A Balloon to Prick

I remember an amusing incident. I was a child then, and had gone to my Grandma’s home for my cousin’s marriage. It was a big ceremony, and hundreds of people from the other villages had also come. But there was one guy who was stealing my attention. With a twirling moustache on his upper lip and a gun in his hand, he was loudly chatting with others of his flock. Meantime he also laughed with intolerably high decibel level flailing his gun-wallah haath.

Guns attracted me always, thanks to Mithunda’s movies I used to watch with the concentration of a seasoned yogi. So I was watching his gun without blinking my eyes even once. But there was one thing which was bothering me. The barrel of the gun was not as broad as the guns of dacoits in Sholay had. So, it shook my faith in the genuineness of the machine.

Innocently, I went to the guy, slapped his back, and asked, “Bhaiya! Aapki yeh bandook asli hai kya?” (Brother! Is your gun genuine?) There was a dead silence for one or two seconds in the flock. The moustache-guy was hurt, and growled at me sarcastically, “Nahi! Chiriya maarne waali hai.” (No, it’s for shooting birds.) There was pain in his eyes, and embarrassment on his face.

I didn’t understand why he reacted like that. Now I do. The poor guy might have invested thousands in purchasing the gun, and had brought it to show off among his friends. And here was me, a small kid, challenging the gun and shaking the roots of his confidence.

This incident hasn’t happened just once in my life. It keeps repeating in different hues and shapes. Somebody says something against somebody, and the second somebody feels greatly offended. His confidence gets shattered in a blink. His calmness fades away in a nanosecond.

'The Da Vinci Code' comes, and the faith of many Christians gets a major jolt. Cartoonists in some faraway country draw a picture of Mohammed, and the self-proclaimed guardians of Islam get uneasy. Some artist paints the Hindu goddesses nude, the Hindus start destroying things to vent their anger.

Crazy, no!

Seems like our faith in our religion, in our ideas and in ourselves is too delicate to handle even a little challenge or doubt from somebody no matter how insignificant he is. Just like that gunman who felt at a loss because of the query of a kid. Pumping our ego-balloons with others’ approval seems to be a bad idea, but we keep doing it till some needle comes up to give a micrometer-deep prick.