How often has it happened to you that the newspaper you are reading carries a piece on a person you are acquainted with? Rarely, I would imagine, if you are not part of some celebrity circle. I , however, experienced it twice over the past month. Two primary school classmates of mine were in the news--one for a good reason and the other for a crime. My mind went back to those days. Jay and Kay (not their real names!) had a very similar life back then: Families struggling to make ends meet and similar influences around in the society. But they ended up choosing totally different paths. I don't know enough details to exactly reason about why that happened. Instead, I will just give an account from my viewpoint and leave the judgement up to you.
I changed school in my 5th grade. The new school was the only option for kids in the village and used to attract a huge number every year. It was so big that all the fifth graders were divided in 11 classes: class A to class L, each with 60-70 kids. Early applicants and pupils of influential people (yes, politics is introduced very early in India!) were put in first few classes and the rest were allotted classes at the back end. I found myself in class L, the very last one.
Our class was ill-reputed for mischievous kids who stopped at nothing in causing troubles to students and teachers alike. Our class-teacher used to carry a look of complete surrender in the classroom. I, being not so much of a troublemaker perhaps, was chosen to be the class monitor. One of my primary duties was to report kids making noise during the periods not monitored by any teacher. Jay was one person who constantly featured on my blacklist as he was the leader of a little mafia gang of our class.
Jay used to live in a ghetto. Young men in the area would engage in small fights all the time. Breaking laws was not a big deal for them and the district police used to keep a vigilant eye on them. Naturally, Jay had picked up a thing or two from them.
One day in the class, Jay and his buddies came with a bagful of Ashoka tree seeds which they had gathered from a school garden. During a recess, they started pelting the seeds at other kids in class. Very few reacted and hit back. Most others were too afraid of the gang to do anything. As I was noting down the incident in my little class monitor notebook, Jay came to me and warned against reporting to the class-teacher. He said he would hurt me badly if I did. However, I did not take him seriously and reported him the next day. Jay and his friends were beaten severely with a wand as a punishment. Jay did not take this punishment lightly and told me to stay prepared for a royal beating once the school ends. This time, I was really scared and could not focus on the remaining periods during the day. As soon as we finished singing Vande Mataram to end the day, I ran for the fear of my life straight to home. Sobbingly, I reported what had happened to my mom. It took some consoling from her to make me relaxed again. It became the routine from the next day. Jay would constantly threaten me and I would try to run away from him. He never actually beat me though. I found out the reason years later from mom. Apparently, she had talked to an elderly person related to Jay who in turn had given a stern warning to Jay against harming me. Phew! Never-the-less, my parents at that time thought I should be better off in a different class and asked me to request class-teacher for a class change. He sanctioned and promoted me to class G. I did not have any trouble from my new classmates. Jay kept giving looks whenever we confronted each other occasionally but things stayed at that. I forgot about him after that year. Perhaps, he dropped out of the school somewhere down the line.
After all these years, that news article brought back all the memories: A high school student was murdered in broad daylight by a mob. Jay was one of the culprits and was duly arrested. Apparently, the reason was that the victim loved a girl who another guy from Jay's ghetto had also fallen for. They repeatedly threatened the poor guy to stay away from the girl but he didn't listen. Sigh!
So did nothing change in all these years with Jay? Was the company he kept at fault entirely for making him a criminal or could he, perhaps, have chosen better friends?
Somewhere in the same class L was Kay, an average student just going through the rigors of the curriculum. Kay used to live in the same neighborhood as me and was my best buddy back then. He didn't have it easy growing up either. He was the youngest of three siblings. The family was raised on a small income his father brought home by working in a factory. But he would spend a large chunk of the money on alcohol and constant fights between the husband and wife would transpire as a result. Kay's mother would frequently fall victim to physical assault. It reached to a point where Kay's eldest sister, who was a quite girl growing up, started fighting her dad whenever he came home drunk. One fine day, she decided she had had enough of it and ran away from home.
Kay was a normal kid despite all this going around him. He was more into Arts and Crafts than Science and Math. Post high school, he opted for a short technical diploma and started working in a small factory to support the family. Around the same time, he got influenced by a right wing political party. This party is ill-reputed for targeting certain minorities and using violence as a weapon to prove their point. I was not happy with Kay's decision but instead of talking him out of it decided to distance myself from him. I had moved out of the village by that time as well and lost touch with him completely. I was convinced that Kay would become a white collar criminal because that's what most folks involved in politics turned into.
But I was proved wrong by that news article. Kay had won an award at a short film festival. He had produced and directed a short documentary on a social issue. Kay--a film maker? How did this happen? I caught up with Kay to find an answer. When he was working in the factory, he wasn't enjoying the job. So he decided to enroll in an Arts college. Arts, as I mentioned earlier, was his passion. Once there, he got fascinated by the art of filmmaking and decided to pursue it further. As for being a political activist, he soon realized that that was not the right direction for him and slowly pulled out of it. In future, Kay wants to be a writer as well. He sent me passages from a fiction he is working on and I must say, it's a top-notch work. Now the next question I have for Kay is how he ventured into writing as I am completely unaware of this passion of his.
Same questions again. Do the surrounding influences alone shape one's life? Or can one choose the right influences?
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