Collecting Happiness...

Happiness is a feeling, a feeling so warm that it makes us forget all the troubles in our lives for a while. I call it for a while because troubles tend to take over the happiness very soon. The extent of happiness is always decided by us. Though happiness cannot be measured, it’s just a feeling; however we make it big and we make it small. But for the while when emotions of happiness curl us within, don’t we feel ourselves freed and relieved from all unnecessary clutches in our lives? I wish if this feeling could persist throughout, always, in each and every moment that we live.

I look around myself, and I see ample number of reasons to be happy. The moment I stop seeing, I start to feel low. I need to clean by spectacles, wash my face, and then look around again. This time I find some reasons to be happy which I overlooked in my previous attempts. I feel enthralled to have found them and lucky because I know there would be many for whom these reasons either don’t exist or are not applicable. I still enjoy reading comics, I read TinTin, Tinkle, Chacha Chowdhury and many more. This may be a joke for a few, but it is special for me. Having found an unseen Chacha Chowdhury comic book at a small bookstore makes me enormously happy. But as I said, happiness is just a feeling, and in this case I make it huge (laughing). 

The God of small things has blessed me with a lot of happiness. When I bought a Parker pen for myself from my first salary, the happiness was beyond any explanation. Now after almost six months of my job, I bought a pen-pencil (laughing loudly). Pen-pencils are not common these days, but when I was in class four, they were very famous. I saw one at a stationary shop where I went to buy ink cartridges for my printer. Now my new pen-pencil rests proudly in my pen holder. Every time I look there, my face shows a smile. I may not use it, but to have procured it made me happy. 

Five days of stressful work in office, which often spans to 6 on some weeks, there it is essentially required to have at least one day off for complete refreshment. My friends might prefer to go to pub and then crash at a Chinese restaurant on sundays, but I have a completely different taste for my refreshment. I prefer to get a full plate biryani packed from Jai Jawan Dhaba, and enjoy it with 600 ml bottle of Coca-Cola at my home. I enjoy more this way, it feels good to be myself. When you are yourself and not faking to be someone else, then only you will explore what the God of small things has left for us. 

I was inspired to write this post by Coca-Cola India. Here I have shared a wonderful ad by them. #Iamappy

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The Flower Boy

We would know he is coming. He would ring his bicycle bell continuously, not because he is like every other guy in Patna who honks on road unnecessarily. It was his signal for us that he is in our lane of the colony. My mom would rush down, and start to collect finest of the flowers that flower boy would bring. We are Brahmins, and we adhere to some proper way of worshipping. And my mom cannot do puja without flowers. I used to wonder why does mom take so long to bring flowers, picking each of them by examining. And all this time the flower boy would keep smiling. He has two teeth in the front which are little bigger than the rest, and protruded outwards. Yes, like the chikku rabbit from Champak books. This makes his face look as if he is smiling. I always doubted him. He would not smile; it was just his face which seemed as if he was smiling, with two of his bigger teeth at display and rest inside his mouth. He would be of sixteen or seventeen years old. He had a dark complexion, and brown hair. You would not believe the fashion statement he carried for himself. He sold flowers, and he always wore a shirt which had flowery prints on them. Marigold, and jasmine; from the front till his back, his shirt was truly iconic. Sometimes I thought that he comes wrapped in flowers, and sell them here to my mom. My mom is happy to buy from him. And she even asks our neighbors to buy from him. He would not say a word; he only smiled or let’s say he looked as if he was smiling.

He cannot speak. He cannot even listen. God has made him this way. He was like this right from his birth. He is the only guy who supports his family. I always thought, if someday his bicycle bell conks out, how would he come to know? ‘No no, his mom would surely tell him that his bicycle bell is not working’, I would say this to myself. But still, to do something whose impact you don’t even know, how does it feel like? Does he know how much sound does that bell make? He does not. 

The flower boy was special. He would make me think a lot. But this was true that his arrival in our colony each day changed everyone’s mood at that particular moment. I don’t know if he smiled or not, but he would make us smile. I can never forget those protruded teeth of his.

We have a lot in our lives in one way or the other. There are many who don’t even have those. The flower boy is special. And he makes me feel that I am special too, because I have so many things. He makes me feel worth of all those things which I would have not considered special for myself. I wish he keeps smiling. I wish he stays sufficiently able to support the family after him.

I was inspired to write this post by Housing.com's activity for writing Look Up Stories.

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Healed into a Flower...

Love is auspicious. May be it is, or maybe I don’t know about it. But there was a time when I used to think about it strongly. I believed love would flutter its wings and take me to the fairyland. I knew of a fairy who lived there. Be it day, or night, my dreams would be occupied with my fairy in it. An angel whose beauty makes everyone jealous of, she would smile and happiness would start to flow. When she speaks, it muses the heart and soul of every person that exists on this earth. From the chippering of birds in the morning sky, to songs of nightingale at night, all of them seemed lighter in contrast with the voice of that fairy. And that fairy was mine. So foolish of me to think this now, but then it was not at all a joke for me. She was in my class. And I would sit beside her, always smiling for her, because she complimented that I look world’s cutest when I smile.

‘Rohan, it has been two years now, I see you as a kid. You haven’t grown up. You are still that school going child. I cannot live with a kid.’ 

It was my first year in college, and she called me to say all these. We were not together; I mean I had to go to college in a different state, while she stayed in her hometown. The physical absence of ours also started to make the space for love shorter between us. Love? I doubt if I should say this. I learned about it later that she was already having an affair with other boy from our school. She made excuse about me having a kiddish temperament. And I suppose he had all the manly traits, which certainly I missed.

‘Ok. If you are happy with this, its fine. I don’t have anything to say in it then.’ Tears rolled down my face as I spoke this to her.

‘It was not love Rohan, it was just that you were a good friend of mine. I dont think I love you the way I should. It’s not love Rohan.’ May be she was right. May be I was solely wrong. 

It was too much of turbulence inside me. I wanted to cry out loud. But I had determined that I would not go back to her again. I would look forward, and bring the change in myself, and do good for my grades that were falling down. I was in the second semester at college, almost towards the end of my first year of B-tech, when I came to know of blogging. It’s said that with all the adversities, sometimes chords set themselves to play a tune right. I started to blog. I expressed from the core of my heart, each and everything. Initially, I may have been perceived as a sadist, but slowly as the wound healed, so did the pain in my words. I started to write articles, short stories, based on various themes.

I don’t consider myself as a blogger, or a writer. But yes, I found a way out from the infliction that I went through and brought out a way to help myself. It’s been almost four years now of my blogging. I happily accept that my decision to start a blog has helped to know myself better.

A wonderful video from housing.com :

I was inspired to write this post by housing.com's activity about 'Start A New Life'

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