The Bubble of Life

How much does a man need? Should we be really satisfied with what we have and when does growing need give birth to greed. I don’t know answers to that and I don’t expect you to have them either. After all how can we? All our lives we have spent taking care of and listening to just one person, that one person we call ‘I’.

Yeah, we may have occasionally given a thought or two to other peoples’ lives, the lives that are connected to ours. The lives of our brothers and sisters, of our parents and of our friends and relatives. But that’s it.

I for one always thought that I am a caring person who thinks about others, of the direction our nation is heading to, of eliminating poverty etc. continuous reading books and watching documentaries and interviews, surfing internet and discussing with friends and family. I thought this is what everyone was supposed to do and I was doing my part.

Yesterday, it was Raksha Bandhan, the festival of love, of the strong sibling bond that has even overshadowed the divisive lines of religions and regions. Since I had no one to celebrate with and basically nothing to do, I decided to do something different this year. I joined some of my friends who were planning on celebrating at an orphanage.

Now, I have never been to an orphanage or any such place before and the typical stereotype played in my mind: lonely sad kids, looking for answers or maybe too young to ask such questions, at the mercy of a couple of people who may or may not be treating them well.

We got there by 9 o'clock and the kids started to come out by 9:30 after having ‘breakfast with their 

principal’, to sit in an unwalled shelter while we were seated on chairs by the edges of the “hall”.

At first it all seemed so innocent and cute, little kids playing among themselves, hitting each other falling down and getting up back again. And there I am in my stupid bubble of pride thinking with a hint of sympathy, “innocent kids, they don’t even understand how cruel the God has been to them”.

Nevertheless, we are still seated watching the kids and talking amongst ourselves while the kids totally continue to ignore our presence. Soon a kid walks up to me and says, “Hello Bhaiya, I am Avinash”. I am surprised by his confidence of walking up to a total stranger like that, so I respond by introducing myself. Avinash tells me he likes to draw and has memorized his mathematical tables. I ask him the table of and he just spells it out like he is reciting some nursery rhyme. We move on to the table of 11, then 14 and then to 19. He is as eased as ever. At one point, he was just reading out his tables while I was trying to mentally calculate if he was correct and hell yes he was.

At this point some of other kids also joined and it turned out that the maths teacher there had done a much better job than my “best-school-in-Kashmir” teachers. Next we moved on to drawing and all of them took off and came back in a minute with their respective drawing notebooks which were actually used maths or science notebooks of some kids before them.

When I took out my phone to click a picture of their drawing all of them unanimously requested a selfie and soon many more joined. The principal acme out and the ‘formal Raksha Bandhan celebrations’ took place with a brother-sister duo tying Rakhi and getting sweets.

Later we also tied Rakhis and vice versa; all the kids just rushed towards us. Rakhis that we had bought finished but not their enthusiasm and love. They then took turns to sing songs or tell a joke until the wardens called them back for lunch.

It was surely the best Raksha Bandhan ever for me and while I had a chance to meet these amazing kids there, I learnt a lot from them. I had gone there thinking of the hardships and suffering they might be facing and they just showed me how miserable my little bubble of life is. They had no bubble of their own, rather they had this whole world to themselves and while not everyone might welcome them to their worlds, these kids had no problem in letting people into their lives and their world. And as a person with first-hand experience, their world is much more vibrant and beautiful than mine could ever be.