The bus wasn't
crowded at all. Surprising, given that it was a bus to such an important city.
The bus was well maintained, and the crowd seemed mostly middle class. Couldn't
have been more than 25 people in a bus of 65 capacity.
There were two
couples who seemed newly married. Such newly married ones are always the
cutest. Its such a joy to be around them, and feel their love for each other -
though it’s a sin to look, muhahaha :P
Thus the bus was
mostly quiet with very little chatter. Yours truly was engaged observing the
bus and its passengers, the roads outside and pretending to read 'Following
Fish', which in itself was a rather delightfully written travelogue of India's
coast. All in all, it was a sort of comfortable monotony.
It was broken by a
sudden shrill. Some youth on the third row was listening to music on his phone,
suddenly broke into song. And these are the latest, snazzy Bollywood numbers -
but the good, old youthy, cheesy 80's ones - the ones that contract labourers
and truck drivers all over India have such great affinity for !
He went along at
full flow, singing both the male and female parts of this unrecognisable duet -
youthfully altering his voice for the female versions too, as though he wasn't
shrill enough already.
"….Tum hi ho,
meri nasha..." or something to that
extent.
The shock of the
moment left everyone else stunned. The instinctive reactions were disbelief and
incomprehension. Seriously, given the situation, its hard to believe that
there's actually a guy singing. Once that shock passed, a quick-to-trigger
middle aged hothead raised a cry to stop the nonsense - "Bakwaas bandh
kar". But it never seemed to have any effect on our dude, for he continued
untroubled by such feeble concerns ! People then looked around to the
conductor, the authority in the bus, the representative of the state, which
clearly is responsible for law and order - more than hope for action from his
side, were actually curious to see how he would react. It’s a sort of
unconscious behaviour for most of us Indians.
It is at this
juncture that bus journey came alive (as though this freak show hadn't already
livened it!). Sportspersons and sports viewers would know that the audience is
always the 12th man - what makes sport such a spectacle isn't just the players,
but the audience too. Now in the bus, where our youthy dude is obviously
causing discomfort to some of the passengers, and also just rebuffed the
efforts to stop him gets an unexpected response from the rest of the crowd.
Of course, being
quite a youth myself, I was actually enjoying the proceedings - but the rather
quiet and dull atmosphere of the bus led me to certain misjudgments of my
passengers. I was worried that this voice of youthness would get muscled out by
the normalcy of the bus. I was under the impression that youthness in today's
world is under such short supply, that our fuses too have so short - and we
have become sort of intolerant of such youth behaviour. The crowd so totally
proved me wrong.
As soon the middle
aged man's efforts were rebuffed - the crowd started smiling, beautiful smiles
on all the 20 odd faces ! And they all turned around to notice that everyone
was indeed smiling. And this converted the smiles to laughter. The 20 odd passengers,
all strangers to each other, not bothering to engage in conversation
previously, were somehow mysteriously connected by this inexplicable force -
were laughing at this moment. They displayed their own youthness qualities - an
ability to appreciate the oddity of the youth who's singing, the quirky
randomness of the situation and the fact that all were able to feel this !
The impact was so
much that, this fuelled conversation between the strangers for the next hour,
and even when the bus halted for tea - people were sitting together for tea,
sharing cigarettes, making Khaini and Miraj (Gujarat's favourite!) mixes for each other. That youth who started
singing made such an impact on all the bus. My idea of the world did change
momentarily. The world has much more youthness than we think. We need to just
open our eyes to it. The world aint a boring place at all - people have an
innately youthy, we need to allow ourselves to be so.
We are a society
that loved Om Shanti Om - youthness shall always thrive here. And for that, we
shall be ever grateful to live in such times.
