Beyond the Obvious
before that, the ones you spend playing in the sand, exploring the depths of your nostrils with those fingertips, drooling on plastic toys, scribbling all day long on some notebook made from a poor tree that was indeed meant for greater purposes but somehow ended up being an object for your entertainment that you still do not appreciate, but how can you? You don‟t know where paper comes from, or the intricacies and nuances of the process, you don‟t know how people are out there chopping trees and somehow these big mighty wood wielding cylinders are made into fragile, fair slices of paper. You don‟t know how anything works! You are still a child! A baby! One cannot expect such things from you.
So indulge me here for a moment, can we really call a toddler or a small kid an actual human, a person?
Well before you go and tell me;
“Of course they are humans! For god’s sake they have eyes and hands and legs among other things in the right places like humans are supposed to have, they can think and communicate like you and I, they
are humans for they are born out of humans, that’s the basic principle of life!” Consider this; we are human for we have embedded deep into our being a Consciousness. It‟s what makes us curious of our surroundings, it‟s what makes us
learn and strive to gain knowledge. That being said, now considers the case of a child. All a child thinks
is along the lines of eating when they feel hunger, fiddling around with toys cause why not they seem interesting and crying whenever they feel the need to attract attention to themselves. Does this sound familiar? If yes then you know this
is what a cat does, or a monkey or a goat, they don‟t know what‟s going on around them, and they just selectively process enough of their surroundings to achieve their basic goal, which is to survive. Now consider the children under this paradigm. What I believe is that we become humans as soon as we first start to have that surreal feeling of being alive, the early years we spend are in an unconscious state but then one day we get up and feel weird.
There isn‟t an exact way to explain it, but we just look at our arm one instance and say “Wow, I think of doing something and my fingers
instantly oblige, neat! How does that happen though?” for that split second we feel our lungs expanding in our chest, the heart pumping, the eyes sliding in the sockets just as if we were in the backseat of the car the whole time and now suddenly we are handed the gear stick and the driving wheel and then told to drive
this vehicle down the road, this one lane road of life, no U turns and try not to bump into other cars and
hopefully someday get on to the other side, which itself is a big mystery to most. What is the other side? Darkness? You close your eyes and poof that‟s it?
No encore?
Well I don‟t know, we all have our sets of beliefs and yes I do believe in my share of those, well most of the times I do, but the other times things are not as clear.
Coming back, we really only become humans when we reach that certain stage in life and before that we
are just monkeys trapped in a human shell. Pressing all sorts of buttons and turning the knobs till we get
familiar with the machinery. Tell me then, when did you become Human? Life for me, as I know it began somewhere around middle school.
I could feel that drop of sweat at the tip of my nose as I focused on the cricket pitch, the bowler was giving me a hard time, it was already summer everything looked like someone left the exposure settings on the camera too high. The sun was directly above us, nothing had a shadow for as far as I could see. In all fairness it wasn‟t the most ideal time to be playing outside, in the school ground but that didn‟t matter. It was really frustrating, I had wasted a whole over of balls and my teammates wouldn't just leave me alone over it. So here comes another ball my way, the bounce is just right. I feel the bat in my hand, I forward my left leg and take a shot right across,
it‟s glorious I squeezed every last drop of might I had into it. The ball floats around for some time and then ever so graciously squeezes right through a window, breaking it in the process. Now at first none of us were too sure that indeed it was a window that the ball had broken on my behest, for it was really hard to see anything in the scorching heat of that blinding sunlight, all we knew was that we heard glass breaking. The very distinctive clink of it. So we did what you would expect anyone
to do, go inspecting the damage and fetch the ball, well more for the sake of the latter. We didn't...
From the book Hard Dreams by young writer Owais Shafi .
