NAUGHTY BOY

Corporate Offices, if you ask me in some way, is nice. At least they won’t let you feel the weather outside. Sweaty mornings, Scorching afternoons, Crimson evenings or Clandestine nights, all looks the same from your pushback chair and eternally drawn curtains. Whatever the weather outside, you remain cool inside. And whatever be the time, nine o’clock in the morning or nine o’clock in the night, if your gruesome Manager smilingly ask you ‘Howz going?’, you make a face like Alfred Hitchcock and say ‘just Great!’ . I have been doing this for long. From the day I enlisted myself in the rat-race. From the day I started searching that crisp currency paper happiness. I read somewhere that the greatest John Lennon wanted to be happy. Just happy. By profession! Contrary to our usual choice of being Engineer, Doctor, Lawyer, Professor and so on. It so happened because the legend was told by his mother at the tender age of 5 that ‘Happiness was the key to life’. I don’t remember if my mom had told me so and ever if she did, for the less mortals like me happiness was always the by-product of the golden word - Money. I have also heard and somewhat weakly believe that this money brings Honey too, but I won’t get into that right now. I want my article to be filed under Parental guidance, so Honey gone.

                                       So, as I was saying, I have been packing bags, travelling places, shuffling jobs, meandering life in search of that happiness. I don’t know how close or how far I am from it. But still when it rains in the evening and I suddenly pull up the corporate curtains to have a glimpse of it, I can clearly hear my heartbeats. Like dull thud on your ear bones. It gives me the feel I am still alive. And I badly, sadly and heartily miss my Naughty Boy days.

               Those were the days of my life! Feeling a thousand rain needles on your face and running with the plastic ball towards a hazy water-bottle crafted goalpost. Or playing Hide & Seek on the cemented grounds of your school. With Naughty Boy at your feet. I remember it became a fashion in those innocent times, wearing the shoemaker Bata’s Naughty Boy. And I remember I pestered my father to have one. Concrete classrooms, muddy playgrounds or tarmac roads, it never left you. Nor did the innocence .In those happy times. When life was without video games and Spellbee competitions, but with lot of fun. When radiant eyes were filled with dreams of ice-cream and chocolates than the bundle of crisp notes in our opaque times. When the girl who sat next to you was really your dearest friend. In those innocent times!

                               Days changed. Time passed. I grew up. Naughty Boy was gone. Torn and tattered. Thrown away from my life. But even today, somewhere I dearly miss that Naughty Boy in me. I miss it badly. And every day wearing those Ganuchi shoes makes me feel so pretty incomplete. And every day while on the roads, as I watch those innocent faces in not so innocent times, in our metro jungle, video game addicted kids, with mammoth sized schoolbags, I miss their happy smiles. Where Skyscrapers, plush malls rule without a single playground in near vicinity. I stop my car, and at times try to look at their feet. Do they still have that Naughty boy in them!