Urban euthanasia

He wears a faded Mickey Mouse t-shirt with torn shorts, both of which have succumbed to an easy brown colour. His hair is greasy with that very Bombay combination of humidity and dirt, and his face is a refugee camp of diseases. But all these physical generalisations of poverty come to an end when your covert glance reaches his eyes. They make you refute the Classical Indian Conditioning of underestimating the personality in black eyes. His sooty eyelashes reverently caress irises which look like two lunar eclipses. Pain, hunger, terrible beauty.

His daily job is as monotonous as a blue-collar worker slugging it out on his five inches of the assembly line. He cleans the compartment floor with an assortment of fossilized bamboo branches - but then his gaze sweeps over you and cleans up so much more. His alleys brushed, he swiftly stands up as if righteously reminded of his dignity and takes out two shiny pebbles from his pocket. Suddenly, the frozen atmosphere of the train compartment is shattered. He starts singing. His song is a cliched cacophony but he does create music. (I have always been against the idea of genres)

A wave of disapproval washes over - how did this piece of persevering vermin find its way in here? But he remains invulnerable to his cocking sixth sense. Swaying to the gentle rhythm of the train, he clicks his pebbles with fluid expertise and blares forth. There seems to be a disconnected quality to his song; the lyrics seem to struggle against becoming a robotic monologue till somebody hands him a tired two-rupee note. He weaves his way between an impossible number of bodies and bags, his jarred notes heightening the silence. Finally, the train halts and the boy nimbly jumps off onto the platform, his thin frame dissolving easily, exiting one crowd and entering another.

I am left with a will-o-the-wisp memory of a boy and his song. And I undergo the sixth panic attack I've had in this week.

There are two things in life that I fear the most. One is being seated in an over-speeding motor vehicle and the other is becoming desensitized. Desensitization is one of the side-effects of living in an incredibly fast-paced city which is still dealing with a lot of unclaimed baggage. I sometimes feel the emotional quotient of our people is ten points short of a plastic bag's. And I can't imagine anything more catastrophic to the future of humanity. Yeah, I know that sounds straight out of a UN World Poverty Report, but it seems this will become just more than red-tape lingo.

Bob Dylan said it best:

"Yes and how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?
The answer my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind."

I hope we strip ourselves of our wind-cheaters.