What a Wonderful World....

This was something I wrote at the end of 2004, when I had come newly to Bangalore, and was not really sure if it was worthwhile enough to rant about the overtly-hyped up life of a 'software professional' (the most frequently used oxymoronic malaprop in the English language) .

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WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD

The alarm, as usual, never failed to wake me up. Today was no exception either. I was, as always, in two minds when I woke up in a groggy state about whether I had to laud the person who invented the device, for it ensured that my day would at least start off as planned, with me waking up at the time I chose to, or, curse him with the most profane of invectives for having reduced my highly valued somnolence to nothing for yet another day.

Unfortunately , I had no time for such thoughts since I had to go about my daily routine of getting ready to go to the office. I am just another one of those hundreds of thousands of individuals in a city whose name has off-late been made into a verb with connotations that are not complementary, per se.

I ran through breakfast as I was reading the morning paper that was, as usual, filled with a lot of bad news about wars on terror and wars on wars on terror and about railway accidents and capsizing boats and God only knew what else, reinforcing within me, my self concocted axiom – ‘good news is no news!’

My workplace was about four kilometers from where I stayed and I used to walk the distance and back, for the sake of the exercise as well as for the sake of the economic viability of the exercise. Every single day, during those walks, I used to unsuccessfully try to discover an oasis of serenity and sanity in this whole desert of madness that lay sprawled about, trying in vain to sense sights, sounds and smells that would try to lower my ever-compounding cynicism regarding my environment.

The whole cynicism thing began once I started living in this city, experiencing first-hand the steady deterioration in all the values that allegedly made us sentient. People seemed to go about their business in a zombie-like fashion, profit in whatever they ventured in being their sole underlying motive. Not that it’s a bad thing to do, unless it’s the only thing one wanted to do, and here, it was more the exception than the norm to do otherwise.

That was probably the reason why I valued animals more, admired them and respected them no end, they weren’t so fucked up as the ‘dominant’ species. The stray dogs lying lazily on the road side without an alarm to wake them up, bothering only about what they would eat next, and not about finances, house rents, deadlines, commutes and the whole rigmarole of trying to earn a living, albeit in most cases, unsatisfactorily. They did not need counseling by shrinks or self-proclaimed holy men for their mental health or for achieving the peaceful countenance that they had when they slept.

I consciously tried to avoid looking at the people as I made my way to the office, trying to be oblivious to the traffic, the shops, the over-flowing trash cans, the contrasting attributes between people of various economic states and lot of other such depression-triggers and instead focused on the signs of life about me.

The trees, the birds, the cats and the dogs, the occasional pig or two, the revered holy traffic obstructions – the cows, the sheep and goats were what grabbed my attention. It was really sad that we wanted to claim ownership of all these animals and tried to justify their exploitation by us, saying that they served the greater good by serving us.

Today, my walk was interrupted by a goat that I saw on the way, bleating pitifully, since the bundle of hay that I had assumed was for its consumption, was just out of its reach. It was tied to a telephone pole. Nobody around seemed to be paying any heed to the goat’s plight, and I decided to push the pile of hay towards it. The goat started munching the hay happily and I patted it on its head. I noticed it had a white patch on its forehead, right between its eyes. It did not seem to object too much to me patting it, for it was probably too hungry and was busy eating.
I walked away from there, leaving the goat behind, with a feeling of happiness, thinking to myself that I had, in a very small way made it happy. Guess I am very selfish that way, doing things for others that make ME happy. I walked on, with Louis Armstrong’s ‘what a wonderful world’ playing on in my head.

At the office, it was the same old nine to seven routine, with tea breaks, lunch, mail checks and internet surfing, not to mention the life saving music playing in my headphones being occasionally disturbed by what was, in a vague sense, referred to as ‘work’. What went on at the office, in general, also reinforced my belief in the dwindling of intelligent life in my vicinity and I was desperately hoping that the phenomenon was not contagious.

I read on the news websites that Islamic militants had beheaded more foreign hostages in Iraq, and were threatening to kill more and more people in the days to come. I resigned myself to the fact that this vicious circle that Cain first started off by reducing one-fourth of the world’s population ( if Genesis is to be believed ) would only end when everyone came in contact with the wrong end of a gun, with the sharp end of a sword, with weapons, targeted at the destruction of individuals or at the destruction of masses, or, worst of all, as was the case in this fabled city, due to cerebral atrophy, that came about as a direct consequence of being the minions of Mammon.

As evening came and was slipping by, I left the office, tracing backward along the same path that I came along, occasionally glancing at what I could see of the heavens up above, the stars, as were taught, twinkling like diamonds in the sky. Occasionally, I say, for its not really a pleasant prospect to be hit by the unconcerned, merciless traffic whilst indulging in star gazing.

My thoughts, once I got my physical self outside the four walls of my cube, once again resumed their bouncing off within the padded walls of my head, strait-jacketed, unfortunately, by societal norms. It was pretty much the same thing I used to think about during the mornings, making attempts to conveniently ignore what there was around me that I did not wish to see. I suddenly remembered my friend, the goat, and I thought I would comfort myself by patting him again, and walked briskly to where I had seen him tied before.

When I got to the telephone pole, he wasn’t in sight, though the rope was still there. Thoughts of his escape came to my mind, and I looked around to check if I could see him prancing around somewhere. It was only during my search for the goat that I noticed something that I had conditioned myself to be oblivious to.

Right opposite the telephone pole, on the other side of the road, was a butcher’s shop, with a goat’s head on display, a carcass hanging on the meat hook in the shop.

I knew, even before I looked to check, that the head that lay there had a small white patch between its eyes.

I closed my eyes, trying in vain to stop the stream of tears welling up inside, walking back home sadly, thinking ‘what a wonderful world………’

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