Blowing Up Things!

As the cries of a child rang out into the pitch dark starry nights of a remote village nobody realized it was much more than the usual vocal chord vibrations emanating from a newborn. The very first stench of the atmosphere, the very first lights that entered his pupils from a dirty old flickering bulb on that night told him there was something about this place that he didn’t like. If the infant could have understood what was going through his brain and put it aptly in words he would have said “I wanna blow up this place!”
Growing up, the little kid nurtured that feeling within him and gave it every chance to grow into something big. He realized he was not the only one with these feelings. There were others among his peers who shared his feelings. There were secret schools even, were they taught them the theory behind explosions and the reason why it was important to blow up things just because they felt so. As a kid some of his favorite pastimes were blowing up crackers under the teacher’s seat because he scolded him, blowing up the toy of the rich kid in class who wouldn’t give it to him to play with because he was weird and so on and so forth. The basic drive was the same as the one he felt on that night he was born. Blow up things that he doesn’t like or takes offence to. However, while his fellow friends were good at it, he alone would end up botching all his attempts. It was not because he was any less dedicated or because he didn’t plan it through. It was just that fate always seemed against him. Like the time when he tried to set of the cracker under his teachers table fate sent in a dog into that remote school in that remote gully to pee on his cracker’s fuse. The time he tried to blow up the rich kid’s toy, he managed to whisk away the toy and tie a cracker to it and was all set to light it when fate sent a dog again. This time it was the rich kid’s dog which decided to chase the scent of the new toy of his master. Hot on his tail came the mightily disturbed rich kid and his gang of bullies. But undaunted by the enmity that fate seemed to have with him the little boy continued with undiminished spirit.
Soon the little kids grew up. His peers decided it was time for a change. They had been told about whole wide world outside the village, waiting to be light up by them. How there was a way to get to that world without having a pass and how things would be fine as long you managed to keep away from the police. So they all embarked on the greatest journey of their life as soon as they hit their teens. Fate tried his best to hinder the little teen in this ordeal too. But he managed to overcome it finally and make it outside of the village though it took him a little longer than the others. On reaching there he came to know that his friends had already made a name for themselves blowing up things in this new world. Some had become consultants in the field, some teachers and others were still continuing to try and scale newer heights. His friends welcomed him with open arms and for once it seemed he had shaken off the evil fate off his back because there could be no better proposition to launch ones career in a new place than friends in top positions right? Thus armed with a all the cash his friends bestowed on him to buy his choice of crackers he set out with elaborate plans to light up the new land and one day become powerful enough to execute the desire since his birth… light up that stupid old village..
It probably would not be right to say ‘as fate would have it’ at this point because the little teen had finally managed to shake fate off his back. But then knowing fate it did want exactly this and purposely let him think he had lost it. Inn which case it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to say ‘as fate would have it too’. Either ways, irrespective of the fact whether I am right or wrong when I say ‘as fate would have it’, fact was that the sudden freedom from his fate led to him becoming careless and soon errors started creeping into his usually carefully knit seamless plans. On the day he was supposed to board the plane and set alight the night sky, he got on the bus to the airport in the morning only to realize he had caught the wrong one to his friend’s house. The day he planned for a fireworks display on a train, he picked up the wrong briefcase filled with manuals for his complex equipments rather than the one with the equipments. The day he decided he would light up the space near the water supply to the town he overlooked the fact that crackers don’t work once they are wet. And thus like this all the money his friends had bestowed on him was soon lost.
But if he had learned anything at all from his tussles with fate it was that one should not give up and to keep trying as there was always a way. “Where there is a will there is a way” he told himself. Unfortunately for him he was about to realize that it was not always happy endings as the movies in his old village seemed to suggest. It was exactly at this point of time that the villain in his life, Fate, caught up with him and send a policeman to him to ask for his pass to the land beyond the gully. Villainous Fate also used his trump card – a fateful revenge for the little mans teacher back in the village under whose chair he had tried to burst crackers so many times. The teacher had one day taught them “where there is a will there is a way” and proceeded to explain a little later that ‘Will’ was also short for a person named William in the land beyond the village. The little boy was so busy with his cracker that he missed everything that his teacher said between these two facts and hence truly believed that the ‘Will’ the teacher was talking about was indeed the one sitting right next to him at that moment. So he instantly flicked Will’s pass and showed it to the police. And the rest was… as Fate would have it….

(For all those who feel appalled after reading what was aptly described as a lenghty PJ by a friend, I can only apologise. This big PJ culminated from my desire to write a funny article and the story of Sheikh Abdul Khwaja who the authorities now suspect, after arresting him and interrogating him, to be nothing but a failed terrorist.)