A PENCIL, CHILDREN'S DAY... AND CHEERS TO NEVER GROWING UP...

So, I had lost my pen and the diary again... Yes, it’s turning out to be a cyclic process in my life... I buy a pair of diary and pen together, use it for a while, and even before half the pages of the diary gets exhausted and half the ink in the pen, I lose both of them; then I buy the next pair, lose them after a while; buy them again; and thus the process goes on and on... And, yes, you guessed it right, every time the fault is mine (no, I mean seriously)...
Well, I was extremely disgusted with myself this time, both for the diary and the pen... The diary, being one I use at work, had a lot of important notes and information that I keep needing often, and the pen was a moderately expensive one (which I certainly can’t afford to re-buy anytime soon), and thus the guilt was real bad... And, since I needed a pen to scribble all through the day, I decided to use a pencil instead... My work-place, being a creative agency, has a stock of pencils, coloured once, sketch-pencils and also the plain ones... I picked a simple HB pencil and decided that from now on this would be what I would do most of my scribbling down...

I managed to locate a pencil sharpner, and started shrarpening the pencil... But then as usual, I broke it instead... So I asked a colleague of mine to help me with the job, and he happily agreed.... We sat in the balcony attached to the office just next to some green orchid-plants, and he started sharpening the pencil with a blade... And, just then, yes then, suddenly I recalled those days from my childhood, when I used to sit with my Dita while he used to sharpen my school-pencils, fill ink in my pens, and hand me over my fully loaded pencil-box...

And, suddenly I realized, only the other day, which was ‘Children’s Day’, I had thought about all these past years that I have passed through to experience the current day... And, somehow, although I’m not a person living only in the past, yet I ended up walking down the memory lanes, to re-live many moments from the same... And, thus, now I realize, although with every passing day a part of the child in me grows up, a part still stays the same, a child still...
Yes, a lot have certainly changed since the time I knew I was growing up... Have passed through a lot of phases, have learnt and unlearnt a lot of things, have met and lost a lot of people, and most importantly have fallen in and out of a lot of emotions... But the growing up never stops... From the phase when preparing for the exams was the only difficult event in life to the phase when managing finances to day-to-day maintaining a house (however small it might be) all by myself too doesn’t look like a mammoth task, life, for a moment too, has never stopped... From the phase when the first red-rose just brightened up the whole world to the phase when all the bouquets went directly to the bin, life changed so fast... From the phase when a heart-break could seem like the end of life to a phase where even many heart-breaks didn’t even stop the casual retail-therapy, the pace of life was like a hurricane... From the time when the first pay-check made the world go round to the phase when pay-checks and cribbing turned parts of the same parcel, life never slowed down... And, along with all these phases neither does growing up ever bothered to slow down... So we grew up, rather really really fast...

But then, did I actually grow up??? I don’t think so... Every passing day certainly does add on to the number of days I’m existing on this earth, but it fails to make me grow up... The child in me is somehow too arrogant to get out of my system and let me grow up... Somehow the grown-up world looks way beyond complicated to me, for me to even take a liking on... And thus I still long to be a part of my small world that I had when I was considered a kid... The small frilly clothes that I wore, the short hair that I had, the black-beaded anklets around my tiny ankles, the colourful colouring books that I had, the fairy-tales that I believed in, and the 10 chapter school-books that looked never-ending to me then, each of these is what I long for... And, most importantly I long for those moments when I could sleep hugging my Momu, with one leg on her; I long for those relentless chatters to Dita over every event that had happened during the day; and I long for those lazy afternoons when me and my little brother fought over colouring books and pencils... And, each time I long for these I realize, I have certainly not grown up... Cuz, apparently the grown-up world is much more practical than that... You don’t cry over small priceless pleasures, you don’t bother to stick around your past, you move on continuously and you focus only on fulfilling your larger ambitions in life... If these are true, then of course I haven’t grown up, neither is there any signs of doing so in the near future...

I know, nobody in this world really does grow up ever... We do pass time and thus turn into an adult someday, and along with it tend to take on responsibilities that the societal norms allow us to... We go to college after school, learn things, and get into a professional life and dream of achieving the highest high someday, thinking that would certainly make us feel complete, and bring happiness... But then this is so not true... End of it all, everyone finds true joy in the minute details of everyday life, and not in the biggest achievements of any sort... Hence, the small bubbles on the coffee makes us feel better than the coffee itself, we don’t stop buying the tiny chocolates that we used to have during our kid-days, we prefer relishing on what our mums cook to an expensive meal at a 5-star, we still sift through the pages of the old albums, and we still upload the pictures from our childhood in our messy hair and tiny shorts... Yes, we never grow up... Nobody does... My Dita has never grown up, he still weeps every time I fall sick; my Momu never grew up, she still starts singing when she buys new shoes; my Bro never grew up, he still comes crawling to me to get me buy him t-shirts; my best friend never grew up, he still gets insecure when I don’t give him time; and yes, I never grew up, I still fail to understand the so-called real and thus grown-up world... Had any of us grown up, we would have much beyond these emotions, cuz we would have been free of any insecurities...

Suddenly I came back to reality on my colleague calling out my name... He hands me over the pencil with a perfectly sharpened tip, just like the ones my Dita used to get me... I smiled at him and thanked him... I don’t know for how long I was soaked in my own thoughts, contemplating on the negativities of growing up... But since I’m back now, I realize, yes, it’s so so so much better not to grow up, cuz being a child you can experience that what you can’t if you you grow up... And, that ‘that’ is the purity with which you view everything that’s exposed to you, that ‘that’ is the innocence with which you live your life, that ‘that’ is the un-conditional love that you have for everyone around you, and most importantly that ‘that’ is the carefree feeling that tells you that it’s alright if things are not right, right now, it would certainly be alright when we grow up...

Cheers to never growing up...