Flashbacks of a Fool
[24-JAN- 2009] 23:50 hrs
There is a void of five months. Again I am here to pen down my thoughts ,thanks to all the factors , suggestion , source of inspiration that have helped me to come out of the temporary pause. …………………………………………………….
For last few weeks I have been enjoying each and every moment of my life, I believe that something has enamored my mind . I told some of my friends about this and I received the reply “Abhi, have you started taking Drugs?”. I could not help laughing . Instead of analyzing the reason, I just have let myself be drawn deep down the sea of unknown trance. Finally I have realized that it is slowly taking my subconscious mind to my childhood, the days full of happiness, joy and bliss . My mind leaps up to those days
When I used to chase fluttering butterflies,
When having a sip of cold drink was a special event in my life,
When I used to talk with chattering birds,
When I used to bring stray kittens from road side
And used to share my glass of milk with them,
When I used to take peaceful nap in my mom’s lap,
When I used to try to reach out to the horizon
Chasing rainbows
When I used to bluff my dear ones
And in return I used to be bluffed too
AND what else I used to do ? Myriads of funny things..
I know sometimes at the hidden corner of our subconscious mind, we wish if we could go back to the best season of our life, our childhood., but we can not, because of the very existence of our pragmatic conscious mind .Today let me have a joy ride by a Time Machine and go back to my childhood days , reminiscing some of the nostalgic foolish moments of my life,. Needless to say, it is a mutual agreement between my conscious and sub-conscious mind.
[25-JAN- 2009] 01:10 hrs [Let me have a cup of trimethylxanthine, sorry it is not a technical article, so no technical jargon, actually it is coffee , it will redefine sleep and myself as two unknown variables of an equation, oops! not an equation , but an inequation, the left hand side can never be equated to the right hand side J.]
[25-JAN- 2009] 01:40 hrs [Back to pavilion, let me play “those were the best days of life -summer of 69” by Bryan
Money Plant:
we all love money, we know it is not all in our life, but it is a reality that it defines a rhythm, a charm, a perception and a dimension of the world and specifies our coordinate points in it. I realized the value of the money in the very childhood of my life; I realized the significance of money that if I had money then I could buy lolly pops, candies , biscuits, tennis balls etc etc .I used to collect money from my father’s wallet , my mom’s purse and some time from my father’s piggy bank too [without breaking it , just using a spoon I could manage to get the coins out of it] and used to insert those coins in my own coin box .I must admit that my parents always refrained themselves from punishing me as much as they could do .Obviously I was reasonably clever at that time . But I am inheriting my father’s gene , hence , it is obvious that he must be a little bit clever too. So he invented an innovative way of getting back all the coins from my Piggy bank without hurting me at all .He came up with a concept and it is like this : “If we can use the coins as seeds of money plant and we can sow them in our backyard then one day a big money tree will grow up from the seeds and it will bear the fruits of money i.e. coins , just whenever we need money we will just shake the tree and our backyards will be covered with a thick layer of coins” .I was very much engrossed into the idea ,, tempting enough to immediately change my perception. I broke my piggy bank .I put all the coins on a rag and along with my father I did sow the seeds of money plant[read it coins] under the ground and started watering the virtual seeds with extreme nourishment .Each day morning I used to go to the place where I had sowed the seeds with the hope of seeing a small sprouting seedling there.A few days went off. I realized that there was no sign of any sprouting plant My hope of owning a money plant was getting faded out soon . Frustrated , I went to my father one fine morning and asked him about it . I got the reply that money plant is a sophisticated tree and it needs an utmost care and nourishment and possibly we did not nourish it properly . So I was waiting for the time when I could brake my next Piggy bank and take another attempt of growing a money plant. . The time marched on. Gradually, my next piggy bank become full of coins, we broke it and repeated the same episode , but this time too I ran out of my luck .The whole series of episodes was repeated time and again till I realized that there is no concept of money plant. Almost twenty years have gone by. Today, if I take a stroll along my meomory lane and minutely observe the whole incident through a new prism , I can easily connect myself with something very special. That is a great lesson inculcated by my beloved father : we can really build ourselves as money plants if we properly invest on our wisdom and knowledge, nourish it with our passion and perseverance .
