My strange moods and a stranger mindscape [need I say pun intended?] often witness my conscious hours being spent in and my conscious-ness being subjected to a plethora of self-assessment tests and self-analyses. By self-assessment tests I do not only mean those MCQ tests that people take online...mine are of a more critical bent and definitely extensively analytical. My action or inaction as the case most often is in a particular situation impels my over-active conscience to critically analyse my basic nature and allow me no remission whatsoever.
Today was one such day. I was the co-passenger of a forgetful,grumpy old woman en route to garia. She sat beside me in her soiled old white saree, obviously one of her very few, carrying a thole, grumping all along and rebuking the poor auto-driver. When it was time for her to pay the fare she searched frantically in the folds of a yet-more soiled saree which she took out from her thole, while me and a fellow passenger waited for her to get down,patiently. Finally with the driver's help she was able to recollect where she had hidden her money for safety, and took it out of a knot in her aanchal. It was a tenner and the only money she seemed to possess. She paid her own fare.Now she only had Rs 5 on her. Poor helpless woman! And there was I, witnessing her distress silently. I could have paid her fare. What would I have lost? It's not that the thought didn't cross my mind at that moment but I was unable to transform it into action. I have not yet been able to acquit myself of this charge.
And then, once again the cynicism that had gripped me when I wrote the post before last, came back in it's fullest flow and flooded me. Yet this time I knew, I still know it wasn't a fancy cynicism of sorts that one falls back on when one has nothing better to do. A never-felt-before emotion inundated me as I looked at the world in a never-seen-before way.
The over-crowded roads,incomplete creatures on the run,hurrying past each other...do they know where they are going? Or why? To survive is their motto of life, I was one of them untill that moment, till I questioned 'why'! Why should man live? Just because he was born? For his parents, his love, his dreams, his children? But all is falsehood.That old woman...what was she living for? What is she still living for? A hope? A dream? But nothing is real. Nothing will stay. We Human beings...soulless survivors,our eyes steeped in the colours of illusion, spin tales about life, create webs and get entangled, wander aimlessly till one day so-called 'death' happens. fame, success, money, love...fallacies. And I detested being a part of that world of soulless incomplete braggarts.

A few minutes later, I had tears in my eyes when a father dangling his baby boy in his arms,the centre of his attention, the cause of the light in his eyes, peeped at me from within a photograph in a book of photographs titled 'Family'.

Thank you Family.

I am sorry about my incoherent ramblings.These days they keep me company though do not make much sense to me either.