Experience of kid-age Afresh!

While most of us remember, recollect and perhaps struggle to re-live those childhood memories, school days....

I was in for a surprise!

I was jolted by a chance meeting of a kid, with whom I traveled from LKG to plus 2, at school!

He somehow managed to keep well-packed, those kid-age emotional-feel of each other ... And he opened that pack yet again, (and perhaps, just for me last evening!)...

I suddenly 'became' a kid, experientially! All my experience of life, after leaving the school, just stood a little away from me, and the mind felt like that kid, once more! The mind did not even think of looking at the dear kid-age-friend using references like his cultural background, family roots, traditional life-style etc... He felt just a kid, nothing more!

This experience, did allow my perception to review, what we did with ourselves during the kid age... (yes, my attempt is to look through a-child-like-mind... so, logic might be missing a little, when it is about pristine emotions!)

We just found yet another co-traveler in the other, ready to face those uncertainties, ahead of us, as ourselves! We are keen to observe the other, as he-is, not as we like him to be... (we have no idea even.... about 'how to design our-own-likings' !).. And so, each unique feature in the other seemed an amazing, awesome and attractive thing!

I could see myself into a busy-schedule of trying not-to-miss anything happening around me! And that teacher was struggling to divide her efforts between drawing our attention towards her on the one hand, and trying to make-us-learn those chants from text book, to be repeated like a parrot! Oh! The better parrot happened to get better scores, but when it came to rank, the numerals were too small, not a double-digit-inflation-like!

The 'session' by one teacher was over too soon, even before we started to get a feel-of-what she was like, and only to be replaced by yet another one, entirely distinct from the previous one! We struggled to match the teacher's 'requirements' of us, when no pattern really suited all of them alike! Yes, we found a flaw in the teacher... she struggled to find out where exactly she had left-it, when she used to have a brief chat with the teacher of nearby class... and there would always be one of us to 'prompt' her with the last-repeated-chant... these 'lessons' meant nothing more than an imposed chant, to be 'religiously' adhered to, including the tone, texture and accent which seemed to please that teacher more than the accurate-match with text material!

Somewhere, the teacher rushes to one of the rear benches, and shows the 'cane' a bit menacingly! We the front-benchers are more curious to know what it was about, which infuriated the teacher? And there was a conspicuous absence of 'action-replay' to enlighten us about the 'unpardonable' act of the rear-seated kid... It did not even occur to ask the kid who sat next to that kid... and that kid would invariably remain 'dumb' like when we ask 'what did you do?' (the look on his face, at times seem to offer a clue like, 'what did “I” do?... oh! Nothing... I was just 'fully-myself'.. just that the teacher found my being 'my-own-self' to be a nuisance to her!)...

And therefore, the one teacher who did 'use' the cane too often became an object of 'our common dislike' (we did not think of 'pooling-in' our common-liking, for other teachers who were more kind... The 'like' for a teacher felt like , our 'like-for-a-chocolate'... we experienced it by ourselves, in exclusivity!)....

Thus, I was looking into myself, through my own kid-mind, and enjoyed the experience of that innocence, which I did miss, at that age!

It almost feels like, we might be able to re-stitch the days together and weave the diary of our kid-days!

When I came out of that kid-mind, I could now see clearly, I am a bit obstinate about refusing to view a stranger in my life now, without pasting 'as many labels as possible' on his image-inside-me, .. and most of those labels are out of my memory of 'similar' looking people of the past, their background, culture, manners, religions, social status, financial status ... what not!

Oh! The mind goes through a huge exercise of wading through a very large data base, and in the meanwhile, I miss most of 'what that person is right now!'... The only consolation/solace being, he is no different about the 'mind-pattern'... It is almost like a 'virtual-meeting' despite being 'live, and face-to-face'! (Oh! .. Oops! Was that the reason why the 'virtual' meeting via these gadgets , manages to bring us closer to each other now? Dunno!)

child-like, yours,

psn(25th May-be, 2015)