mohan parasain

I meet sad people. Very very sad people on my way back home from office. These people are angry too. But they are not with the government. People angry with the government are a different lot altogether. I shall talk about them later. But this lot I am talking about is angry for nothing. They are perhaps sad with their chores and confuse this sadness with anger.

They are professionals, shop-keepers, government servants and workers. They are fraught with the meaninglessness of their lives, but too busy to articulate their despair and are complacent to confuse it with price rise. The entire day they dealt with another set of sad people interacting with whom they earn their sad living. But the day’s sadness was simulated like that of the priest for whom death is only a means of livelihood. They reflect their real sadness in the evening metro ride.

One sad young man sitting in the joint of two bogies (area prohibited for sitting in every second announcement) is probably a ward boy in a government hospital. This man works in the storehouse of all sadness of the city. Yet, he does not seem to be sad because he is coming from the fountain of sadness or because two sad persons died in his ward today, but because a sad busy doctor does not like his sad face, which reminds him of his sad wife pouring her daily chores on all his persuasions to revive his youth.

There comes an announcement about ‘any unidentified object’ making us realize the grim political situation in the world outside the tube. The most imaginative ones in the crowd can feel the impending danger. But before they could act on their intuitions, the unidentified object often gets down in Old Delhi Station, along with someone too speedy to pay any heed to their intuitions.

Another one is sitting in the reserved seat. Several eyes accuse him of selfishness. The poor sad man does not even know his own self to be called a selfish. He is perhaps resting his sadness till the next station. A sophisticated sad gentleman is trying to find guilt in the face of this illiterate moron. But the more he tries to decipher any meaning in that demeanor, the more baffled he becomes and decides to leave it untheorised.

In this large station, large enough to belittle one and all sad people, there enters something that can roughly be called a queue. The queue is that device of social contract which makes the sad people realize they have never been unique and deserve to be sad, and therefore leaves them more firmly grounded in their sadness. When the crowd enters the train in this more or less queue, the numerical superiority of the crowd makes itself feel like a substantial force till the crowd fades into insignificant sadness of each sad man. Even the pride of breaking the queue evaporates when the only empty seat is won. Probably because there were so many empty seats which have already been won by other insignificant sad beings, who do not look any better than his reflection that he furtively manages to see in every intermittent opportunity.

Then there is one sad libertine waiting for the crowd so that he can come near to the sad receptionist still attending to her office work and pretending to be talking to friends. She is aware of his gaze and his desire vomiting from his stare. But one part of her sad soul knows he is the one whose call she does not have to transfer.

One sad moneyed businessman had to take the metro today. He even missed his morning meditation class because his driver fell sick. He is sad because today was the last day of his 15 day meditation crash course organized by Art of Still Alive Foundation and he was expecting a great revelation from the guru. He realizes he wasted his hard-earned money and 14 precious mornings by violating the first commandment of the foundation by abusing his sick driver. Oh these poor men, their sad bodies lack immunity like the rich lack patience and the absence of immunity in the former often causes lapse of patience in the later.

There is no end to this story, not to talk about happy ending, sad ending or twist ending. Therefore, there is no punch in it. It has only repetitions, repetitions so trivial that those great men of letters do not waste their brains on it. These man and women slot time for meditations, depend on the crash courses for the act of living and are always brisk in prayers, swift in eating and have fixed time for love. Their next moment is not a moment of hope but of trivial uncertainties. They are certain of only one thing: they don’t have to repeat their day in the metro if only they don’t get up alive the next morning. But unfortunately the next sad morning arrives and they find themselves alive and again in the metro.