Recently I was on a trip to Bombay and was travelling by the local train from Vile Parle to Churchgate. One of the stations I saw a man climbing from the wrong side despite of announcements for not crossing over the railway tracks. But here I am not writing about rules and regulations its about a thought that crossed my mind when I saw that man climb over from the tracks on to the train. Now whoever must have travelled through these local trains would know that the coaches are pretty different from the regular trains as in they don’t have steps to climb. So if one has to climb from the wrong side he has to jump over the coach with the support of his hands first and then one of his feet and then the other or else the fellow passengers help you by pulling you up.
Now this man, really stout , tight pants and big butt climbed in an earlier manner, hands first then the foot and then the other foot kneeling on the coach’s floor, and at that very moment I thought “Shit! His pants are going to tear.” But fortunately they didn’t. I was reminded of my childhood days when once during school holidays my friend and I were up to regular mischief. During afternoon after knocking his neighbours doors and waking them from sleep, we were running to climb a wall to hide and as we were climbing the wall, my pants went “trrrrrrr....” and I was like “noooooooooooo...not at this moment far away from home how am I going to reach home? And plus the guy whom we have managed to piss off enough”. Everybody on the way back home would see my torn pants and laugh at my ass. Well not to say that my friend himself was into fits of laughter and needless to imagine how others would be reacting. We were the ones who used to play pranks and it’s taken a U turn. He could see the worry on my face and told me “You start running home and I’ll run right behind you and cover your back, won’t give a chance to anybody to see that your pants are torn.” And we did exactly the same and what a relief it was when I reached home. My thoughts just ran across this incident when I thought about that man’s pants tearing in the middle of his journey. It would have been an embarrassing situation and he would have no one to cover his back. At that moment, while Churchgate was 30 minutes away, I asked myself how many friends do I really have who would stand behind me to cover my back? I was a bit afraid at the thought that the numbers would be few. So I started listing one by one and I was amazed, there were so many on whom I could actually count on and believe me what a relief it was. The same relief that many years back my friend gave me by covering my back. I was happy at the end by remembering each of these friends on whom I could rely unthinkably. Just stand at their doorstep in the middle of night and they wouldn’t mind a bit. All the more they would ask me what took you so long in coming to me. During that journey to Churchgate I was happy at this very thought, that I have quite a few friends. Then I thought how many people do actually have the privilege of having such friends who’ll cover their back when their pants are torn? Even if we have one such friend, believe me life will just sail through. These are the ones that we remember when life is at stake. We could have a lot of friends with whom we share our happiness but how many do we have to share our troubles. Over the period of years, I have realised that the ones with whom we share our troubles are the ones who’ll stick around to cover our back.
Nowadays, social networking sites have changed the way how people see their friends. Most people see their friends in numbers. It has increased the number of people shown in the profile pages. Some of them have huge numbers in hundreds and thousands. I remember one such incident when a friend new to this whole business of social networking was actually worried that he just had a few numbers in his profile and rest all people in his profile had huge numbers. He felt low when he compared numbers. Do these numbers really matter? We are lost in facebooking and orkuting and numbers in the profile have started mattering so much that people really feel low by seeing less numbers in the profile. We have forgotten that what matters in those numbers are the ones who’ll stand by us and if we do not have a single person in those numbers who’ll cover our back then these numbers are just hollow as good as ZERO!
Cheers,
Mervyn
