The Birds and the Ferrari

Another wretched traffic jam….

As I cursed the grinding traffic jam, I knew I’d be late for the office meeting again. I honked relentlessly along with the irritated others. I screamed angrily at a biker who raced in the little space beside my car almost scratching it. I annoyingly yelled out who taught these morons how to drive.

I realized how crappy the morning has turned out to be with people like these….

I impatiently looked at the many vendors on the side walk trying to sell their many overpriced wares to the stalled cars – fake glasses, newspapers, magazines, fruits, birds,.. the birds looked beautiful. Ironically, their beauty is their curse – they have been caged because they are beautiful and sold off to random strangers who’d keep them to show off to their friends.

A bright yellow Ferrari was in front of me: it’s pretty rare to see a Ferrari in Bangalore; but with a color like that, it’s hard to forget - wonder how I missed it earlier. Now here’s a guy who does not have to cook up a story to his boss as to why he is late for the weekly meeting. But I wondered if he even had a boss. Or maybe , he is the boss…. Some guys truly have all the luck!

From inside my car, I saw the front window of the Ferrari go down in fine automatic precision and a well bejeweled male hand came out of the front window of the car. The hand wore many gold rings dotted by red, green and blue rubies. The hand held a 1000 rupee note between two fingers and extended it to the birdman. The birdman smiled a toothy smile and I could see the greedy man asking for more. The bejeweled hand extended another 1000 rupee note. The bird man put all his ware in a big birdcage and exchanged it to the gullible hand and pocketed the currency notes.

The well bejeweled hand came out of the window again and this time held the big birdcage. The other hand came out and opened the cage. The next thing I saw was the trapped beautiful birds flying out of the cage far, far away into their happy freedom….

As I watched this magnificent gesture, my heart sank deeper into my chest and my face broke into a smile.

I realized how beautiful the morning has turned out to be with people like these….

What a wonderful world!

My friend Sandeep told me this story and I was mesmerized by it – I like it as it strips the pretentiousness that has colored our world today. I realized how a simple gesture can take us back to our roots; to the things that we all learnt while growing up but forgot along the way, to lessons taught to us that life is actually quite simple yet we try hard to complicate it and many a times, we succeed... sometimes, its these simple gestures that bring us closer to the real things that nature would have wanted us to have – to the real things that matter in life.. maybe like happiness, freedom, innocence…..

This is an entry for the Kissan "Get Real" contest.

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J

pic courtesy: here