Crystal Ball

We are born. We study. We Work. We Die. It doesn’t get any simpler.
We are not bothered about the first and the last parts, nothing to do much there actually. Your parents take care of the first part and biology takes care of the last unless some drunken truck driver decides that biology is too boring.

I often look at gray hair of my father and wonder whether they delineated my destiny. They were always gray even in my earliest of memories. Perhaps to do something with my going to the best school in the city even when there wasn’t much left to splurge on essential goodies. Perhaps they got gray in sun during the countless hours that he had to spend for his field work every once in a while. By the time I was finishing the school I already had a feeling that I owed those hair something. Perhaps being good at studies comes naturally to people our kind. It’s a natural instinct which just happens as we watch our parent’s face brighten up at the sight of our score cards when we top our classes. And happens perhaps due to the less talked about fact that he does not have a legacy to leave behind.

Uncles and Aunties would often ask me “What do you want to become?” and I would invariably answer “An Engineer”. They would pat my back and would compliment my father with an approving look. I wonder what they would have said had I said that I wanted to direct films!!

Now several years later, as I drag myself to work everyday, into a cubicle by the window, sipping coffee out of a plastic mug from a vending machine, I often peep out of the window at the herds of people getting out of the cabs, straightening their clothes having a quick peep into the glass facades of their office buildings to check their hair, their laptops dangling by their side, ready to queue up in front of the lifts to get to their seats.

They would rush to their desktops, check their mails, open some forwarded jokes, frown at the messy mail from the boss, check their bank accounts for salary credit, check how much their portfolio has crashed in the bear market and carry on with their daily load.....EVERYBODY..just EVERYBODY. Like they have been cast out of a single mould, like they were a quality controlled factory product, like they were all just.....yes...engineers. I have become an engineer after all..just like EVERYBODY. Sometimes I so badly wish that there were a crystal ball which would tell me, what if I had taken the road less trodden? What if I was not everybody? What if I had not longed for that pat on the back and that gratifying smile on my father’s face? ......But then isn’t everybody longing for that crystal ball...!!!