The Obsolescence of Innocence!!

Once, as I returned from work – I offered a hitch to a bunch of kids (studying in a municipality school) who were walking across the road with their shoulders loaded with an oversized bag!!

They jumped into my car, sat admiring, the otherwise ordinary upholstery, pushed themselves out of the window, waved their hands to the passers by with pride and announced whole-heartedly to the whole world that they had attained momentary status quo and were honoraries of the services offered to them by a four wheeler automobile!!

Amidst disappointment at the conclusion of the overwhelming voyage, each one of them gave me a gratuitous wave and a flattered smile – an expression showcasing abundance of indebtedness and gratitude towards me - created a unique feeling that has stayed with me since the moment it was manufactured.

As I drove further home, I felt I had rediscovered a forgotten emotion – I had witnessed Innocence, humility and sensitivity at its purest form – and I sang a silent prayer for the fast endangering trait to be preserved and the tribe showcasing it to live a long life!!

As a kid when my family had limited means, I would always wait for rich friends and relatives to come home and a couple of rounds on the scooter within the colony would make it easy for my mom to feed me her food!!

Those kids had made me realize and remember that. Those days, it was very easy to smile, to feel appeased and to stay contended. You had limited rationality, short-lived ambitions, humble dreams and a docile character. You found happiness in small things (like a ride in a scooter) and your smile was sincere, was innocent!!!

My mother is a school teacher for the last 25 years (in Delhi) – and owing to her connect with kids, upbringing, academics, school and everything related to them – I couldn’t help but share this experience with her. She couldn’t agree more and confirmed my thoughts by saying that there is a humungous difference between the kids of yester-years and the kids today and she suspected the validation of my observation.

She said those kids instead of showcasing the explained behavior should have instead examined your car – asked me as to why would you use a Kenwood stereo instead of the latest SONY available in the market and also should have explained me as to how the wheel alloys do not go with the car model and design.

In my defense I could only explain that possibly these were small town kids (Lingampally, a suburb in the outskirts of hyd) studying in a municipality school (where the fees is appx 12.50 rs per month) and not like the one’s in Delhi or Mumbai where most of them are from rich families having a legion attached to their name since birth, living in plush houses/appts and brought up wearing imported nappies, walking on silky carpets, breathing only conditioned air and motored on expensive cars by their nanny’s to their international schools!!

As a child, I had the luxury of seeing both the sides of life!!! My ambitious, aspiring, emulous parents, like every parent thought that they had reproduced a son – equal on competence, intellect and faculty like themselves and hence wanted to offer me the best of education, if not anything else given the limited means that we were living upon!!

Owing to this endeavor of theirs, I did my primary education in ‘Ryan International School’ – A colosseum like building, air conditioned classes, designer uniforms with a suffocating bow tagged along with the tie and prickly cufflinks – my school was more of a display of childhood fantasy than an academic authority.

My friends used to talk about the new car that their parents purchased last week, they used to talk of the new pizza variety that they had tried at Nirula’s the other day, and how they cart-wheeled their remote controlled GI-JO (toy maker) with their cousins.

I felt suffocated whenever they asked me as to why I came in a cycle rickshaw to school everyday – I felt, by telling them that my father did not own a car, I would let him down – I did not have the courage to do so

They would ask me – why I never came to the canteen to buy a snack during lunch time. I again would not tell them that my father could give me only 10 rs daily and that it did carry much purchasing power when the others carried currencies in multiples of 100.

I wouldn’t go to the weekend school picnic to Nepal and I would also not know of the latest track that Micheal Jackson was playing!!

It was easy for me as a kid – amongst innocence, given the schooling I was going through – to term my parents to be a failure – but I would not do that, cause when ever I went home, my mother would daily explain to me while she put me to sleep that both of them are toiling hard, and that they are burning their sweat and blood to achieve all that we don’t have and that my other friends have.

I learnt very early as a kid – that comforts are best valued when earned!!

I learnt very early as a kid that embarrassment is inevitable in life – and needs to be accepted with honor and that only on its experience does one find reasons to live for.

I learnt very early as a kid – that the world is divided into two, the one who’s got a famed blood-line to inherit and the one who conceives and constructs everything from dust!!

When as a grade 3 student, I couldn’t make much sense of the SHERLOCK HOMES compulsory supplementary offered as a part of the pedagogy of Ryans, my father decided to shift me to a different school.

I crash landed to a municipality school – where the monthly fees was in the teens, broken chairs, dingy class-rooms, uniform comprised of a white shirt and a blue pant – could be torn and be worn with anything else meaningful or aint. The school had a worn out building, last white-washed 35 years before and could only boast of a huge water tank which had my fathers name mounted on it – cause he was the one who had donated to it being the chairperson of its PTA members trust.

The same 10 Rs in DTEA (new school) was worth in gold and I could buy the whole canteen for it, coming to school in the scarcely populated school bus was a honor. I was one amongst the few who could afford to have lunch while most of them starved.

My 7th grade class teacher asked all of us to introduce ourselves, by telling our name, our ambition and our father’s occupation.

Instead of I am Arpit Singh – I want to be a business man and my father is a industrialist, I heard I am Babu M, my father is a driver and I want to be a teacher!!

Someone said, I am venkatesh – I do not have a father, my mother is a house-maid and I want to be a landlord, another fellow’s father was a cook and he wanted to open a restaurant.

I told them that my father was a Journalist; I came from Ryan International and that I want to join the Navy (A huge ship on the latest Limca book of Records, that dad had recently bought had caught my imagination those days)

I got those stares of admiration from all of them which I once upon a time used to give to my ex school mates. I later thought as I was going back home that I should have probably lied myself. I told my mother that I should have as well told in the class that my father is a peon or a clerk. I could understand what they would have felt, but how would one explain how a peon could construct a BIG WATER TANK for the school!!!

I then learnt that in life everyone in life enjoys their unique existence – be it fortunate or unfortunate. On comparison you d find superior to some and inferior to other.

You are always in between, never at the bottom nor at the top. For a beggar, the one who s starved to death is an inspiration and for the rich, the interest on his money is an inspiration!!

However, amidst all these materialistic comparisons and analysis – we have somewhere lost our innocent identity!!

With time, age, education, work, responsibilities, competition, and greedy ambitions, I realize that the same innocence has died a slow death. There aint space for its existence, cause it acts as a hindrance to materialism and causes immediate satisfaction, rendering the scope of living life to be very limited and narrow.

Resultantly, it has over the years been abandoned; forgotten, suppressed and today it’s depreciated and obsolete!! Only repeated rewinds into the past like the one in this blog could bring about its rebirth!!

Signing off