Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Survival of the fittest...or the best endowed-part I

Life has been particularly kind and generous to me. Or so I’ve been thinking, post a recent conversation with my younger sibling, As he narrated the ridiculous stories of his ‘groups’ vandalisms and anti-social operations, quite invariably targeting some poor weakling and making his or her life a string of abject embarrassing events. While such situations can be dismissed as a cruel hand of fate and laughed over 10 years down the line, how does one go about forgetting the trauma when it has been plotted, not by fate directly but by immediate society itself? Perhaps the only part fate ever played in such suffering is to gift the said individual with a improbable name, or a hopelessly incurable constitution, or a downright unfortunate visage.

It has been said often that to be borne in an unfortunate body, family, caste, neighborhood, is a crime that the unaware infant commits before he ever even learns to breathe. It is the ‘Original Sin’. And as heinous as original sins go he/she is to be punished and punished again for it for most of his life. Their is no penance, and there is no retribution, unless the unfortunate soul changes his situation completely, renounces everything he has ever known and settles down again in the world as a total stranger, completely wiping away his past so that no boisterous fellow employee can ever remember at that blasted corporate party that you vet your pants in your kindergarten, or that you had a father who wore transparent bollywoodesque apparel to PTA meets, or exclaims loudly how wonderfully trim you look especially after the grotesquely fat school days, so that you bury those inhuman cat-calls that colorfully described your weird surname, or your not so generous complexion.

Pondering upon the millions of insults that I had myself heaped upon society around me during my childhood days, I can’t help but heave quite a prolonged sigh of relief that, though not having Greek-god looks, or Nobel prise winning brains, or a James Bond like persona, I was still lucky enough to be nondescript enough to escape that torture and yet well endowed enough to throw the same all around me.

I suppose that qualifies me as quite a bully. Though the western representation of a ‘Bully’ will unfairly exaggerate my ‘behavior’, I am sure I was as much a bully as you get in cultured, ol’ India. Recently while watching a random movie called ‘the bench warmers’ basically about these so called oppressed people get back at the bullies that have haunted them since school days, helped by a former bully himself who regrets having spoilt quite a few childhoods during his school days.

So my brother proudly narrates how just last evening they conspired to displace a romancing couple that had had the audacity to occupy their favorite hangout place. They Decide to play the local variant of ‘hide & seek’. The farcical seeker is chosen. And the hiders all dash off to their hiding places, those that inexplicably revolve around the hapless couple. They hide besides the bench and behind it, they crawl around the bench and under it, all 12 rascals of them, abusing each other and catcalling with meaningful gusto. To take on 12 roguish vagabonds obviously being physically impossible and ungentle manly the guy meekly suggests that they go somewhere else. Well the battle is won. They follow the victory with raucous cries off ‘ ha ha bhaag gaye, bhag gaye’, the couple being well within earshot.

What cruel hand of fate twists and warps such young minds into marching into such criminal endeavours? What else but a blatant disregard of any form of manners, culture, respect whatsoever.

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