Meeting life......

Large spaces, bustling with people...people, scurrying to get to the right place at the right time....that's what our Metro station is usually like. Its a regular, mundane exercise for most of us...infact, its become so much a part of our schedule that it has almost been reduced to being banal! The thrill that the inauguration of the metro came with, is gone...the ten minutes to CP that seemed like a super sonic ride initially, now seem excrutiatingly long...that's what the human mind is like..it outgrows itself, and in the process wears itself off..wears itself off of all the small pleasures of life...

The metro ride, however, can be quite bereft of such dormancy and tedium...the bustling of people, that I just spoke about, is also a converging point of energies....the apparently vacant stares cease to be vacant anymore...there is so much to people, and so much more to life that simmers underneath! It is only when one travels on a public transport that one realises what the real, uninhibitted world is really like. When you're on the metro, you rub shoulders with men and women of all hues...from busy corporates..to brimming students.. to people who have never got the chance to escape the scorching sun....the airconditioned environs for whom are alien territory, and you can almost feel the apprehension in their eyes...and it is these people who have always caught my fancy. It is impossible to not notice that bewilderment in their eyes, that excitement , spilling away with small shrieks and chuckles...women, veiled inside their sarees, but buzzing with spirit inside, clamouring to be children again, clamouring to partake their new found fount of fun! Their men, I have noticed, are usually looking for places to hide their faces, red with embaressment as they are!! Sometimes, a small thing like the Metro becomes an epitome, as also an excuse, of feeling liberated, even if for a short while, for women such as these!

The best part, however, comes when they get to the escalator...the thrill that was once a part of their countenance now turns into fear...its takes all of us a while to get used to these "moving stairs", as I once heard one of these women cry out in disbelief!! It took me some time to get used to these myself when I had my first brush with them....but I'm sure it was'nt half as much fun for me, as it is for them.
Our gospels of etiquette and propriety, all shadows of our 'good breeding', take from us, sometimes, that charm of being inane and wild...that fervour of letting your hair down! But, not for them....nothing holds them back, with frenzy written all over their face...it is infact, contagious! Some people though, often scorn at them, laugh at them, at how naive they look, at how demonstrative they dare to be, but to me, they are what we should all strive to be like..unrestrained and real. That is one lesson that they give to us, inadvertantly though it might be....if you feel happy, show that you're happy, don't colour it with pretensions, pretensions that we all adorn, pretensions that the world cloaks us with...pretensions that smother and choke our spirit and zeal alive.

This is probably the worst of times to write a blog!! I have the toughest exam that I have ever taken in my three yrs of Law in two days, and here I am, in my hostel computer room, writing!! Been studying like crazy for the past couple of days and that is what has probably gone to me...its just the second exam of a series of five, and I'm already sick of them! Juris is next, and I still have loads to do...decipher basically...noone can ever understand what these honoured jurists of the world were trying to say or prove anyway!! Long discourses with them, hours of futile efforts to understand the first line of fifty page chapters...Gosh!! I'm not cut out for this maybe!! But I guess some men are sadists of the first order..take these distinguished jurists for example....who ever asked them to tread on areas the common mind cannot even comprehend? And even if they did think Big (unusually smart people they were!), why did they have to share it with the rest of the world??? why? why? why? The end result of such "thoughtlessness" is that lessor mortals like us, with miniscule minds, are forced to learn something which we will not even remember the head or tail of after we're done with the last word in our answer sheet!! :D

PS- This blog has been written under an intense state of frustration....juris is not that bad a subject after all!! Special emphasis on "that bad"! ;)