A Statue speaks (NaBLoPoMo Day 25)

One post every day in November

If you ask the average human being if he/she is happy, most will immediately think of it as a good opportunity to entertain you with a list of all the pains and worries that they suffer from.

Not I. My existence has its own problems, but I have learned to accept them stoically and to acknowledge that for me at least there will be no respite. I never complain. When I do, no one hears me anyway.

Most human beings have their happy moments and their unhappy moments. I just have an endless experience of the same kind of moments.

Scott Adams, the creator of the widely famous comic strip, Dilbert, said, “Accept that some days you are the pigeon and some days the statue.”

Me? I’m always the statue. Figuratively. And literally.

I have a miserable existence. For the most part, I’m ignored. And that happens on my good days. People walk past me, an endless stream of men, women and children, old and young, hurrying, rushing, to get to work, to catch a train. Talking on the phone. Running.

On my not-so-good days, birds poop on me. Their droppings fall on my head, my shoulders, the folds of my granite clothes and the most on my right hand. I’m pooped upon all the time. The pigeons are the worst. I can’t react, much less fight back.

My arms ache but stretching my limbs is out of the question. Some days my nose feels tickled. And if all that isn’t enough, there is a homeless guy who lives around here (I suspect he isn’t all right in the head) who uses me as a clothesline to dry his dirty linen in public.

Thankfully, I was no great politician or statesman in my time. I shudder to think what might have happened had that been so. I recently read a newspaper. Actually a page from the newspaper got dislodged and hit me in the face). There were some food stains on it, as though it had been used to wrap something, possibly vada pav. I could actually smell the vada pav. It was that real to me. Memory is a strange thing.

The wind blew hard, trying to get the page to get away from my face. It obeyed, and settled down on my right hand. My right hand is always stretched out, you see, pointing at something out there on the distant horizon. A horizon I can no longer see, because your ugly buildings are everywhere.

The page was talking about the statue of some politician which had been desecrated. Smeared with goo, or dishonoured with a garland of shoes or something. I forget the details. The report said that a lot of people went crazy when that happened. They attacked some others, and a lot of people were injured. A curfew was announced. And some people couldn’t lay their hands on basic necessities.

Waste of energy, if you ask me. And all because a statue was insulted? Don’t they know that statues are beyond all this? Pigeon poop or garlands of shoes, they are both equally irrelevant in our scheme of things. Fretting over them is a waste of time and energy. Eventually the rain comes and washes it all off. The poop, that is. Not the shoes. The shoes just stink more. Thankfully, I can’t smell. Unlike human beings, I’m not stupid enough to choose to wallow in unpleasant memories.

Nor do I get any sycophants visiting me on my birth or death anniversaries. I’m one of those people in whose honour they erected a statue they forgot about. I have no followers, no disciples, no supporters. Not that I miss all that. How does it matter if you have a garland of fresh flowers one day and a coat of fresh paint on two days of the year? It won’t stop the pigeons from pooping.

I wish they hadn’t erected this statue to me though. For reasons that have nothing to do with the poop. I’d rather have had no statue and have people ask why not, than be burdened with this massive granite and iron body and have people ask why.