Thoughts on Fingers

The annual ritual of playing music chairs!

Have you ever seen little children playing musical chairs? The game where children try to grab a chair as soon as the music stops. It's a miracle, or perhaps destiny that you land up on a chair as soon as the music pauses. What if it pauses when you're not in a position to grab a chair? You're probably unlucky or you didn't make the right efforts. No. It simply means you're meant to win in a better game.

Every year , in Mid May or June, Indian young adults indulge in a fun game of musical chairs. The musical chairs organised by various universities across the country. It's a tiresome, stressful and uncertain game. Around 10,000 people run around 100 seats on an average. The drawback of  this game is that the music plays only once, for 100 seconds. Sometimes it varies from 300 to 400 seconds. If you're able to run fast in these seconds, you're a genius. If not , you're incompetent. You're not allowed to have a bad day. People are often seen pushing, stumbling, falling and groping in this game. Sometimes, people are not able to tolerate the heavy noise of the music, hence they prefer to die. Some are compelled to listen to music that doesn't suit their taste. It is supposedly the battle of your life, you either sink or swim.

Recently while witnessing one such game, I wondered why don't they increase the number of chairs if so many students are keen on participating in the game.  The country can accommodate more chairs if it can accommodate - perhaps the symbols of gratitude and tribute. Why are the chairs discriminated against? Someone might prefer old Bollywood music, while someone might prefer western music. Each participant is subjected to a great deal of anguish , that it feels like a slow dead trap, which is closing slowly as you're unsuccessful in grabbing a chair, till the end.

But there's always light at the end of the tunnel. Not everyone can run fast. Not everyone can apply their presence of mind. So why don't we indulge in different games? We can probably try hide and seek, or a game of tambola. Why are we attracted towards this one particular game? It is probably because, we've been playing this game right from birth. We ran around the chairs as little babies to get into a play school. Then we ran around to get into a good school. Our parents did the running for us then. Now, we have to run ourselves, while they cheer for us.

Try try till you succeed, good old days ,when we preached this in school. If you don't get a chair in the first attempt, don't get disheartened. If you don't get a chair at all, never stop participating in other games. The journey never ends. It just gets more challenging and fun. You never know, when the music might pause exactly when you're in front of the chair you deserve.

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Got back to writing after so long. Please leave your thoughts:)