I met karan yesterday outside my college. He was lying on the mud where the two wheelers were parked. He was being brash with his younger brother. He got obsessed with the camera I was using and was curious to know how it functioned. Unfortunately for him, the battery was wearing off, and I couldn’t demonstrate its functioning to him. In his curiosity he made sure that nobody distributed their attention to his younger brother, golu.

 

He insisted that I go call his mother, Gita from my college who worked on the fourth floor of the building. The consistency of his questions forced me to ask him a few of them so that I wouldn’t have to wrack my brains into answering his unnecessary questions. After my round of questions he declared that he didn’t go to school. If his mother could, she would definitely send him to one. His dad worked at the construction site.

 

The conviction with which he answered my questions caused me streamline his situation, it didn’t seem as grave as it actually is. He had accepted it the way life had thrown circumstances at him; no regrets. And it did not matter to him if he didn’t have a playing ball that he could toss around. He had the water bottle that my friend had carelessly thrown away after finishing it off. And certainly, he was not jobless. Along with his brother he cleaned the dustbin at the X’s restaurant. And that was no waste that he dealt in. That was his storehouse of creativity.

 

Every time he took his turn cleaning the dustbin he carefully left his brother behind and emptied the contents on the ground to nurture his creativity. He sprawled around on the muddy ground to escape the heat. And he tied a rubber band on his forehead for some reason not comprehendable by me.

 

I have my regrets and apologies that I have to offer each day. I wish and keep doing so and I never get tired. I accept things as they are and always anticipate that they will get better the next day; but I never stop wishing. I never wait a minute in life to thank god for what I already have. I look at those who are worse off than me, sympathize, and move on, never gratifying the life that I have. I don’t see the need to, because I take everything for granted. I have a whole lot of friends but I keep wishing that I have more, I get a good news and I keep hoping that the next time it will be even better; stability and stagnancy don’t influence my life, because I believe in simply moving on.

 

And at the core of my heart I even know that I have been the least successful in moving on. I don’t know what holds me back; neither do I know what is it that never lets me to be stagnant.