The forgotten finishing line

I’d rather be a forest than a tree….yes I would, if I could……. Simon and Garfunkel can really play havoc. Something in me has begun to murmur that this is not the life I bargained for. Sanitized work spaces, insulated from the vagaries of weather. People pushed into compartments called work space. Then miles and miles of metal shimmer, all headed like headless chicken to God knows where? Every face, taut and tense……waiting to explode. The saving grace; a stray glimpse of lovers; the sweet madness in their hearts creating a halo of magical oblivion.

Am I being sucked into a renunciation mode? Somehow, the desire to fight, the desire to resist and the desire to prove myself is not there anymore. I look at the milling crowds around me and am filled with a painful sense of emptiness. Something in me tells me that this is not what I want….I have gone wrong somewhere…terribly wrong….where is the sense of achievement? Or to put it honestly – what am I trying to achieve? And more pertinent…do I really want to achieve?

More than ever I want to get away to some place that has not yet been ravaged by ambition and progress. A place where people do not live in stacked compartments..one piled above the other, a place where people do not spend evenings ,robot like blinking in a stupor like daze at the idiot box. A place where people do not gobble up some junky fare to fill their bellies. A place where people do not even have a right to their share of earth, sky and sun. A place, where one is controlled by the uncontrollable, transient, Tyrant; Time.

In our blind race for material affluence, we have lost sight of the real finish line. In this race, unlike the fabled rabbit we have not slept off… on the contrary, we have slogged so much that the finish line has become irrelevant. After all what do we all want at the end of the day? Are we all not on the lookout for contentment? Don’t we all want satisfaction? Don’t we all want peace? Deep in our hearts we all seek: A place where I have all the time to gaze at the rising and setting sun. A place where I can be lulled into slumber by the cry of a koel. A place where I can sit back and read, with the sound of the rain gushing through leaves. A place where lazy, warm afternoons are spent lolling on the coolness of a plain scrubbed floor. A place where evenings carry the aroma of wet, water sprayed earth. A place where the evening lamp and smoke from the kitchen chimneys lend a perfect prelude to the star spangled night.