‘I am overwhelmed by the kind of greetings that I received on my birthday..thank you buddies,’ that’s what generally we say after getting more than a hundred messages in our profile page of any social networking sites. But I don’t want to say that to my friends. I don’t want to say this clichéd sentence mainly because I am not overwhelmed.
I am not overwhelmed. But I am afraid. I am afraid of the responsibility that your love and affection renders on my shoulders. The skeptic, the arrogant and the irreverent who resides in my mind asks me whether I am able to carry such a great responsibility. When people wish someone good on his/her birthday, they expect and they demand the person of their interest should be worthy enough to have such greetings.
If I fall short of their expectations, in fact I must be insulting myself through hurting their faith. But then I remember, the folk story, which had been painted by Bhupen Khakkar, ‘You Can’t Please All’. Yes, none can please all. But there is one person in this universe with you could tell the truth of your mind and that is ‘you’. You can look into your mind and ask whom are you going to please.
None in the world would get pleased by your acts. As Eddie Murphy puts it in a comic context, even your wife would ask you, ‘what have you done for me of late?’ You don’t have an answer. But you have an answer for you, for your own self.
At the age of forty three, when I sit in front of my FB profile and see all these friends wishing me great, I realize that they all helping me to looking into myself. They don’t want anything from. If at all they want anything from me, that is this; you just look into your own soul and see what you have done so far.
Forty three is not an important mile stone in anybody’s life. When you are thirty, people say it is time to start a life. When you are forty, people say tread cautiously. Now it is the time to grow. But several things keep knocking at your own soul and body. Your lungs would tell you to stop smoking. Your heart will tell you that it has been there all the time giving you free service. Now it is time to hark to its rhythmic heaving.
Friends tell you, it is time to have a complete check up. And you refuse to do. So one day when you sit in bus or a car or an aircraft you feel like choking. You just do not know what to do. You try to read, you look at the beautiful faces around you. Then you suddenly remember all what you have done in your life. Your rights and wrongs. You see your children’s face. You see your wife’s face. You see your mother’s face. You see your dead father. You see your friends and soon everything go out of focus.
When you get up from a physician’s stretcher with semen like jelly messing up your chest hair, you realize that you have a heart and now it is time to quit many things. Doctor advices you to be cautious. And he reiterates your faith by saying that you are as fit as a nut.
Yes, you have gone nuts. That’s why suddenly at the age of forty three you feel like forty three years old. Your wife tells you to behave like a forty three year old man. Your girl friends say, don’t. You are still young. Your kids, if you jive with the song in the television, ask you to go and sit at the computer. Your neighbors really don’t know; they feel that you are too young to be respected and too old to be neglected.
So you take revenge in the bed. Your wife tells you that it happens, don’t worry. Friends tell you, one day you need to dye your hair otherwise your kids would tell you not to go to their school when the session is on. They don’t want to see an old man coming in looking for them.
At the park, when you overtake the young couple in the walkway, they look at your with some kind of suspicion. The husband doubts your vigor and the young wife likes your rigor. You take pride while examining your mid riff; you are still fat free. You have an ironing board for a stomach. You have nothing to cut; even your living cost.
But then end of the day what are you supposed to do after turning forty three. So you masturbate and you ejaculate your humiliation on the bathroom floor. You can count the sperms in that. They are too less. You look at the mirror. The reflection laughs at you. So you flex your muscle and curse under your breathe.
Then you smile. You want to forget everything. You want to move away from all these worldly ties. You just want to be alone. You just want to be one with yourself. You don’t want to listen to your children screaming. You don’t want the flushing of toilet from the next door. You don’t want to see lovers walking hand in hand and exploring their secrets under a chunni. You don’t want to read anything. You don’t want to do anything.
But then it is at forty three, they say, one gets the real maturity. This is the time you start your professional life. It is the time you make schemes for your future. If you need a happy ending you need to pay for it.
Life, like a whore sitting on your knees would tease your organ with her index finger and ask, do you need a happy ending. To get that ultimate explosion of your nothingness you need to pay. And to pay for that you need to work.
So here, I am friends, working and trying to tell you that’s why I am working.
2 comments:
brilliant. enjoyed it thoroughly,johny
brilliant, johny.enjoyed reading it thoroughly.
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