The soul refuses to grow: Childhood-philia!! or just a Fantasy??

(Disclaimer: This post is not for light-hearted people. All the characters in this story are real and belongs to my childhood.. Any relation with the reader is purely co-incidental)

Today, my soul cries.. It refuses to maturate.. It hankers for a time machine that will take it close to the words like Innocent, Innocuous, Pure, Virtuous, Naïve, Sober. These are the words I have not visited anywhere for a long time now. These words epitomize my childhood. Yes, I want to go back to my childhood. The precociousness has mired me into this materialistic world. But I want to get out of it. I am tired of my maturity. I am losing my patience. I am frayed by the responsibilities. It is not that I am a chicken-hearted, pusillanimous being but it is just that a few hours back, I saw the frail images of the sheer bliss which has been missing in my life for some time now.

Perhaps, nostalgia has wounded me once again. Yes, last night, the beautiful memories of my childhood once again instigated my heart. They made me realize that how stale this hard-mass has become.

I want to go back to “my era”. The era in which, I used to get more attention; attention of my parents; of my relatives; of my neighbors (and of their daughters!!). Also, in school, I was the favorite of almost all gorgeous teachers whose faces, I still remember and my first crush, a 17 year old English teacher from Mumbai, is the tenderest example of it. She really loved me when I was in class ---^th and she once said these beautiful (now seducing) lines:

 “Rahul, you are my favorite student, I will not leave you!!” (Though, she perhaps meant to say that she would not leave me if I would not do my homework!)

I am not flaunting here but believe me I was almost as popular as a teddy bear among the fairer sex in school! They liked to play with me but tended to forget me as we collectively grew old!

I really don’t want to grow old.

I just wish for a time machine that would drop me back to the intriguing era of the fantasies…where I would deal with the talismanic tales of Vikram Betaal and Alif Laila (I never got to see Laila though!) and the beautiful fable of Chandrakanta (Ahh, I loved her so much!!). And how can I forget, the “chaddi pehen ke phool khila hai walaa” boy, Mowgli in Jungle Book; baah! his wonderful Tarzan acts and his friendship with Bageera. This was a semi-decade when Sunday used to wake me up with the ever-refreshing songs of Rangoli and put me down with then countdown of Superhit Muqabala! And the best part was that Ekta Kapoor was still in her nascent stage and there were no saas-bahu soaps to cook our bheja fries!! Most of the serials were comedies which eventually addicted most of the people, including me. Dekh Bhai Dekh,  Shrimaan Shrimati, Zabaan Sambhal Ke, Flop Show, All the Best and lately, Small Wonder were a few of them. Apart from these, a few thrillers like Byomkesh Bakshi and Aahat were also successful in making me glued to their chronicles. What a fun that used to be.

This fun was not restricted to the TV serials only. In fact, the volcanic eruptions of Saabu in the comic Cha Cha Chowdhury, the birbal like acts of Baankelal and the beautiful stories of Champak were also some of the fables which I really enjoyed to navigate through. More or less, each of the stories used to exemplify what I had read in the panchtantra stories of the victory of good over evil at my school. My mind was drilled there with these “values” with the courtesy of various books and TV serials like Ramayana. Indeed, the sense of “achievement” and “gratification” that used to come in at that time whenever Arun Govil killed one of the evils was inexplicable. It was much more pronounced than whatever of IT would come when I would solve a (dictated) error while coding!! But now that satisfaction and the energy is perhaps dispersed in the prism of “material”.

The amount of energy in that era was at its peak. It is perhaps comparable to the energy which releases when a space shuttle takes off from the Earth. I used to see myself in place of big-time discoverers! Even Newton would have blushed after discerning the number of experiments I performed at home. I unassembled my black and white TV while I was in class 5^th (though never bothered to reassemble it!). I made one IVRS at home for conversing between different rooms of my small house. I even recorded numerous audio cassettes as a radio jockey (Now you get a fair idea why the name of this blog is NjoyTV!!). My family still plays those “memories” sometimes whenever they feel so. And indigenously, I made one mini-dish antenna also at home to “catch” the cable from the nearest cable-line!!

All this and still used to get away with my parents' admonitions just because of my “good” results at studies! Securing an excellent rank of 4 (out of 30-35) in the class used to sound like an “abuse” to me and my parents! The sense of competition in me to succeed was more than what Dhoni boys have in them now. I can easily recall one incident when I secured 77 marks in Sanskrit and then also I was scolded by my parents as the “other” child had scored 90 in that. (Though, they were again happy when in the final exam, I again secured 77 but this time the “other” child scored less than me, what a consistency!!)

And if you have done well in your exams then who stops you from playing your sport? Most of the times I used to play cricket only until I was dragged into the really virtual world of the video games. I remember that I started off my journey with the dragon stages of Mario!! A feeling of strolling on a different planet would come while moving the jockey of the video game. Apart from this, cycling used to be my favourite past-time where I gave tough competition to almost all my friends. That too especially in the rainy seasons of  yeh Dilli hai mere yaar, among the whistles of cool breeze called monsoon winds, under the darkness of cumulonimbus clouds, in the deafening sound of thunder storms:

ZZBhuuuuuuuuuddooooooooooooooommmm ZZBhuuuuuuuuuddooooooooooooooommmm Zuuuuuuddoooooooommmm Zuuuuuuddoooooooommmm

…

…

Rahuuuuuuuuuuul….o… Rahuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuul….Please get up. Office nahi jaana kya..

 And suddenly this sinfully blatant sound pierced through my subconscious sense and broke apart my sleep-sealed eyes. I looked at the clock that showed thirty past seven. Oh… no… the f**** Monday has come yet again..Got to get up from bed now… That means the culprit was my soul, my subconscious sense that was (desirably) playing the beautiful images of my past somewhere on a little screen in the intricate alleys of my brain!! but what about the cycling which I was going to do in the wet air….Alas! the bicycle has been replaced by a car and the monsoon winds are now replaced by the ersatz air of my car’s A.C…Abe yaar..

Anyways..time to be practical now..Hope I have not made you too nostalgic with the narration of my “fantasy”. But believe me, I thought to put it in the way I saw it. Now, leaving you with the memories ..this is me, signing off.

 (After almost all the fact-based topics, this is my first attempt at writing on an abstract topic.. Please ignore the structural and grammatical mistakes, if any. Suggestions for improvement are always welcome)