Living in the present!!

I don’t understand. There’re people who derive an unseemly, malevolent pleasure out of inflicting misery, unprovoked. I wasn’t even aware of their existence until sometime ago. Which got me thinking. I’ve led a very cloistered existence. I’m looking at my life right now and I’m marvelling at the absolute absence of evil in it. Which is not to say that that is the case in actuality. It just appears so now. I feel incredibly untainted right now. Some other time when I feel particularly wretched, I’ll rant about the horrors lurking in the recesses of my very selective memory, distorted, I’m sure, several times over.

I’m going through the I’ve-always-been-happy-as-sunshine phase. I’m looking at my life right now and I’m thinking about something called “Gandhiji’s Talisman” that used to be printed before the contents page of every NCERT textbook I’ve had to read. Funny I should think about it, really, because I don’t like the man, and moreover I don’t exactly follow his talisman, verbatim. It says something like when one’s in doubt or when the self becomes too much with one, one must apply a test, and recall the face of the poorest and the weakest and ask oneself if the step one’s contemplating would be of any use to him. And then it goes on about swaraj. The doubts and the self’s supposed to melt away by doing this. I only do the recalling bit.

It's been saving me since class IV.

Being acutely aware of having been given more than enough, while others, perhaps worthier, have no choice but to fight tooth and nail for the same, can sometimes be an extraordinary incentive to hold on to what one has with redoubled tenacity, hitherto undiscovered. This is how I was taught to value things. "Lokey khete paye na", and all of that, but with a very scary Darwinian twist- "Eta koro, noyetoh you'll end up in the unselected reject pile. No offspring of mine is going to be in the reject pile." One of the perks of having a mother obssessed with genetics, evolutionary biology and the like. Come to think of it, she could have made an excellent teacher, if she could explain the 5observation/3inference Natural selection thing to a 4 year old in a way that that 4 year old never forgot. Sometimes I miss the Punett square games.

I’m always marvelling at my fortune, and thanking whatever it is that’s constructing my semi-charmed reject-pile life.

I’m looking at my life right now, and I’m smiling, and inside my head its wow. WOW WOW WOW!!

The why WHY WHY WHY can go knit itself a furry yellow jumper to keep warm while it sits out the cold treatment it shall receive for some time now.

I’m Jack’s irrepressible half-grin, at the moment.