There are days when nothing helps. Almost like those ‘A day when everything went wrong’ essays that one used to write for literature assessments in junior classes. Unlike in those essays, nothing happens and whatever happens doesn’t help. Waking up to see a dear face inches above your face doesn’t help. Her display of affection towards you doesn’t help. Nor does the steaming cup of morning tea. A cynicism grips your heart and mind and nothing seems real. The scorching sun, the stray clouds, the articles on the newspaper, the glint in your dad’s eyes and his ecstasy at hearing a melodious number, your mom’s iciness, the melodious number itself, an email reminding you that human beings are not as superior as they think themselves to be; so don’t be complacent, prospects of watching a good movie with people you like and people who like you back, promises of friendship, a book that makes you think, Romanticism, learning a foreign language…all seem as Holden Caulfield so rightly used to say and say again ’phony’. The superficiality of everything surrounding you strikes you hard on the face. And suddenly you just don’t give a damn! Yet you want to close your eyes and shut the world out. You try that. Sounds and smells and touches assault your senses, infiltrate your thoughts and encroach on your privacy, disrupt your rare moment of being able to stare back at the truth that usually stares sardonically at you full on face making you cower and avert your gaze. You thank the ostentatious celebrations of life, the splendour, the pomp that have helped you delude the truth once more! The truth that you are an insignificant nobody, destined to die from the moment you were born, like everybody, that you can do nothing to improve any man’s life, that you have known very little about life and beyond life in these 20 odd years that you have spent on earth, that there are more books than you can ever read in one life, that you have been cursed with mediocrity. You retire to your cocoon defeated.