Listening to yourself

They always say that we should listen to our heart and leave the rest on the universe. 

Well, they are mistaken. And how.

We should listen to our heart, not because they say so but because if we don't listen to the poor thing—that works from the moment we sprouted to the moment we succumb—who else will? I don't know about myself (because i'm not in Delhi) but an acquaintance of mine from my transcription days listened to his (and is).

He was weird in many ways. For instance, he went to Ladakh—this was in 2008 and it was my dream to be there someday—but didn't click a single picture. On resuming office, he explained to Tush and i how he doesn't need photographs to remind him of what he experienced. We could only try not to roll our eyes. But we respected him because he came across as somebody who was visibly content with the person he was. There was no symptom of a man who wanted to prove anything to anyone. This was despite the fact that every second person in the office seemed to be mocking him either discreetly or not so. Either ways, he didn't care as he had miles to go—quite literally. 

What he cared about though was Chinese. My infatuation with Urdu automatically dwarfs when i think of those days we used to catch him scribbling fancy characters in his notebook. Maybe he sensed back then that Chinese would be the language of the future just like English is the language of the present. 

Let's dig a bit into his past as i just made him sound like Nostradamus without a hunchback. 

He was kidnapped from his village and forced to marry a girl from a neighbouring village. While facing a gun barrel, you do whatever you're told to. As a consequence, he circumambulated the holy fire with a stranger—yes, Indians marry strangers but this was taking strangeness to another level only—and stayed under house arrest. However, he managed to escape to Bombay in the second week itself. And the rest is...well, a brilliant story. Whatever happened next, as of today, he's enrolled in a prestigious college in Delhi pursuing Masters in the Chinese language; something hitherto unheard of in Mumbai University. 

All things done and praised, he must be regretting the drastic drop in temperature. Ni hao.