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.