Its a boring day and needless to say that I am bored out of guts. Though I must warn you that some of my friends might raise an eyebrow or two at my statement as according to their estimates this is nothing new and that I am bored almost every hour of every day that I spend in office. However, I don't wish to cause a flurry in their statistics and in a bid to maintain my track record (after all there is something called consistency)..here I am stating yet again that I am bored. After pinging a dozen people on gtalk and watching their shining green lights tranform swiftly into dangerous red bulbs within a matter of my beginning to mention anything of my bored state...i decided to sit down, pretend to stare at the comp and sort out the swirl of thoughts in head.
There are lots of people in the capital, including me, who complain constantly about the rude burlesque careless auto rickshaw drivers in the city. I too have been livid, furious and murderous many a times at their attitude...well what do u expect on a cold wintry evening u wish to get back home as soon as possible and you have a tobacco chewing, spit spweing auto rickshaw driver shaking his head at you unsympathetically and saying "jamuna paar nahi jaana hai". Well, the way Jamuna Paar is uttered, you would think that I was making them wade through the river carrying my heavy weight on their shoulders. But oh what the hell. Anyway I am going ahead of my story. I am here to talk about some extremely moving experiences that I had on these infamous auto rides.
I was on my way from office to home and was crossing the Akshardham temple. As the guy driving the auto broke into one of those corny Hindi film numbers, I couldn't help but stare in an extremely disapproving sort of a way. However, my irritation turned to panic as he took an about turn on a flyover and started to move against the traffic. I opened my mouth to question, but soon I understood what he was up to. My eyes fell on this old wrinkled man who was putting a super human effort into pulling his cart up the flyover. Despite all the efforts, his shrivelled body was not able to carry the weight of the cart up the bridge. My auto rickshaw driver plonked his vehicle behind the cart and put his left foot out on one of the wheels of the cart. With the weight of the auto behind the cart and the pressure put by the driver's foot, the man managed to haul his load onto the bridge. As he reached flat ground, his moist eyes turned to thank the auto driver...the lad just smiled and broke into yet another cheesy song. But this time his off track nasal voice didn't irritate me...it just made me question what I would have done if a situation like this had presented itself before me. Oh I know what I would have done and what thousands of others on the road would have done....observed, sighed and hoped that someone somewhere would come to the rescue of people like the old gentleman with the cart. But not us...maybe because we are too caught up with our own lives to be concerned about people outside of our comfort zone. It is time to wake up ...and to me that moment was a call to get out of my comfort zone and be human...once again...not mere robots programmed by the 21st century to lead a clinical life.
