A Slice Of Life

Growing up in a backward part of India, books were my prescription drugs, art a therapy and watching movies my lifeline to sanity. Like the narrator in the play The Glass Menagerie, illusion suited me better; and in my interior world I could do no wrong. Perhaps I wasn’t yet ready for the real world that was monstrously short on facts and more on keeping appearances. A world of genteel mediocrity that suffered fools because they held some position of authority and my father earned his keep by taking his order from them. (Shades of Wiley Loman, the salesman!)
One university examination in particular I would skip for the simple reason that it clashed with the last picture show ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’My reasoning was thus: ‘University examinations are held every year. I can always try another time. But this movie perhaps may not be seen in my part of the world for many years to come.’
Mind you I was in my twenties! Now some four decades later, what that examination was about or the course in engineering for which I was least equipped by temparament or in inclination, I have no idea.
Even at this last part of my life I am warmed up by the feelings the movie evoked in me.
Tailpiece: Reason is not everything; life must be in letting cold reason and impulsive heart to work out their differences.
benny