For all Ass-shakers

One of the biggest hurdles I face when I want to go wandering is that no matter where I go I have to take myself along – and that spoils everything. Maggie doesn’t mind, of course. She has got used to it. It’s I who am to reconcile with it yet.

When I was young, a teacher of mine compared me to a tiny bird that used to be found commonly in Kerala. I don’t know its English name. In Malayalam, it was known as thuthukulukki pakshi – literally, ass-shaking bird. Its posterior would always be shaking whenever it was resting in any place. The teacher who discovered the analogy between the ass-shaker and me explained that the little bird assumed that the world moved because it shook its ass.

Another teacher compared me to a hen. You know, the hen always crows loud after laying the egg as if it had just worked a miracle.

I had a big ego, in other words. And I had gracious teachers who did their best to rein it in. But I guess I was like the hen scratching around in the stall of a huge farm horse. When the horse became restless and started shifting its massive hooves, the hen warned, “Be careful, bro, or we’re gonna step on each other’s toes.”

Hindsight tells me that I did have a big ego in those days. I had imagined myself as some great incarnation. The reality was that I was a little ant in a queue telling the elephant behind to stop pushing.

The chasm between the ideal self and the real self can be quite frustrating for certain people. I imagined myself to be what I could never be. It took years of torture (both by myself and others) for certain harsh truths to be accepted. Don’t worry, now I know what I am. You can keep pushing in the queue and I won’t complain. 😉

I’m writing this for the latest Indispire prompt: There is a yawning gap between how we would ideally want to be and how we actually are in most people's lives. Would you care to speak about yourself with respect to this? #IdealAndRealMe The chasm between my ideal self and real self once acquired ridiculous proportions in my personal life. That was when I consulted a counsellor. The man listened to me patiently, then looked at me curiously and asked, “You claim that you are not normal. But you look quite normal to me. A very ordinary hairstyle, ordinary dress, ordinary everything.”

“That’s just the problem,” I said. I didn’t want to be “ordinary everything”. I wanted to be extraordinary. An ant wanting to be an elephant. Yawning gap between the reality and the fantasy. It happens. Don’t worry, time will heal it. If not, the other people will do the job of healing it. Otherwise, you will become the prime minister of a country or something.