Driven Home

The private passport agent asked Amar for Rs. 2000 as ‘gift’ for helping him to get his passport on an urgent basis. That made him angry, but he didn’t react. He paid it and started for home by bus.

He was completely pre-occupied with a mix of thoughts. Did he really want to go to a foreign country? Not just because the agent had demanded money, but there were many involved in changing his decision. The other day he had gone to a nearby post office with his mother to deposit Rs.200 on his name that his mother had saved. The post master there had no computer. Only few fat registers with the green and blue rubber stamps, with old worn out forms and inlands. The fan wasn’t working and even with heat scorching he was polite as usual. He didn’t even have any other helper for assistance. Can people even live without computers?

Within a week’s time a policeman came home for passport verification. He had to give Rs. 300 for his ‘conveyance’ expenses. He didn’t say a word. Within two week’s time he got his passport and a month later his Visa interview date was confirmed. He had become unusually calm during these days.

“Am I leading my life where I wanted it to go? Or was life taking me somewhere?”

Amar had never thought of these stuffs during his school and college days. Life was fun while learning, but when life teaches some lessons in its own way, it’s not always fun. He wasn’t also longing for money. There is something in him that tells he has to do something in life. But Amar still didn’t know what he wanted to do in his life. His campus placement had made him apply for the passport – to work in an MNC is a no risk life. A rat race that can at maximum take him to the management division of the company if he sticks to it for another decade, but will he be content with his job’s content?

A secured position, a good name in the society, a decent bank balance, iPod, cell phone, laptop, car, and a home may be with a 25 year period loan or something like that. But is that all what is called life? How can one just take what comes his or her way and live with it, with little to no risk. Didn’t someone say that life means risk?

For Amar, it meant peanuts. He wanted something big in life, perhaps, something big that makes him satisfied. Something big enough which at least doesn’t make him feel small.

“Yes”, Amar said to himself, “I am going to follow the voice inside me, what my heart says”.

He was lying on the ground in his room staring at the roof, introspecting. With the power cut, he had the mosquitoes singing his lullaby. But now, these were like angels flying around his head, because, at this moment, he is seeing the light in the darkness, not of any emergency lamp or a candle, but the brightness of the wisdom that led him to see the light of his life.

He was clear now. His Visa interview was tomorrow at 8 am. It was already 11.50 pm.

Smiling, he slowly got up and sat on the ground, took his timepiece and adjusted the alarm time and then went to sleep, satisfied with what he found on that day…his conscience!

Per the master’s instructions, the alarm clock rang sincerely in the morning at 9 am!