Not Everybody is Like You

When a girl of ‘age’ posts something sad on her social network profile, nearly everyone jumps to the conclusion that she either suffered a broken heart or had a fight with her BF. How lucky such a girl would be, to be having lover’s tiffs at the age when she should have them! And then I realised, how lucky people would be when right things happen at the right age...

You take your baby steps and fall down often, break you teeth, but that’s okay. They are baby teeth, they will regrow. You throw away your pencils and go out to play instead of doing homework, your mother scolds you when you come back, but that’s okay. School Life is when you learn, play and grow. You battle your eyes at guys, you notice someone who cares for you, you develop crushes on random strangers, in midst of all this you fight to get a good score to get into a college, you study long hours, but that’s okay. You are young, you have a great health, you can endure anything. You fall insanely in love, you get hurt and confused, you suffer heartbreaks, you make best friends for life, you grab opportunities, you suffer backlashes in job interviews, you travel a lot, you become mature enough to start taking life seriously, but that’s okay. It’s time to take some responsibilities and you actually want to handle life by this time.

Then marriage happens, kids come, you earn, you plan, you make and you live. Life flows on. At each stage, things will happen the way they should. And you accept them. Because that is life. And you will not regret, because you will want it all anyway.

But imagine. For some not so lucky people, things don’t happen the way they should. At a very young age, they are made to go out and work. It destroys their childhood. Tiny hands picking up garbage for sustenance, a baby girl suffering abuse just because she is of the ‘undesirable’ gender, a little boy having to live in an orphanage because he was dumped for having been a ‘bastard’, a doll in the shop being stared at by a little girl in rags from the other side of a glass window.

A maid’s daughter watching kids go by to school, an unwell child having to stay in wheel chair while her siblings go down the slides, the balloon selling boy wishing to buy a balloon for himself someday. They did have dreams too. And they speak of their dreams, because that is all they can do.

A lonely girl sitting in her room while both of her parents are off to work, a teenage boy looking enviously at his friends when they ride their bikes that he cannot afford, a low-scoring student actually believing his professor when he hears him tell that such students are a waste of space, a drug-victim or a girl forced into prostitution thinking what normal life would be like.

A young bride hoping and praying for her in laws to treat her well, a shell shocked mother who is cruelly degraded for giving birth to a girl child, a moustache less boy being called a transvestite and a hairy chested one being called junglee, a recently orphaned one having suddenly been burdened with the entire responsibility of the family, a spinster past her mid thirties waiting patiently for a guy to marry her.

And you never know these stories. Because most of them are hidden behind their smiles, their inconsequential way of carrying their lives, their taking everything ‘lite’ and their not so serious attitude. And you wonder, if they are so sad, how come they are smiling, how come they are posting such a lovely statuses, how come they are not sitting at home moaning and moping and complaining about not having cool gadgets, no wardrobes full of clothes or not enough money to travel around the world while you clock selfies.

Because, they want to have some happiness. There is already so much pain in their lives, that they don’t want to have more. So they laugh, so they smile, so they let you crack jokes on them, so they try to make others laugh. So they post statuses on their FBs, so they make ridiculous stories about themselves, so they lie about how they are, so they hide their pasts.

But don’t judge them. Because life is already judging them. Life is convicting them for no fault of theirs. May be you can be more considerate next time. May be you can share some of your happiness with them. And may be you can encourage them, to fight more bravely with life. Because greater battles are fought within you than on the battlefields. And greater wars are won just because somebody patted your shoulder and said softly, “you can make through this, I believe you”....