Sorry Uncle, Truly am.

Ever wondered why one seemingly trivial incident gets buried so deep in your conscience that no matter how hard you try to shake it off it refuses to buzz off.Time and again and when you least expect it and are at your vulnerable best, the figments of the visions from the past come swarming by and before you know it, you are engulfed by it. By the time you forcibly extract yourself from them, you are left wondering for one possible and, so far, elusive explanation of why this incident continues to haunt you.

It was February 2009, the place , Bangalore. I was with a couple of friends in a shopping complex. Somehow there was excitement in the air and everyone around us, it seemed was buying gifts for someone else. As is wont with shopping malls, We perhaps did more that our fair share of shopping and by the time we were done the four of us in between them had close to six big polythene shopping bags. The scene on the corridor of the complex was similar to what all of us, have all our lives, seen in all the shopping complexes we have ever been to. WITH ONE BIG ANOMALY.

Right in the middle of the corridor was a middle aged, well dressed, bespectacled man holding a small placard that read , "SAY NO TO POLYTHENE" . He was so strategically placed in the complex that everyone exiting the mall had to cross him. And when people exit malls their hands are invariably full of bags.

Over the years, I had seen many hands holding that placard and many faces behind it but this one was different. The people I had earlier seen were 10 something kids doing something noble as part of a school drive or 20 something punks honestly thinking Armageddon is just round the corner only to get disillusioned couple of weeks later. But this man, this face and this hand was different.

He must have been well off. Had plain decent clothes on him. The watch seemed decently expensive. He could be a retired school teacher or a college professor. he could also be a doctor or an architect. Bottom-line he could be in any of the jobs that we normally associate with the middle class. He looked like someone, all his life people looked up to. And yet here he was , all alone , standing for hours with that placard.

While my friends were window shopping I spent some minutes observing this man and the effect he had on the crowd. All around him was a flurry of polythene and everyone seemed oblivious of him. For some moments it seemed that he was invisible to the crowd. But then I observed closely and an interesting pattern began to emerge. When people were about to cross him they would avert their eyes, look somewhere else, pretend to be lost in thought or start talking to someone else. And as soon as they crossed him they seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. There was perceptible change in their gait as if they were now more relaxed. And it was like an endless chain for it kept happening again and again and then again and then some more.

And then another thought struck me. Why would anyone wake up in the morning , get dressed , pick up a placard , come to a shopping mall and stand there for hours at a stretch? This thought defied me. All of us know that polythene is bad for mother nature. And we use it not by choice but out of compulsion which brings me back to this man. He was definitely not out of his mind. He was not one of those punks who are ready to lend their voice to any cause but can't stay with any cause for more than some days. He was a dignified and thoughtful man not someone who could be impulsive. He wouldn't be here unless he was totally sure that this is what he wanted to do.

And as I crossed him , I was so intrigued by him that I perhaps did what no one did before. I looked into his eyes. And he looked back. And those eyes continued to haunt me thence. For the eyes didn't chastised me, they didn't castrate me, they didn't even mock me. They smiled, not at me but for me. They weren't sad because I had polythene with me, they celebrated that I UNDERSTOOD the message. They were happy because I wasn't a lost cause. They were joyous because there was still some soul left in me to salvage. I could change, after all, they seemed to say.

I was never a big fan of Gandhi but that instant I understood the essence of his core philosophy. This man should have been angry with everyone for we were defying his cause. He could have shouted himself hoarse like some angry politician on an electoral campaign. Or he could be immensely sad that we were all so arrogantly foolish that we didn't see something that was staring right into our faces. But, nay, he chose to smile at us. He shamed us into thinking about his cause by invoking our own conscience and all he had to do for it was SMILE.

I would be lying if I said that I stopped using polythene all together. But whenever I know I don't need it , I don't take it. And time and again I think of that man, think of his smile and remember the look in his eyes and can't help but murmur a quiet thank you.