Every adult has super embarrassing moment/s from their growing up years. Yup, I have had them too. And today when I think about those times, I want to laugh, grin, duck under the bed and poke myself, all at the same time.
The last time I remembered one of my all time favourite silly moments was while I was in the park two days back. I have known couple of boys from my apartment complex since they were about nine years old. Today they are all at the threshold of entering teenage. They look, talk, play and behave different now.
That particular evening I saw all of them sitting on a swing with iPods and sharing their earphones. And all four of them were singing an English song. (It ofcourse has to be English! There is something about becoming a teenager and suddenly shifting gears from Hindi songs to English ones. It was the same then and...now) The boys shifted their tempos, tried to reached the higher pitch stretching their necks as much as possible and when they were unable to do so, started laughing. They surely were having fun. And looking at them, I couldn't help smiling and remembering 'those' days of mine.
We were a group of 3 girls who always sat together to and fro the school bus journey. It was weird that though we were in the same class, we never sat together in the class. But we sure were 'bus buddies'. The journey was a good 45 minutes each way. And those days there used to a trend of playing Antakshari to kill time. And we played...EVERY SINGLE DAY! That was also the time when "Maine Pyar Kiya" (The super duper Salman Khan-Bhagyashree movie) had been released, and there never used to be a single day we missed singing atleast one song from that movie. And slowly we realised that the letter 'd' would come up every day, and we ended up singing
"Dil deewana bin sajana ke maane na" from the movie, each time. I think we three ended up 'loving' the song to such an extent that Antakshri was taken over by just singing songs. We would pick up any Hindi song and just sing it. And everyday we would start with our anthem: Dil deewan bin sajana ke maane na!
Imagine, 3 girls with pig-tails and school uniform, singing this song, the whole song, every single day! Gradually everyone started noticing. (But obvious). And we started being called the 'Dil Deewana' girls.
Now I seriously want to hide. The seniors used to say, "Oh no, they have started again!" But no, that would not stop us. It used to make us give them the "look" and then...
sing again.
This went on for a long time. We sang, we got commented upon, we did not care and we sang again. I don't remember how it got stopped though. I think we got bored eventually. And we also moved apart. We made different friends, and I moved towards the back of the bus. But this memory stood intact within me. There was something about it.
It is all about growing up, I guess. We do stupid things, we laugh, we think it is 'the' thing to do and it does not matter what others think about it. But today as an adult, we are scared to do stupid things, we cannot afford to be silly, we can hardly laugh at ourselves, there is no such 'the' thing to do...we just carry on our responsibilities and expectations, and if there is anything which matters, it is what others think about us. No wonder, life was much easier when we were young.
But these small, silly and seemingly insignificant memories still bring a smile to our face. And I ask myself, was it really that insignificant?