The whole stage’s a Pavlovian drama
As a kid, I had a lot of misconceptions about the world at large. I still do but not in the same range as I once used to. I was that boy…
As a kid, I had a lot of misconceptions about the world at large. I still do but not in the same range as I once used to. I was that boy who waved up at the aeroplanes because I believed that they could somehow see me. Back then, I was under the impression that all seeds give birth to plants regardless of the weather or the soil. I also thought a man and a woman have to be married to be able to conceive a child. For the longest time, I believed West Indies was a cricketing nation in Africa. Being naive, and under the strong secular influence of my mother, I used to touch my forehead in front of a temple as promptly as I would at the sight of a church or a mosque. While watching a Hollywood film, everything seemed real to me. If a person jumped from a train, to me, the actor did exactly that. No strings attached. Quite literally.
Distorted. That’s the operative word for childhood. Being physically tiny and psychologically helpless, you tend to take the world for what it purports to be. People taller than you tell you how things are or are supposed to be. It’s only much later in life you understand what is what, where is where and how is basically why. As a social experiment, visit your school now. You’ll notice how puny it appears. Almost as if time has created an orange of its premise and shrunk it down to an unreasonable extent. This happens to all the confined areas from your younger days. Your old house attic would feel congested now.
Growth. That’s the operative word for adulthood. A person, after a certain number of years, is supposed to change. Evolve might be a fancier word but let’s leave evolution to the biologists and the anthropologists of our textbooks. With the progression of time, every little thing associated to you — animated or otherwise — goes through a process in conjunction with you. It’s painfully slow but for what it’s worth, we hopefully end up on the other side of the river only to look back at how idiotic we were once upon an age. The catch being, no matter how far we travel or how wise we turn out to be, we’ll never know why we always remain ignorant in retrospect or why we are always late.
Nostalgia. That’s the operative word for the perennial river that continues to flow between childhood and adulthood.
PS. Oh, I forgot to mention that I genuinely assumed there had to be a country called Bargaon. The little me used to search for it in our school atlas. If it didn’t exist for real, where the hell were my friends’ fathers disappearing to for months — and sometimes, years — on end?