On a pleasant morning, I, along with my friend, entered a road-side tea shop after we had our usual morning walk. The street was deserted, and the sky was clear with the mixed shades of mauve and forget-me-not -blue. The rustling of leaves played the perfect, light-background music. I looked at my watch; it showed 6.00 a.m., both of its hands far from each other.
I enjoyed the feeling of the first sip of the lukewarm, invigorating tea entering my system; But as my eyes moved around the pleasant surroundings, my attention was diverted towards an aged man, probably around eighty years old, trundling into the tea shop. He looked to be a gentleman; had an old fashioned charm and more interestingly, carried an antique-looking radio. His favourite leisure activity could be listening to old songs on the radio. His zealous personality was an example for those in old age who lived as if there would be no tomorrow. He stirred the atmosphere and exuded the conviction that being active is contagious.
As if his old-fashioned charm and the radio in his hand had transformed the morning into vintage colour, for a moment, I felt I was somewhere in the 1970s. For a fraction of second, it was like he had captured and stilled time by the very act of holding an old radio which emitted the cloying fragrance of age. I had always believed that the 1970s saw a profusion of zealous Indian youth, as by then it was more than twenty years since India had attained freedom. Many youths of the 1970s oozed flamboyance, inspired by what were called as the golden years of Indian Cinema. For millennials like me, a day dream about 1970 was far-fetched.
I felt like giving the old man some new funny name like ‘Mr Radioholic,’ but then I recalled that this was not a college-campus and controlled myself. Well, I had given him the name so that I could remember him.
My train of thoughts got derailed, and I slipped into a similar topic. I recalled an anecdote my father had once shared with me. During his college days in the early 1970s, he used to be a listener of a popular radio program ‘Binaca Geetmala’. Then he formed a club named “Radio Listeners’ Club” with a few of his friends. The club members used to request to play their favourite songs by writing letters to Binaca Geetmala, which the program organisers gladly played in a few days. Interestingly, the club also made printed notepads for writing letters to Binaca Geetmala.
I have noticed that many people in the older generations had the quality of finding something interesting in the small pleasures, so that the others who did not have this quality could also feel that their life was interesting, too.
Be it Mr Radioholic or my father, as people from an older generation, they both have the quality of finding happiness in the small pleasures of life. Life is about living and enjoying little things, rather than waiting for big things to give us happiness. It is better to smile at the sunrise daily, than to wait for a rare rainbow to flush ourselves with joy. The younger generation needs to understand more about this. We need to know that it is not the right way to make our inner joy dependent on personal goals, huge profits or costly trips. The simple pleasures of life are like what we do with a coke can: we open it, enjoy the taste within, simply crush it for no reason, and then hit it around with our foot. And then it fades from our vision.
The next moment, we don’t feel sad because the pleasant moment is over; We smile because we lived it. This is how we should approach life, too.
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