Life is full of experiences. Sometimes we have bad experiences, some times we have good experiences and most of the times we have just experiences which are neither good nor bad. Those are experiences which do not matter or they do not bother us at all. I call these experiences as neutral. As neutral experiences do not matter, I do not have anything to write about them. When I had started to think about personal experiences, I started off with word ‘Bad’. I preferred bad experience to good experience. I am still not able to figure out why the idea of choosing bad experience first nonplussed me. For a moment I felt a bit cynical too. May be because ‘B’ comes first in alphabets, I chose Bad over Good. May be word bad is shorter or may be there was no reason at all. But the answer laid somewhere else.
I had stopped thinking about the bad and good riddle and moved on with the experiences of my life. I started thinking about bad experiences. I thought my mind would suddenly flood with lots of negative experiences, but surprisingly I was able to recollect very few of them. I thought about the experience of my school days when I had gotten little less than 50 % on my score card. I thought about the experience of getting caught for watching a movie in the official college hours that I had never seen. As I had not gotten parking, I had parked my bike in a theatre which was adjacent to the theatre where I was watching Tuze Meri kasam, starring local boy Riteish and apparently somebody reported that my bike was found in the theatre which was showing Adult film, this whole thing had created a big drama, somehow I managed to escaped from it. Then I thought about experiences of hurting my closed ones and I thought about recent experience when I came to know that things you confide to your close friends do not matter to them at all. But after stressing my cerebral cortex for long time, I was able to think of very few bad experiences. I had stopped there for a moment and asked myself, are these really bad experiences ? Do I really feel bad about them ? Do I still repent about them ? In almost all the cases my answer was negative. No wait, it was a firm NO and then i realized that these experiences are not bad at all, may be they were when they took place, but not any more. They have turned into the experiences which do not matter to me, eventually they have turned into neutral experiences. For a moment I’d frowned, I thought of all those good experiences I had in my life. I thought of all those small moments I had cherished throughout my life. I did not want my good experiences to turn out the same way. I wanted them to matter to me forever. I wanted them to be long living. With this thought I strolled towards good experiences.
These are the experiences which matter to every human being under this sky. Experiences which make you happy, experiences which make you laugh when nobody is around, experiences which make your gloomy office commutation beatiful and bright. Experiences which shape you and define what you are today. Over the time these experiences are preserved and nurtured in terms of memories.
Memories such as, watching TV, cuddling yourself on your Dad’s stomach and telling him with a bit of concern, “Pappa, tumachya potatun awaaz yet aahe” (“Pappa, i can hear some weird sound from your stomach”) and within few minutes felling asleep, next thing your see with your bare eyes was a bright shiny new day and now realizing, that was the coziest place you have ever been too and that was the best nap you have ever had and you will ever have in your life. Memories such as, you pettily complain to your Dad for not buying a new cricket bat for you and your dad, without getting mad at you, assuring you, “This is month end beta, I will get you a new bat, better than what you are thinking now, but give me one more week” but you would not give up on the bat and by hook or crook your dad would get you a new bat and as promised better than what you were thinking. All these hurdle, just to see the angelic smile on your face and twinkling star in your eyes. Memories such as, your dad comes home with a new pair of expensive clothes & asks you to put his threadbare shirt on hanger and you suggest your dad,”Pappa, let’s get one pair for you too naa ! ! Your shirt looks very old now”. With a feeling of aback and bit of proud, your dad says, “I do not need one, I am happy with what I have. And any way nobody looks at me now, This is your time”. Memories such as, listening to your childhood stories from your mother. Memories such as, lying on hospital bed and eagerly waiting for your mom to come and meet you, in the mean time making up your mind that at any cost you are not going to cry, and the moment you see your mom, breaking the barrage of tears which you had held for more than 60 hours. Memories such as, with cherubic expressions, your partner says, “perhaps the fault is mine, I am not the best thing that has ever happened to you” and you smiling at her foolish and innocent madness ensuring her, “if you think you are are not the best, then I do not want to know what is better than the best”. Memories such as, holding hands of your love & realizing that your body temperature has shot up more than mercury can ever reach. Memories such as, coffee at 1 A.M with the people you love the most. Memories such ................. ! ! ! !
The list was endless, it was unstoppable. And by now I realized that bad experiences come and go like small stations in a long train journey, but what remain with you are the junctions, where train halts for sometime and you get out and spend beautiful moments of your life. These junctions are nothing but bouquets of good, happy, joyous experience. Unlike neutral experience, which are effect-less, you savour those for rest of your life.
