‘The good old days,’ my friend said as we finished our third drink, in celebration of a decade of our graduation. It was just two of us who had managed to come for the celebration while the rest of our friends were apparently busy. I nodded in approval and we continued our memory down the lane. We laughed at the fact that now the world looked at us like adults while a decade ago we were this irresponsible boys whose only aim everyday was to gather money for a bottle of “Old Monk”. We laughed reminiscing the days when we had nothing to eat all day but by the evening “somehow” we had money to buy alcohol and cigarettes. We kept on laughing like the boys from college we were once when suddenly he said, ‘when did this change happen? How did we grow up?’ It changed the tone of the conversation.
Laughter turned into smile. It was so difficult to see backward to see the time that had turned us into adults. We had come out of college, all excited and that is how we had continued. It was impossible to see when had that excitement ceased. Back then, the excitement woke us up every day. We felt life was some celebration and it had to be celebrated every day. Though many adults told us we were wasting our youth we felt looking back that it was perhaps the only time we hadn’t wasted because I had recently met those who weren’t like us in college; the ones professors said would lead a good life; the one’s professors wanted us to be like; the ones who acted like adults even when they were teenagers. They were leading a life of external comfort and inner turmoil. But, how did we become adults was the question? Perhaps, it was the energy required to remain young kept decreasing with time as our world shifted from a confined space to the bigger realm. Every time we were excited we were reminded that we were no more kids. We tried defying it for few years but then friends kept separating and all of us were alone in the world of adults. With too much energy required to remain young in the world of adults we gave up and accepted it as the inevitable. It was time for another place, more drinks and philosophical revelry.
Few more drinks and it was no more about us but the whole humanity. We realized that since the day we are able to think the society starts telling us that we need to be responsible. Being responsible means listening to everything adults say so that they can concentrate on their ‘work’ and they can contribute to the world. The idea is to convert the child into adult as soon as possible: earlier you become an adult more you are appreciated by the society. If someone wants to remain a child they are seen as a nuisance-not because we hate children-but because children don’t think about future and we have been told by ‘someone’ that the purpose of being human was to ‘develop’ the world for future. This is how we have been doing right from the beginning. We were having fun discussing our own theory that now perhaps was making no sense but who cared. We felt adults had been fooling themselves for so long and yet took so much pride in achievement. First, we got the children married early to convert them into adults and now we educate them for long so that they don’t realize when they were converted. Nothing has changed since the beginning. Not to be mentioned we look at past and say with pride-we have come a long way or the ones like us who said-good old days.
Our thoughts, following us, had lost its last thread of coherency and we felt like it used to happen back in college that we were close to deciphering some reality that had evaded us till then. We were no more blaming adults, society or anybody but were trying to understand the idea of humans: the humans- with the idea of children and adults. Children were present while adults were past and future. Children were simple while adults were complicated. Children lacked depth while adults had too much depth. Children lived as if every day was their last while adults lived for that one day that would be their last. Children forget everything that is wrong while adults apparently learn from everything wrong that has happened since the advent of mankind. Children don’t care about system and rules while adults care a bit too much about it. My friend disturbed the flow by asking the same question, ‘but how did we become adults and when did it happen?’ ‘Perhaps the moment we stopped being children; nobody did anything,’ I said.
By the time we reached home we were so drunk that we crashed on the couch. In that little moment between the shutting of eyes and arrival of sleep I looked at my whole life. My whole life compressed in that little moment. There were no outsiders. I was the child: I was the adult. The child had never left me. The society had done nothing about it. The adults around had done nothing. I had just managed to suppress the child inside where it laid lonely, made unconfident by the adult in me. The world had done absolutely nothing. The child had asked me innumerable time the permission to be free but the adult had denied it outright. The child wasn’t stifled by the adults around but the adult in me. The child had tried and tried but every time the adult in me gave the same answer-you are irresponsible. I knew the child was still there waiting for me to open the doors but I wasn’t sure the adult would even remember about it the next day. I just hoped the adult in me wouldn’t brush the thoughts aside by blaming it on alcohol. I just hoped the adult in me would be kind enough to let the child breathe in open once in a while and not continue blaming the society and world as it had been doing since the adult took over. I just hoped I could see the child more often. I just hoped, for once, the adult in me understood that I was only happy when the child was out. I just hoped we would do it again, like good old days. I just hoped…