Do I even belong here? This was a question that shook my mind when I was sitting on the sides of a basketball court, in front of a cafe in NUST too liberal for my taste. Do I even belong with these people I got enrolled with? Some boys running, their footsteps muffled by the shrieks of the ball hitting the court. Am I one of them? Can I ever be? This all is pompous. Grandeur. And don’t confuse it with classy grandeur like an honest man’s smile after a hard day’s work. It’s dirty grandeur. Or so it seems to me only I guess. I’ll never be one of them.
People wearing joggers the price of which is the monthly expenditure of houses in my village. Girls and boys laughing uncontrollably, not having a care in the world. And then I thought oh all right, these people actually don’t have any worry in the world. Not finding their loved model of grandeur, game, phone or any material is their maximum problem. These people regard discomforts as problems. They discuss these little problems with worried faces. They have grins and pouts and smiles and smirks. I will never be one of them.
There are prisoners in this very city who have long served their sentences and yet are still imprisoned. Those are my people and those are my problems. There are parents out there who don’t know where the next food is coming from for their children. Is it even coming or not? Those are my people and my problems. Uneducated brothers chain their mothers thinking she has gone mad when it’s just epilepsy or seizure or any other very real, curable, medical disease. But they don’t know that. That ma is my people and the system that did not send her sons to school is my problem. Outside the minds of these resourceful, filthy rich, teens and preadults, there are underage boys actually allowing themselves to be raped every night at truck stands, to get a share of food from the same truckers later on. Those children are my people and the system preventing those truck-drivers to get marries is my problem. Inside the system, on fancy complex-named posts are people who actually want to change the system from within but are afraid of doing so. They are my people and their’s are my problems. These petty, ignorant, insensitive, apathy-stricken, foolish, lethargic, self-centred people balling and baking away their lives in well-lit, aromatic, smart and serene surroundings … think they have problems! May you do! May you someday do taste some problems, gross and fat as they come!
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