smiles about...

As if the winter has infused fresh blood into everything...the house sparrows seemed extremely happy as they skipped and jumped on the branches of the creeper in the front grill...the squirrels were unusually noisy. Adding to these happy music were the magpie and the fighter bulbuls...all these produced a musically noisy Saturday morning, forcing me to leave my bed earlier than usual...and I was happy with no particular reason...

"What it is that you are happy about?" I tossed a question towards the man inside. But there were no answers, a silence inside that did not sound unnatural. So I tried rephrasing the question, (something I have been doing professionally through the past four years) in order to extract an indirect answer..."What makes you happy?"

Ahoy! It did the trick...The biological search engine turned up with thousands of random answers in response and in a few moments I found my mind stuck in a thought-jam. Now the task in hand was to assort these in a sequence.

It's here the problem started...which one to put first, which ones after that? An impasse that usually occurs whenever I start arranging my room and the many things I have collected over time. On a daily basis; you collect things that do not have immediate use (but might come to your rescue some day!). You collect things that you know you will never use, but because attached to them are certain memories that you want to preserve for good. You keep on collecting them as you keep weaving the world of memories and one day when you sit down to recollect and re-arrange your world; you do not know what to do with them...you rebel against the idea of letting them go into the dark corners of the cupboard, but you need to create spaces for the future that's fast becoming present...

After spending more than an hour in and around this deadlock, I gave up the idea of finding an order of the things...perhaps it's not always possible to arrange our preference of the four dimensional world in a two dimensional scale.

So I started picking up the answers at random...some of them were distinct, some of them with so minute differences that sounded the same at the first look...the most prominent ones had a theme 'in being able to what I am'. Yes, the most memorable moments are the ones when I was at the shortest distance from myself, in the face that is really mine, with no added colours...the moments in which I met with the strongest me and also when I was crippled by the sight of the weaknesses that I usually ignore...the moments that led me to the light inside which again exposed the dark spots I choose to keep hidden from myself...

Not necessarily I was happy all these moments. But what resulted were moments of bliss that I will cherish...most of these moments were witnessed by one or the other, people who cared to nourish the man in me, appreciated me for the strengths and in the same time accepted me with the humanly failings and limitations...And the happiest moments were those when I succeeded in picking up words to express the feelings of gratitude from inside, or to say that I was sorry for the mistakes I have made...The most happy ones, when I succeed in forming sentences that are nearest to express what they mean to me...

PS: You'll find me smiling infinitely to be answered back, "Subhe se koi nehi mila, banane ke liye?" (You found no one else to fool from the morning?)