When Reason Goes for a Toss!

When Reason goes for a toss!
Wish I were a real rat! In this Rat Race I feel humiliated as a human being. And I wish I could get transformed into one of those scary looking Field rats! I have completed my Post Graduation unofficially. I say unofficially because my results are yet to be declared. In the meantime I tried my luck at the media houses. But so far no good! So I feel frustrated. And here’s what I do when I feel frustrated. No I do not pen down a fake suicide note and then Shift+ delete it. I get nostalgic and I start misusing the Microsoft word! Here I go…

The Kargil War was in a way quite productive for me. I had no real idea of what toll it was going to take on thousands of lives moreover on the economic system, but I was stupid enough to get intrigued by the Newspapers. That featured every gory act so stupendously. With Miss Barkha Dutt gaining more limelight than the Indian army I was swooning with an ambition of becoming Barkha! O! What a great service that would be for my country. I kept racing up and down the staircases of my house. I jumped up on the bed, rolled over the floor, with a comb in my hand, which obviously served for a mock boom! So I tried hard practicing the Barkha spirit. For the very first time I was sure of what career I should choose! Journalism! That’s it!

As time sped away, I became too heavy to stand up on the bed, let alone jump on it. I realized it would not be easy to practically prepare for the Barkha spirit. So what is to be done? Fear not Comrade-said my innovative faculties! And I decided I will become a Barkha dutt with a pen, not a boom! So the decision was taken. I was relieved. So was my mom as she was now confident of retaining her wedding bed. I did not do the “Barkha” any more. Writing is always my cup of tea. But slowly I realized it is not enough to keep it as my cup of tea, I must make it my cup of coffee, and if possible cups of honey and hemlock as well! The conflict began. I wrote and tore, tore and wrote. But coffee was not brewed, and for worse, I forgot the taste of tea!

The Kargil war is now a bygone issue (though some brigadiers may think otherwise). Leh has been under six feet water. Mumbai has faced a 26/11. I have completed my so called education. From a High spirited “Barkha” aspirant, I have turned into a Godforsaken, compulsive pessimist! What an achievement! At the end of the day when I realize my displacement is zero and I have returned to the same crushed pillow of yester night, it feels so bizarre. The day’s work seems useless; the endless brooding seems like a montage, the e-mails sent to employers seem like Grand theft auto game! And all my depressions turn into a hard day’s toil that makes me Y-A-W-N. I try my best to invoke the Rat in me! I rattle, and battle, but the rat refuses to give me any importance. I guess it decides to give itself a break after it has trotted the It, Media, Political, academic sectors! So when I invoke it, it considers me passé! Just like Sukumar Ray’s “Ho Jo Bo Ro Lo” I wish for some magic realism or maybe some surrealism. Anything, any suffix, any prefix that could for sometime hush up the reality of realism!!

Now the keyboard is obeying Newton’s Third Law a bit more acutely, and my head is saying that its time for minimizing my displacement to “zero”! (Y-A-W-N…er…I thank Mr. Gates for including the spell check!). So adieu to all my dreams, frustrations, rats and of course Barkha Dutt-like desires! I am sure the world has a lot many speedsters apart from Mr. Usain Bolt. So I voluntarily shrug off the responsibility to run on the mill. I prefer a stroll down the Ganga-ghat, across the Jetty where at dusk I sit and gaze at the flickers of the steamer lights! Hey, that is not such a bad job! I just discovered an old Class X English answer script where I had written a Quote from the revered Mr. Milton-“They also serve who stand and wait”. So, Here I wait for my kind of steamer to arrive. The world can in the meanwhile spin as fast as she wishes to! I am definitely not going for a toss! And I believe that even if Barkha would never know her ardent fan, my new found courage would make something of this nemo!

…I end the gibberish here...Curtains, Folks!