Very Very Ordinary.......

    

I am lazy. I know that well. But sometimes my ‘laziness’ is not exactly what it means. Sometimes it is mere abscence of work, sometimes mere absence of urgent work, sometimes mere fatigue of work or sometimes pure disinterest. A little illness and I droop off. It is a habit. The night before I would be burning with enthusiasm but the morning brings a new light, a new laziness. Today, was no different. I had pledged to wake up early and study but ended up waking at a phone call way past the time I had intended to wake up at and spent the morning reading books.

Ahhh….books. They are little drops of heaven which tickle your mind and pinch your heart. Many months had passed since I had caressed my faithful companion, time makes a fool of us time and again. I sat by the window of my living room, a pillow by my back, the book in my lap and drank all that poured out of them.  And suddenly I struck upon a sentence, an incident, a story which gave me the answer to all my unanswered questions, those which often poked at me in times of solitude. It was a good old Ruskin bond book. It said that the writer often sat on the wall of their garden and…..just sat. he neither dreamed nor thought. Nothing poignant, nothing at all. I suddenly found striking similarities between him and me. I do that often when I am left without guilt of the piled up work ahead of me. I just sit, and watch

.

This got me thinking. The writer sat, saw and conquered. All his quiet musings transformed into word landscapes and poured out into his books. All his silent sightings were actually observations of a prolific mind. And without realizing it much later, the writer had built up a great literary artwork for himself, full of people, colors, scenes and incidents, all that the writer had seen.

I liked the idea but till that moment did not realize its significance. I closed the book and went to my bedroom window. The scene outside was typical. A few young children were engaged in a merry, unprofessional game of cricket. Just a three player game though. Never mind. Toddlers toddled about, bearing fascination for the most ordinary things, providing amusement to their spectators. There were few people on the street, it was a working day, to top it the productive time of the day. Yet a few people dawdled here and there, a few cars zoomed by and a few school buses deposited or picked up their load for the day. Nothing fascinating. But I could not draw my eyes away from the whole scene. I watched it unfold, like a play in action. I watched as each character took its place and played its part, as each ordinary thing happened in accord. And then it struck me. The lines I had read before, why were they so important.

The writer had been observing the ordinariness of life. He had watched people just go about. But through these common events he had woven many a tale of extraordinariness. Maybe, I thought, even I have that eye. The eye to relish the ordinariness of life, to not wait or pine for the exciting but to cherish the very melancholy which brings so much weight to our existence. Perhaps, I will grow up to be a writer and tell my readers the ordinariness of my life, the magic which lies in the very mundaness of routine. Perhaps I will meet ordinary people and their ordinary lives will bring fascinating humors and grieves, perhaps I will be appreciated, hounoured,celebrated.

And perhaps ,in one ordinary corner of the world, an ordinary observer(here, I am unable to think of the most appropriate word, neither dreamer nor thinker suits, coincidentally, the very problem the writer faced naming himself), an ordinary being might read my lines and embark upon his own journey, of the most extraordinary of the ordinary….