My First Maths Exam:
In my childhood I had experienced a peculiar attraction – repulsion dynamics with stones and bricks. At first I used to get attracted towards stones and once I used to collect them the repulsion effect used to start off immediately The stones used to get vanished from my hand , one could find them either resting at neighbors’ roof or hitting a pedestrian or in extreme cases directly it used to be dropped into the neighbor’s bedroom . After getting frustrated with a string of complaints ,my parents decided to admit me in a nearby school named “Sishu Malancha” –“Garden of children” – though I have never seen a garden in my six year long tenure in that school or any caring gardener (read teacher) but our head mistress. She was the only one person whom I could perceive as an affectionate teacher .It was not only the first maths exam of my life but also the first exam of my life . I was studying in KG1[KinderGarten 1] standard then..Everything was okay until the result of the 1st term exam came out . I scored a big zero out of fifty marks. Spending a disastrous day in school, when I came home one of neighbors “Mejo Kaku “ as I used to call him , started ragging me over the incident . I was a pretty sensitive boy in my childhood. I could not hold my tears and started crying .My father came forward and kissed me on my forehead saying “ Son , I am proud of you , not because of that you got zero out of 50 , but in a sense that you did not copy from others, neither did you cheat at all , let’s go and party “ . With my eyes still swollen, at the spur-of-the-moment, I promised to “Mejokaku spontaneously “ that I will get 120 marks out of 150 next exam.My father took me to a “Sweetshop “ where we had Kachuries [“ Some Indian Snacks made of wheat”] followed by some mouthwatering sweets.In the half-yearly Exam one miracle happened and the miracle was I scored exactly 120 marks what I promised to “mejokaku” ,securing 50 out of 50 in Maths,. That was the year 1986, he brought sweets of Rs.50[it has huge value at that time] for me . Surprisingly enough, for the rest of the six years, during my total tenure in the school, I never scored below 99 percent in Maths .
[25-JAN- 2009] 03:00 hrs [let me have another round of Coffee break]
Never Throw Your Lunch Box:
My parents had a big problem to send me to school. From my childhood itself I was not at all fond of going to school. It seemed like a prison to me.
. Now I realize that Iwas not very much keen in indulging myself in anything bound to routines or rules . Always I wanted to be free to think independently , to take decision on my own etc etc. At my home too, I was given the same kind of environment, I was never told to open my books and study , never did my parents tell me to be someone like “Soumalya” – the boy who used to stand first in my primary school .It was a real big pain for my parents to send me to school . Often I used to lie down on the roads and get my shirt dirty so that I could escape from going to school on the excuse of having dirty shirt .One day the chance factor overpowered the choice factor and as a result I had to get into the classroom .To be frank, from the beginning of the classes I was there under my desk instead of sitting on the bench . So one of my teachers, “Mala Didimoni “ – as I used to call her ,came to me and told me that my mom had come. She was waiting outside to take me back home . I went outside and found none. I came back to my seat and sat quietly .In the mean time she called other teachers to explain the event and started laughing at me as if she managed somehow to bluff me . Humiliating enough, fuming in anger, I took out the tiffin box from my bag and threw it to her. Unlike stone, it did not miss the target and directly hit her face..The only grief I had that I had to miss my midday meal .That day, I had to spend four hours in the school with out having a single grain of food .Any way, I had made a very profitable investment with this incident ,because later I came to know that she was one of the tough teachers in our school , no one could escape from her punishment . I guess I was the only one she never dared to punish. Might be she was thinking that I had thrown only one weapon, tiffin box, at her ,rest of the others like Pencil Box, Water bottle , School bag were still intact and ready to be tested from my weapon collection .
[25-JAN- 2009] 03:30 hrs [let me have another cup of Coffee]
Never Bluff Your Dear Ones:
I am very fond of biscuits [as the biscuits came into the picture let me have some biscuits with Coffee] In my childhood my affinity towards biscuits reached an extreme level . I have had a record of having one large packet of coconut biscuit [containing sixty six biscuits] in a single day , so obviously kitchen was not a safe place where my mom could hide the biscuits . She used to hide the Biscuit Jar somewhere, ,though it never used to be out of my scope unless she kept it inside Almira and locked it . Hardly she used to keep inside Almira, so there was no permanent place for the biscuit jar .It was a hide-n- seek game for me , I had to find the jar out of its secret location .One day she kept the jar on the top most Rack of the wall , where I could not reach at all by jumping . So when I saw mom was not there in the room, I came up with an innovative approach , I pulled down all the pillows from my cot and I arranged them vertically in such a way so that on standing on the top most pillow I could get the edge of the biscuit Jar easily .Once I took a handful of biscuits , I tucked my T-Shirt in and put all the biscuits inside my t shirts and went outside via veranda where my mom was knitting sweater . There was no scope of getting the smell for her that I had already taken the biscuits from the Jar . Everything was fine until on the street a mad dog started chasing me when it saw me taking out biscuits from my T shirt tucked in . I started running as fast as my two legs could carry myself and at last jumped into a drain .I can not remember what happened to the biscuits , but I can vividly remember and feel the obnoxious smell of sewage that covered my whole body. It was as if someone had painted my whole body with thick black tar . I can still perceive the offensive smell of the sewage that triggers me to vomit. After that incident I did not use my hands to have my food for the following seven days because I continued to have the feeling that still there was virtual grease on my hands. Eventually, my mom used to feed me for those days – that was the only consolation for that incident.
I am grateful to God in that sense that he has made me a bumper prize winner in the contest of Parent lottery ,presenting me two precious gifts : they are my beloved parents who allowed me being me as me , who never have imposed any rule on me and allowed me to learn things and gather experience from my own mistakes .
Last but not the least, the great mistake in my life is to pretend not to love someone whom I really love and I do not how long I will keep on loving her ………….might be an ocean of years …………………..Anyhow it is morning now, I have to go to bed , I will tell the story of my love sometime later .
Good Night, Sorry Good Morning
[25-JAN- 2009 04:20 hrs]
