The Ordinary Man

The sun rose over the sub-urban town somewhere close to a major metropolitan in India and the hustly-bustly but a nascent neihbourhood came out of its slumber. Somewhere deep within its tall structures as the ball of fire disturbed the sound sleep of the eternally tensed common man, he got up. No name, no identity, just one description and a tag "The Ordinary Man".

Is he loosing his identity or has it been long enough that now it siezed to exist or is it just that there wasn't a place for him in our society? There doesn't seem to be an answer to this eternal question of his existence and yet every morning he gets up and rushes through his chores to reach office just in time. He uses the pathetic public transport of the suburb not because he's enlightened but because the small paycheck he recieves for the 9 hour toil that goes through daily is not too big to let him own a conveyance or even be convenient. Yet, through years and years he keeps on working in the same place, in the same conditions. Hopeful that the pleasant lustre of the nearby metro will one day light up his own dark neighbourhood as well.


And one day the skies are cloudy and as "The Ordinary Man" leaves for work he is engulfed with water and lo he's drowning. As he sinks deeper in the water the air flushes out of his lungs as the water gushes into his nose leaving him blinded. While this "Ordinary Man" struggles to survive in the harsh expensive world of a suburb he looks back at feels that to he's lost a lot. The life he leads is all a big illusion and the psychedelia he's going through is nothing as mystical as the future he'd foreseen before he took up the sojourn which has now become an eternal journey. Just when he's ready to give up the last puff of air he was holding in his lungs he finds a pocket of air deep inside the drowning pool. "The Ordinary Man" catches his breath and as he opens his eyes he feels atonement and as he feels al the more powerful he takes the last breath and surges back up the stream with all his might. He reaches the surface and tears it apart, landing on a foggy road. The road which no one ever took and whose destination was a mystery. "The Ordinary Man" started down that road and as he took a step ahead he just disintegrated into thin air. "The Ordinary Man" was no more there, the soul of that sleepy village which tranformed to a sub-urban town was no more there. The soul of the suburb had disappeared into thin air.