My Silent Eyes Speak

I had thought that spending four hours at the Mumbai Airport with nothing to do would be quite an ordeal. But I had not considered that when not closed in sleep my bespectacled eyes love to watch. And when one is keen to watch, a comfortable chair at a busy airport can provide for interesting viewing.

Besides women in color coordinated clothes and men with the ‘I’m really busy look’, I noticed that the place was thronged with kids of all ages… Don’t worry; this is not an outpouring of a woman’s so called ‘maternal emotions’! (I don’t lay claim to those anyways)

Children, yes they look cute and can be fun to watch but they also have a world of their own. Their world is what we adults try to enter by becoming children ourselves. I mean I saw all these mommies and daddies making baby talk with their speechless infants. Infants who looked least interested in any sort of conversation and were on the lookout for the next bright object. I wondered how some gibberish utterances could help us adults enter the world of a child?

In this perpetuation of ourselves, in this need to have and be children, do we seek to return to that unconscious state of being, called ‘innocence’? Is there such a state in the first place, or do we adults just create it for our own comfort; in retrospect? Childhood, after all, has its own miseries, the miseries of dependence and ignorance.

So while I go back to silent observation, maybe you could ponder upon the real meaning of being a child.
Sakshi Diwan