Difficult morning

-
I yelled at an autorickshaw fellow today. I’m feeling very bad about it.

There were two autorickshaw fellows outside Fine Arts gallery in Chembur. I asked both of them if either would take me to Marol. Both nodded yes, and then started persuading each other to take me. The first guy told the other guy to take me, the second guy told me to sit in the first auto, and as I was getting into the first auto, the guy told me to get down and go to the second auto.

I yelled very loudly. In cartoons, sometimes when a character is being yelled at, you can see his hair being brushed back because of the force of the sound. It seemed the same way with the auto guy. I shouted really hard. I stopped only when my thorax started aching. The second guy who acquiesced to take me told me to calm down.

Lately, with whatever has been happening in the city, in the world, etc., it is very important to be courteous. The last few weeks, I had been trying to consciously not lose my patience with people.

I failed today. I meant to apologize to the auto-fellow and his friend. But by the time I paid up, the guy rode away.

My chest still hurts and feels heavy with a knot of ill. My body will not forget this…But I am really sorry.

Comments

Unknown said…
don't feel bad. if i was there, i wouldn't whacked them too!! the world does not need courtsey. it needs some serious disciplining .. like all 8 yr spoilt brats do .. like show the wrath of Gods and all and see how sodom is destroyed and a better city built. :)

~J
2:21 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Check (the) mate

-
My cousin, who was born sixteen hours before me, got married recently. I am expected to follow her footsteps soon. Thankfully, I have been granted more than sixteen hours to do that. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worse. My mother is completely exhausted. Rationally, points 1, 2, and 3 would be distinct from each other. But in my family there is no such thing as ‘rationally’. Therefore all these points are inter-related. Strangely, here, we believe my marriage to be an antidote to mortality and fatigue. I happened to be sitting in my parents’ room while Ma looked through Papa’s blood reports. They didn’t look good. Ma was worried and Papa didn’t help matters much. He kept talking about Sourav Ganguly and why he deserved better. Ma got further agitated and after flinging the reports somewhere inconvenient to retrieve (I should know), she snapped, “So what? There are many like him.” Papa doesn’t believe that and would have no one in his family believe that either. He went to...
Read more

Not the same, all the same - Rang de Basanti, being a Hindu, uniform civil code, and Hostage – in that unrelated sequence

-
I watched ‘Rang de basanti’. That, however, is not the point. Everyone now wants to go to Delhi and cruise around in jeeps at night. And that too is not the point. I need to say something. That, really, is the point. ‘Rang de…’ is a good movie but frankly, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen ‘Yuva’. It is creditable, though, that the movie could say what it did without using the ‘sage on the stage’ (as we say in Instructional Design) approach. The movie does have a couple of ideas that I have been besotted with for a long time now. One is the life of a story. There is the germ of an idea about men who go to their deaths cheerfully. There is fascination about what could inspire such courage in ordinary people. That story lays inside a diary for a long time. How long? Long enough for history to play itself out and begin the process of repeating itself. A nation goes the ‘Animal Farm’ way – humans out, pigs in. The story lays untouched – fermenting in latent vigor. Then someone discovers it. She ...
Read more

Save the Indian (male) child

-
This isn't exactly a feminist tirade, but this is written by a woman, and it is written in annoyance. You raise your girls to be sweet, strong, and independent. (Wise parents teach their children to listen to opinions and discard or heed accordingly. The other ones just teach their kids to bullshit everything that everyone says. Still others bring up girls to be on guard and forget that spine so that everyone thinks well of them. I am not sure which is worse, but I detest people shoving their opinions down other people's throats in a show of liberation, so I'll lean towards the former. But only slightly.) As the gender construct of being a 'female' is pushed even further, you teach your daughter complicated activities – driving, perhaps, sending them off away from home, wearing a sari (those freaking pleats!), cooking and de-veining prawns for added advantage. At the end of that, you have a person who genuinely dislikes blending into anything, doesn't like bei...
Read more