Into The Wild

My normal day begins with the phone alarm ringing and shaking the soul out of me and ends with the same exercise at night for the next day. I wake up unceremoniously without any emotion and carry the same passiveness and coldness while I dress up and leave for office. Everything is well documented in my mind. The time I devote to bath myself; the way I dress; the particular metro rail I board are all timed to perfection. Any irregularity may cost me dear as I may end up missing my office shuttle waiting at the other end of the city! And if I thought that I was the only individual to have embraced this lifestyle then I am wronged everyday upon meeting people who are equally passive and ‘perfect’ in the modern day context. Even in the Metro rails considered the ‘lifeline’ of Delhi, there is hardly any life. The old buses with open windows and a touch of fresh air brought in more romance to life than the comfort rich moving boxes better known to us as the Metro. Inside the metro the scene is gloomy and dull. People are either sitting with their eyes closed or are hanging sleepy like zombies from the hand supports on the ceiling. The rest are habitually plugged in to their head sets. The haunting silence is only broken by the screeching noise of the tracks, the monophonic tone of the computerized announcements at every station and the clicking of the automated doors. People come in & come out of the Metro rail as if ready to work robots are being rolled in & out of the assembly units in batches one after the other. The rails come & go throwing out human machines pre-programmed to follow a certain path to their work places. In the helter-skelter of the wee hour I am lost among the millions and find myself sitting ideal all alone, unnoticed by the crowd passing around me. And finally when my station arrives my mind projects me in an unknown land trying to figure out what is going around me! I run with all my breadth and pace to be the first to exit the metro gates or end up being the hundredth gentleman in the queue! The morning hours in the ‘Cyber city’ seems like a visit to the Chernobyl post its nuclear tragedy with a lull and stillness of the morning mist; the dullness of the monolith structures under the still sleeping sun; when even the green and lively tress are fast asleep. But again who cares about the trees and for that matter if they are sleeping! The trees keep on cursing the polluting machines and the machines keep on mocking and honking their handicap brothers! The world moves around so fast that if I recall it at my leisure, i come to the realization that our lives have become so messed-up in our own systematic ways that it is hard to comprehend a life otherwise; free from the daily chaos and the modern wisdom. In the quest to perfection we have relinquished the motherly touch of nature and embraced a system which de-voids us of any vision and life beyond material success. Ironically, today one has to search for life in a torch light; albeit it is near impossible to find one in broad day light!