed? We love to hate things, and we are not even a bit choosy about it. We despise those things that never happen to us; for instance, true love, a rich dying grandfather, conditionless sex (or in some cases, just sex), and for all that we curse our destiny. Nonetheless, we also loathe things that are meant for us, mostly shrugging it off because of our ever growing discontentment.  In nutshell, we can’t bear what’s theirs, and can’t adore what’s ours. If we add up both the equations, what we get is unreasonable hatred for every-damn-thing that somehow affects our lives.

With the right set of eyes and the ability to interpret, one can witness this phenomenon anywhere, and metro compartments are no different; infact, they are more like a black market of abomination. Getting all the negativity at wholesale prices.  

The long queue at the entry point, paranoid police officers, insufficient metro card balance, insanely slow person blocking the way, out of order escalators, overloaded lifts, too many stairs, suppressing the fetish to cross the yellow line, wrong announcements, boarding Vaishali instead of Noida City centre; all of them are merely starters to our hate feast. One can easily imagine how worse things can get once the train commences its journey.

If we are standing up, we stare down hard at those sitting and proud. And if, out of sheer luck, we are blessed with a seat, we tend to dig out reasons to dislike it too- space not sufficient, co-passenger is sweaty, view is not to our liking, lack of charging point, and absence of hot girl in the chosen compartment.  Moreover, their beats audio headset hanging there like an albatross around their neck or the fancy silicon mobile covers that you never thought ever existed, makes you envious like an old queen of the fairy land.

The slightest of acts in the crowded compartment sparks up your rage upto Delhi’s summer temperature. An unintentional, harmless push appears either to be a battle-call to your masculinity or an assault to your sexuality. The innocent turn of newspaper pages torture your eardrums for a dreadful crime that you never committed. You may think that every element of the universe is out there to infuriate the deeply buried jolly-good-fellow out of you.

It clearly proves that we are pro at disliking stuff. But, is it really something to gloat about! This skill doesn't even qualify to be added into our resume, yet we apply it in our lives. Hate and its numerous evil off-springs significantly affect the way of our life- the way of love and affection.   

It’s time that we take our pre-conceived notions and negative perspectives, slant them by 45 degree, and see everything from the new set angle. I think it’s time to extract some gold out of those coal mines. Look for something beautiful in our everyday situations. Feel content. Try smiling instead of frowning. I think it's high time we realise that hate is too expensive to be spend on lousy things, try love, it's cheaper. 

Setting up the track

We, humans, are not as glorious as we like to presume. We think too much about ourselves, speak a lot about others. We like to exaggerate what we are, by inflating our achievements and hiding our failures. We boast of listening to our true heart, instead of manipulative mind, but hardly ever able to differentiate which voice is coming from where. ‘There’s no sound-tracking device inside here, dude’, we stupidly say to excuse ourselves. We wait for something big to happen and, thus, ignore those latent minute moments: a walk in the rain, an unexpected eye contact, sharing a chocolate, reading a book, free WiFi, laughing with friends, keeping a secret, conversing with your crush, and countless other gems.

But, he was different. He believed in ‘God of Small things’. He celebrated those tiny moments which some even fail to notice. Unlike others, he was not a hypocrite, but a fickle-minded for sure. The guy I am talking about here was known for his intense pauses and habit of drifting into an unknown world.  He was a kind of person who never stayed where he didn't felt belonged and hence stayed alone, in his dreams and world of expectation.  It’s not like there was any shortage of faces; they were flying all around him. Some also putting on a show of love and care, but it was his inability to read those faces which made him float apart. ‘If you can’t read them, you can’t trust them’, as his policy goes about the bond formation. He paved his way into lonesome only after juggling through a social construct called friendship. For him, it was just a familiar crowd which buzzed around when he needed some space and left him alone when he was desperate for some warmth.

It was this very loneliness and mistrust that drove him to the outside world of strangers and beauty. In search of companionship, he started looking at things in a different way, which drastically changed him from the inside. He found all his answers and even framed some new questions in this newly discovered world of chaos and peace, hanging together in equilibrium.  Believe me when I say, it was no fairy land, but the fast-moving real world of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation.  Strange, isn’t it? It’s in those metro rides, he recognised and understood the myriad elements of life. Now, he looked at people not because of their appealing beauty or weirdness. He looked for something more meaningful and smiled when he did. He would breathe in the view outside and sew his own world using those props. He deciphered the complexities of relationships by merely having a healthy chat to himself, in the long metro ride.  

It’s not a story that I am going to narrate but an imperfect knot of moments called life, the life of an ordinary me and an ordinary you. The life of a typical metro guy.