Where Would I Rather Be?

“When we were kids, we couldn't wait to grow up. Now that we are grown up, we realize that wounded knees and broken toys were better than wounded emotions and broken hearts!”

As I started growing up, this world became more and more of a cruel complex place. The place where innocents are brutally murdered, rapes are common, bomb blasts and drones are quotidian breaking news, child abuse and molestation is the trend, and stereotyping is a fashion. ‘This is not the kind of world my parents told me about. No fairytales here exist. No girl is a Barbie, a Cinderella or a Snow White’, I thought. ‘Contemporary times are not what I dreamed of when the Alice in me saw the Wonderland’. So where would I rather be? What would I do? Where is it in the world that I would find solace? Caves? Perhaps. But only a moron would want to go back in the Stone Ages. An island? That wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever either. Under water? Not like evil creatures don’t dwell either.

Realizing the fact that there is nowhere real I can go, where I bury my head (well I’m no ostrich) and keep myself aloof from the unjust happenings of this world; I can say I want to go back in my childhood.

I want to go back to that time when in stories shooting someone shed no blood, when my father used to sing me ‘All things bright andbeautiful’, ‘Sohni Dharti’ and ‘Dosti’ type sweet songs, when I could slurp not just the noodles but tea and everyone would find it cute, when I could wear a beautiful stitched frock and everyone would compliment me. I would rather dwell in my childhood than being a part of this grown up and mature yet fake and ruthless world. I would rather be in a dream where everything looks like a fairytale and hope no one wakes me up. I would rather be in that wondrous world of magic where I can turn everything into gold.

They say the bubble of fantasies bursts as soon as you get reality checks and reality is better than fiction, but if this is reality, I would rather be in a fantasy world – a world where justice prevails, discrimination is extinct and humanity is the one and only value.