A Day of Disappointments

It has been long since I last put down my thoughts in black and white.

So long that, today, I typed a wrong password on my laptop twice.

So long that I had to check the date of my last blog post to figure out how long it has actually been.

My! It has been long.

This evening while driving back from work to home, I had a school van ahead of me. I have always enjoyed looking at children sitting in the backseat of their school buses\ vans and making monkey faces. Some have even winked at me and I have always winked back. I reciprocate to flying kisses too. Or, let’s say, I am usually the first one to pass a  kiss to an innocent child looking at me selflessly and I have received a lot of love in return.

Today, it was different.

The van was driving the students of one of the best private schools home and by the look on their faces they must have been in the 10-13 age group. The moment they saw me driving right behind their vehicle, they started to smile. Then, in a flash of a moment, a couple of them positioned the cameras of their mobile phones towards me and started clicking pictures. Why were they carrying their mobile phones to their school is another topic for some other day. Here I watched them in shock knowing that since we were all on the busy and messy national highway near Hyderpora, there was no way I could stop them. I wanted to. Not because I was scared of my pictures being misused, I am somehow off that stage in my life, but, I wanted to tell them, what they did, was wrong. I wanted to tell them; you do not click pictures of people without taking permission. How did their parents not tell them this? If they did, these children would have known. What has become of parenting now? Children studying in some of the best private schools are presumed to be from well educated families and most of them are. Why are their teachers and their parents not doing the primary job they are supposed to do? If they will not, who will? And, if no one does, all these children will grow into remorseless, brazen adults like the one in the next part of the narrative of my day.

While trying to rest my nerves after this not-so-childlike incident, as the traffic-signal was red, I noticed a sleek sarkari car by my side. The officer was sitting in the backseat and the driver, like all of us waiting at traffic signals, impatient to play with the steering wheel at the earliest. A flash of green and we all zoomed out. The driver was in such a hurry that he almost hit an old man riding his scooter. He didn’t but the feeling that he could have, unnerved the old man. He quickly balanced himself back on his seat and started to hoot behind the sarkari gaadi. I read his face. He didn’t want to fight; he didn’t want to scold anyone. He was disappointed because he expected an apology for what could have damaged a bone or two in his fragile body but, there was none. We don’t say ‘sorry’ anymore. We are in such a rush that we no longer remember and understand the significance of any such gesture. Uncleji slowed down eventually realising that he would in any case lose the race as well as the argument, if any.

What has become of us?

What’s all this rush about?

What is all this, ‘sab chalta hai’?

How many more generations later will we start behaving like educated, civilised people?

Or, will we ever!