Blackened eyes
A tired mind
A bright screen
Some tears cried
Late hours
A lot of caffeine
Too much pressure
Today I turn nineteen
(End of scene)
I could write pages and pages for ages and ages. Yet only parts of this pain would be written properly. I have no idea of what is it exactly that causes this searing. To this vague, uncertain, illogical but existing and very real feeling of uncomfortableness, I name love. This could be very opposite, but it is a pain I’ll call love until proved otherwise. Again here, love is not being associated with a person. It’s a feeling, vague, uncomfortable and something very painful which I yet don’t know the cause of. That’s all. That’s love.
Feminism. Women. Cryptocurrency. Bitcoins. Men. Existential crisis. Wealth with peace and tranquillity. I want to have answers to these when I go to the afterlife. I want to see all these things settled once and for all. Afterlife can’t be a meaningless pleasure. Sex and wine might be a way of awarding some but not all.
In NUST there is always some construction happening somewhere. The workers, petty, illiterate, poor wretches wearing tattered clothes, work, as they are expected to do. But I don’t understand their ‘why’. Money? Nah. Money alone can’t be so powerful to make a donkey of a human being. These people who don’t rebel, are even worse than the donkeys who do rebel to get rest in the hot summer sun and to get their extra burden removed. These workers don’t get any such luxury. At nights they sleep under the open sky on a patch of land between a stagnant smelly lake and SEECS, a school of engineering having its very own supercomputer. These people can’t do engineering and won’t jump in the lake to commit suicide either. Why do they think existence matters? Maybe money for family … But I guess if you give them a choice whereby after their death, only they themselves will be affected, many of these wretched people cancelled by the society, these untouchables will choose to die.
If a passing student merely smiles kindly at one of them, that student actually considers it an achievement. “I was kind to someone I would never want to shake hands or eat meals with”. People smile at these ‘inferiors’ to get a good deed. Why do these people then, born poon and classed as inferiors by misled public, choose to wake up again every single day?
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, feature 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 married 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!
I need to touch some grass!