Leave Me Alone.....

 Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

I am young. I have the energy to hold the earth like Atlas. I have dreams to launch spaceships to put out all candles of the sky and burn my own stars I have created in the laboratory. My passions are immeasurable. My ambitions are Herculean, my love will stun Cleopatra, my reach is unlimited. Sitting with a super computer I can hack all devices, accounts and bring the world to a standstill. I can do what my temperamental brothers over the countable centuries could never do. Yes, I can hold the universe as a grain of sand in the hollow of my palm. I work for twenty hours to create and destroy.

But when I go home my mother asks me what I ate whether what she calls, junk food, or what she had given in the hot box. Father asks – did you read that book? That’s very important for the competitive examinations you know. The library bought ten copies of the book at my request. Father runs back when shouts of joy are heard from the TV room- his star Kohli has scored his 32nd century. I run up the steps to my room, bolt it from inside and fall on the bed. Mother’s -o’ listen, eat these sandwiches- rebounds against the doors.

I take Ritalin when I sit in the old fashioned classrooms as my attention wavers. I get stressed listening to dull lectures and irrelevant rhetoric. In the university play fields I have no place in the playing eleven of the cricket team. I play basket ball against my will but my team regularly wins championships. Father has forbidden the play field- recommends the gym to me. Well! why should I be commanded by everyone to do this or that? Why should someone tell me what to read and what job to apply for? Mother wanted me to be a doctor, father an IT professional or a Management Guru. None asks me what  I want to become-BECOME no I want to BE. Parents, teachers, advisers please stop bullying me. Let me be what I wish to be. And I wish to build and create. I want to fight the enemies of life. If you tease me and say what will I eat, where will I sleep and such nonsense, I’ll say I’ll eat the sun piece by piece and sleep on the starry bed of the sky. You think I am mad! Then don’t ask me anything. Leave me alone. Millions like me roam in the streets searching for ideals to follow. What world have you left behind O’ my great grandparents? A world where I cannot breathe; where the climate goes North by Northwest because you wanted the West to come to the East, where gaping manholes swallow pedestrians midway to their homes; where lakes foam and fume, water tantalizes the farmer to his suicide; where dragged from a train a woman is raped on the footpath- onlookers like four legged brutes take pictures to ruminate in moments of shameless privacy to savour in human barbarism in primitive ecstasy; where bullets are sprayed on music revellers by a demented ideologue of the devil; where; where your chancy birth to a religion makes you superior to others; where atom and hydrogen bombs are bandied about on whims; where God’s acres are reduced to rubbles to justify ownership; where love and faith  are commodified in the name of modernity; where all values are  sacrificed for vote bank politics and where man wishes to live for two hundred years with medicines...

Well, don’t play with my passions. I am a simple human being. I want to live in a comfortable home where love bonds the human other into a relationship. I want a fair job which will absorb my soul and give freedom to search for new things that will delight man without ecological despair. Life should offer challenges to show and prove that man is a creative soul in a world full of such human beings who never bother to chisel out a stone knife even for hunting like the Homo Erectus.

In short let me live like a man with love and creativity to make the world more beautiful. Let me leave behind a more hospitable world than I was fated to inherit. Let me be a glowing part of God’s scheme of things- If there is no God, let me create God and worship Him as a referee to judge me in the final reckoning.