I am not Ishaan

Originally, The Carousel Horse by Michael Mitchell

If you’re an Indian, at some point in life you have surely seen this movie called “Taare Zameen Par”. It has great music, great story and a very emotionally painful plot. I don’t know how the readers might be seeing it and what is their perspective about the movie. But, for me the fundamental anecdote of the movie is to make every kid think of himself as Ishaan and hold some kind of hope. At least, that is how it was with me. I always related myself with that mischievous lad. Growing up, I was deep into the swimming pool of mediocrity. Never even having the feeling of coming out of it, and focus on only one single thing. I always had this shameless plug to my mother that I can score above average marks, play music instruments, play decent football, and then also draw at times. At a point, I was behind honing the art of copying. Because, I was always rubbernecking towards different things.

There is certain class of students who don’t study during the exam seasons, and then pass by copying from others answer sheets. But, there’s also another class of students who don’t study, but don’t either copy from other’s answer sheets much. I was a part of the latter class. But, to be very honest, I was great at copying things. But I like details, if I’m invested into some detail, then surely at some point in time I will copy it. At least to me, It was quite natural about how I was copying things. For instance, I have had multiple type of bench mates throughout the academic years. Some had exceptionally beautiful handwriting, some wrote way too curvy cursive, the other wrote print, some had very instinctive and thoughtful way of using strokes or their pen. And every year, when the bench mate changed, my hand writing changed with them. I never did that purposely, but it somehow started becoming like them. Maybe, it was because of observing them a lot. I don’t know how many have faced this. In my circle, there was no one who was copying to their bench mates style of writing. Probably, there are more, many more many, many, many more, like me and I accept that. I am not a new apple pie in this universe.

I somehow liked being shameless and manner-less because both of us siblings were always taught to have manners in the right place. My sister ended up praising conventionalism (-ism just to spice things up) and dreaming the same like everyone else or maybe my parents did that to her. And, I took the path of randomizing throuh out. Till date, it’s very fun to taunt her with those things. Conventional or Un-conventional, there isn’t much to worry in it, because they’re just two sides of a coin. Maybe, it hurts her but again, she had a choice and she did not do the right choice for herself. I’m aware of how childish I sound, but I can’t help the fact that I’m thinking all these things and I reprimand everything.

There’s this particular scene in the movie wherein, there’s a surprise test in the class and like always the main character - Ishaan isn’t prepared for it, because obviously it is a surprise test. It was probably the most nonsense thing schools have ever had. Schools teach us conventionalism and this test is a reminisce of it. Surprise tests often look for the ones who are consistently studying. A lot of students including myself never study consistently. My mother always used to taunt me saying, “You always start digging the well, when you’re thirsty”. With surprise tests schools find those average toppers of the class, and with the help of these Surprise tests, these average topper students find the conventionalist in them. An exceptional teacher would never use all these lame conventional ways to test an individual’s intelligence.

Coming back, the first question in the Surprise Test is to solve “3 * 9” which results to him entering into a space ship and imagining the whole question adjacent to the planets in the solar system. This is quite a unique approach to formulate the scenery of a naive and young brain. Ishaan aliases the number 3 with Earth and the number 9 with Pluto. To multiply them, he takes Earth towards Pluto and then bashes them together and breaks both of them apart. And in the mean time during his cynical thoughts and imagination, the test comes to an end. Time flew by like nothing and he gets the wrong answer.

Our brains are like fantasized barbie dolls in my honest opinion. Let’s say, a girl talks and plays with Barbie doll, she makes it walk with her own hands, but does the Barbie doll ever talk or walk by herself ? No. I realized about this in a interesting conversation with a wise person. Our brains are like a doll, we listen to everything, act like we’re listening and walking up to others expectations. But internally we never let those sayings become a part of our core beliefs. The people who manufacture these dolls are our childhood moments and parents. The rest around us telling all the random things are just like thoughts saying “Let me in, without a shout, Let me in, I have a doubt” and there are many more in this world who want to become a part of our core beliefs. Somehow, childhood plays a very surreal and vital role in people’s lives and perspectives.

I always talk about this box, kind of half-baked philosophy of mine. There’s always a box inside a box and a box outside of a box. It is similar to the fact of “unknown of unknowns”. No matter what, you always end up missing some or the other thing which you never wanted to miss. That guard clause to do early returns, that necessary 10px gap, that mistake during your days of being a fresher, or anything you can imagine about. I am going to miss some or the other thing all the time, it could be important, it could be trivial but I will always miss something. But that said, I find it hard to explain it to everyone. I don’t even remember the count of attempts I’ve made to explain the Box.

It is very easy to shed tears watching little Ishaan sit and cry in the Bathroom sticking his head to the wall. It really hurts to see those closed eyes bleeding tears with glycerine mixed in them, with those big teeth flashing themselves. Maybe, he was helluva feeling like his heart was being crushed like a paper plane. Maybe, Ishaan was actually feeling all the uneasy-ness around the heart region on his chest as if there’s someone crumbling that piece of paper. I don’t know if he ever read Metamorphosis by Franz Farka. I don’t know how it feels to right the write thing. Though, I myself have these moments when I’m jumping through windows of thoughts and I suddenly fall down the alley, that feeling in the narrow and congested alley makes you cry for a reason. Oftentimes, there is more to fear when you’re aware of things you’re supposed to be blind about. Sometimes, there is a race between my writing and thinking, often times writing looses horribly because of the potholes in the process which gulp a few words.