mY SpAcE : mY RuLeS :: mY KiNgdOM : my ThRoNe

The use of punctuation marks in the title isn’t correct. Sorry. Not that I used to get them all correct in the grammar section of my test papers ,but still this is quite awkward. I agree. But then, to talk of math, I haven’t excelled in it either. So, this explanation leaves me a total jerk- ‘an adha-adhura knowledge’ kinda person. Well, that suits me best! Anyway, I learnt the use of : and :: long back. So the only thing I remember now (that too, very vaguely) is that : is for ratio and :: is for proportion(Sorry again, if I got that wrong. It’s been years I have smelt the calculating repulsive scent of a mathematics textbook).

Try arguing with an auto rickshaw-wallah near his auto stand where all his buddies sit comfortably under the thin short-lasting stretch of synthetic covering around the rust-eaten rods of their three-wheelers. He might utter an inexplicable fare in the most inexplicably confident voice. Then suddenly you realize that you are a minority in the area where you are standing and feel yourself shrinking into an agitated electron among a lane-full of anti-charged protons. You relent. The fare no longer a matter of concern. Your skin is!

And that’s the absurdity of it all. Ask the same auto rickshaw-wallah to come to your colony. You and your whole lot of like-minded people can argue with him. The reason of argument?? Oh, leave the reason. Now that you are a majority, why do you need a reason?? (Darn, am I stepping into political swamps with the last statement?? I suppose, a big no! Politics is the last thing in the universe that would grab my interest!)

Dare to step on a lonely stage- the platform vast and a forlorn stranger. But then, you were the one who was laughing your uvula sore, back among the audience. And then the same light when focused on you, you hear your heart recklessly beating drums within your atria and ventricles. The absurdity of it again.

The teacher you mock at while he’s lecturing in the class. You scribble his outline on the last page of your notebook. The cartoon sketch turns out to be a divine bucket of laughter. The balding head, the sagging gravity-loving belly and the strands of hair protruding from where they should n’t. Gosh! You try to hold back that laughter-pressure inside you to such an extent that had your body been a pressure cooker, your intestine would have got satisfactorily boiled to be gulped down like a long Chinese noodle,by the time the lecturer leaves the class.

The contrast- The pot-bellied brat makes a joker out of you in the viva table. He laughs and sips coffee, finding faults in every word you utter. You wonder-how the funny cartoon character featuring on the last page of your notebook turns into a blood-sucking vampire overnight. Damn! But that’s what the ratio is all about. As you sit sweating your way out and wetting your dry throat by painfully swallowing the minimum amount of saliva sticking to the insides of your famine-struck buccal cavity; you realize : this time it’s his space: his rules. As you walk out of the examination hall and walk back to your gang, it’s your kingdom: your throne.

• (P.S. Though it’s often difficult to predict which king wins the broader battle at the end, we always are the triumphant crown-bearers in our own territory housing our gang of friends, family and well-wishers and once we step out that comfort zone, we suddenly feel like an outcast ) :)

So the next time I comment to my friends about a girl wearing an awkward dress, I’ll at least think once before commenting as to how many others might be laughing at my own dressing sense. But to wind it up all- WE ALL ARE SO GROSSLY DIFFERENT !! AT THE END, IT SIMPLY DOES N’T MATTER-until of course we get something to laugh at and there's someone else to laugh at us. NOBODY SURE IS 'UNLAUGHABLE' and we all are miniature freaks at one level or the other. )

• [P.P.S. If the title with its punctuation marks still does n’t make sense, then……well……I have admitted before, I never got them all correct!!]  ;-)