An Incident

Firstly, a few opinions,
Friendship day: I somehow feel the entire friendship concept is a little over hyped these days. I do go around wishing my friends on that day, but somehow feel we don’t need a day for that… more like we don’t even need to wish each other. And then there’re always these people who I hardly even know who wish me and give me their opinions on what true friendship is… quite weird and unnecessary I tell u.
But then it’s quite harmless and people like it, so its fine the way it is.

Independence Day: This I’m clearer in my opinion about. It seems a big farce to me. All the pretense of patriotism, plastic (no biodegradable remember) flags and all. If you really are patriotic, then how about probably cleaning the road you live in? Or simpler how about avoiding chucking mint wrappers or cigarette butts anywhere you feel like.

The incident:
This happened when I was 8 yrs old and involved 3 characters.
A: a fairly huge kid (around twice my size then) but timid like crazy. I’d beaten him up more than a few times (and I left that place when I was 10).
B: the nice kid in that place, loved to talk to parents and all that. So was generally the voice of the group.
K: me. Generally quiet, shy chap except when it came to bashing ‘A’ up, oh that was fun heh heh.

OK, I had this habit of threatening to hit ‘A’ with the bat every time we had a fight in our cricket games. After around 4-5 such warnings, ‘A’ got his retort going. He used to stand in attention and ask me to take a swing. Now I obviously couldn’t do a thing after that.

The entire problem with all this was I was addicted to threatening him and getting my way. So it was real hard to stop that.
This one time, I threatened him and he stood in attention again and I decided to swing the bat real close to his head so he gets real frightened and realizes that I mean business.

I missed.

That is I missed missing his head.

“Clunk” Some good quality wood came in contact with some bad quality head and ‘A’ started yowling like crazy. I was stunned. Things had suddenly gotten real out of hand. I had just bashed a friend on the head with a cricket bat.

B decided to take control of the situation and dragged us both to my mom.

B goes… “auntie, do you know what K just did?”

Mom: What this time?

B: auntie, he threatened to hit A on the head with the bat and A told him to hit. So K hit him.

---------x---------x---------

Thanks mom for being such a bad actress. I mean yeah you put in your best efforts to avoid laughing. You tried to look angry and all and were fairly convincing. But you smile through your eyes mom and I knew it even then.
I don’t remember the other incident (which happened when I was 3), but I can imagine your expression when your cousin told me “hhelllelelelo… glug, glug goo…” and I told her that I know English and Kannada and please speak to me in one of those 2.

Happy mothers’ day mom (whenever that is).

Needless to say, I thoroughly deserved the thrashing I received that day (the bat incident I mean).
I mean had it been me in mom’s place, I’d have been paranoid. I’d have been more like “oh god, my son is showing signs of psychotic behavior. Will he grow up to be a psychopath?
I mean, who goes around clubbing people’s heads with bats? Something must be done… and quick.
Else he might end up like those demented people we read about…
Consider this, he might go on to perform anti social deeds like kicking out at fellow artistes in college plays, pretending to be a dad, getting caught, writing “mothers’ day” posts on some arbit date between friendship day and independence day
This is real frightening, mustn’t panic now…”

And so on… you get the drift.

-KD