God of Small Things

Happiness! Such a weird feeling naah? All the time we keep running after it thinking it is this elusive thing, and then one fine day it just jumps at you out of nowhere, and you are left thinking, “Wow! That was simple!”

One hell of a bad day I was having. Nothing disastrous, just one of those days in college when everything goes wrong and nothing goes right, your friends don’t understand you, your lecturers are mean, and the human race in general is not just mind bogglingly stupid, but is also on an out and out war with you. You know the kinds when the world and everything beyond just pulls you down.

At the end of a naggingly irritating day at college, I went in the evening to meet another friend. Ranted my heart out to him. Didn’t really help though. When I left, my mood was really really unhappy. I was walking back home, and I had to cross through Forum. Now malls are one place that I always was a fascinating place for people watching (NOT the same as bird watching). You meet all kinds- the rich, the not-so-rich, and the most interesting, wanna-look-rich. But that day I really couldn’t care less. I was too bothered my own set of borrowed problems to be worried about all that just then.

Then I saw this dude. Cute li’l chap, must be all of three years old perhaps. Dude had this tetrapack of Frooti in his hand, and was struggling with all this two feet nothing might, to push a stubborn straw into the packet, and finding that it ain’t the as easy as he thought it should be. His mom offered to help, but our man, staunchly refused. After all what’s a puny li’l straw to question his super baby might?

Then he looked up to see me looking at him with extremely amused eyes. I couldn’t help smiling at that tiny bundle of cute resolve. In return, the dude gave me the most spontaneous, and genuinely happy smile that I ever saw. That moment, that smile, made me feel so innocently happy, something that no amount of talking, counselling, philosophising, and ranting could manage. Looking at that kid, his happy smile, made my heart feel so light, all those things that were nagging me seemed so not worth it. Sure if he were some another two decades older, he’d have probably thought I was linemaorfying him. But right now, for him life was really simple. He saw someone smile at him, and he smiled back. He had his worries to handle (he was in the middle of the battle with the straw, remember?), but he had his fundas clear. Smile for a smile. As simple as that.

Sometimes I think, as we are born with the knowledge of pretty much everything that we need- to live to be happy. Then our whole life we spend in unlearning that, and then feeling all lost in the search of answers. Tsu recently said, if you can’t find the answers, its probably because you are not asking the right questions. Makes sense huh?

Happiness. It’s such a weird thing. All our life, we keep running after it, while it is all the while waiting in a mall, fighting a stubborn straw. :)