my revelations...

One thing that was troubling my normally useless and always free brain for quite sometime, was the absence of the proverbial  'Howard Roark' from society these days. I somehow felt that the modern generation, of which I, persuing my career is willy-nilly a part, is less smelly, and idealistic than the previous ones. Living up to such fictitous assertations, I was foraying into the uncharted chinese puzzles of changing psychological patterns of humans when fate aided by a train journey, made me tumble upon the ultimate revelation. I was going to Pune, accompanied by a variety of characters. Notable among them, a newly married bengali techie along with his better half, an elderly parsee gentleman, a big mouthed army doctor, and a particularly handsome young edition of Brad Pitt. Now, People acquainted with this route knows how terribly irritating this long 36 hour odyssey can be. I was already planning to battle time with an editione-de-luxe of James Hadley Chase, and was praying for forgiveness from the almighty for the unstoppable sinful thoughts about to come in the next few hours. Mr. big mouth was already grunge-d... But this young man was ecstatic for reasons unknown to average intellect. His joy was apparent. I was bamboozled. He seemed to have passed the age, when the train in motion itself proves to be a matter invoking immense wonder …except for tournaments entailing horizontal human postures, or a Alonso dash at 300km/h, adrenaline is  usually slow in nerves of that age. What heavenly treasure then did he find that was eluding us mortals? I failed to comprehend, and the invitations, from the pages of my crime thriller was also repulsive to me. But then there was light! I noticed a change in him, slowly starting like a ripple from his eyebrows and gradually spreading on to his whole body, he was filling uncomfortable. The train was approaching a junction and was slowing down and it seemed that his happiness was directly proportional to the speed of de-accelerating train. I forgot my cup of tea. It seemed that he was waiting for someone to come, who was testing his nerve, like a cat with a cockroach. But I was enlightened in a minute. As soon as the train stopped, a middle aged man with a deeply worried face, and a middle aged woman came looking for him, which I presumed correctly to be his parents, panting, with bread and banana.
I felt pity. His was a troubled soul. For a second year student like him (which I learned later), this was embarrassment. The occasion was the annual results of his institution. And he was not alone to suffer! I came to know later (after much assurances, and a Rothmans, which I smuggled) that there are more of his kind on the same train. His painful ordeal continued on every small and big junctions, and he reached a state of unbound trauma, when the elderly parsee gentleman left, somewhere in chattisgarh, and was replaced by a young lady, more or less of his age, ironically who was going to pune also, but alone. This man was being treated like a juvenile, whose fantasies, at that point of time was anything but juvenile. He, who was supposed to exchange mobile numbers, was constantly being haunted by the thoughts of his vigorously overprotective parents, parents who  are not deliberately trying to believe, that their son is capable of growing up, parents who don't respect space and gets a morbid satisfaction in violating it, parents who likes to impose their own wish on their siblings way after the kid  has left  video games and got used to changing  his boxers every morning, and most importantly parents who don't understand that molly-coddling leads to suppression, suppression ultimately to deviance, finally to revolt. Howard roark? Who was that? Never heard of him …no wonder …
(sumantra_1983@yahoo.co.in)