When we are obsessed with speed
and dream of surpassing the speed of light, after badly outdoing sound; it is
refreshing to pause for a while and have an attentive look at the snail. I was
more familiar with them, when I was small and growing but soon forgot them I gradually
got busy competing with absurd people who loved and showed off their success by
provoking me and many others to hurry up. The dominant ethos of the society,
which is stark materialism, convinced me enough to join the rat-race of
achieving things at the shortest period of time with minimum efforts and
therefore, I had to cling to the credo
of ‘better’, ‘more’, and ‘excess’ to remain respectable and alive. I won some
races and lost many more to condemn myself and feel sorry to pacify myself and
earn the approval of those who scored the points over me. When I regretted
about my incompetency, naturally I had to praise the winners, who with
tremendous jugglery, cunningness, hard labour and luck collected the prizes and
proudly showed off. In the beginning I envied them and wanted to worship those
doers and considered the as wizards. The super human group had lots of things
which I was bereft of. This is how I started to believe in fate and accepted
miseries willingly without much protest. I found myself degraded to the near
lowest rung of existence at times, feeling tired and exhausted. I had less of
name, fame, prestige, wealth, power, property and lots of any and all such
types of tangible and intangible things that constantly goaded me into apparent
submission. I lost my arrogance and became humble to deny the defeat. It went
on and on till I discovered the bruised successful people cowering for peace in
their hiding, in spite of having achieved everything; just like me. They too
had insurmountable insecurities, pains, sufferings and defeats-they were tired
of their beautiful wives, educated sons, married off daughters, aged parents,
the legal authorities, lavish lifestyles and bouts of emptiness.
To discover the emptiness of the elites
of the time, I took a very long, profusely perspiring in the winter and
shivering in the summer.