I left my house in the morning, disappointed again with the same argument with my father about my choice of career. I walked down the road to the metro station to reach my reach. My brain was stormed and bewildered with disappointment and self-doubt. I boarded the metro and grabbed the seat near the gate. I took out my headphones, played my favourite track, gazed at the unknown people around, and started pondering over their untold stories of success and failure. That was the moment of my escape from reality, into the world of unknown people where I exist with my favourites.
Metro and escape from reality indeed are paradoxical because the metro is always thought of as a compartment gushed with the common crowd, travelling to and fro throughout the day. However, it is for the paradoxes that one believes in an existence away from reality. Metro is an escape from reality because inside the metro, and within the time of travel, you live a life like a crooked curve connecting two roads of family and work. The crooked curve provides a space where you keep aside the frets of life and feel the rhythm of lyrics or the thoughtfulness of the words in your favourite book. Of course, this “space” can be easily found in a corner of a room, or under the shade of a tree. But in the humdrum of life, everyone moving against the clock to grab a penny, bed and rice before it runs out of stock, you barely look at the tree near the metro station before boarding the first arriving train! It is only inside the metro, its cooling AC, the monotonous speaker, and in the stipulated time that you have a sigh of relief. Though there is a lot of pushing and pulling inside the metro, again a race to take the seat, it adds a tinge of reality to the escape, hence making it more significant. Because dreams are also an escape, but do you always believe or remember them?
Metro is hence as detached from the reality as it is attached to it. It is another canvas or page of a book, with unknown characters and their strange life stories that you imagine with a basic sense of your own reality. True, those passengers are completely unknown, but when you imagine their story, you see yourself from another perspective. Meanwhile, you can find solutions or get more puzzled but you do get time to think about it. Maybe the woman over there, leaning against the sliding doors with messy hair and thoughtful book forgot her tea on the table while arranging the ‘importance’ of life. Or maybe she is you. What matters is that you have realized that you have left your tea and your parents waiting at the table.
You might disagree or laugh at the “exaggerated metro stories” away. But the next day when you board your metro, plug in your earphones with your favourite track, or read a book of your interest and ponder over the happiest or the disappointing morning you ever had, do run your eyes on this article again and maybe then it will make some sense, as it did to me.
