Ping’s Sermon

Chubhti jalti garmi,

Chubhti jalti garmi ka mausam aaya…

Chubhti Jalti Ghamouriyan laya..

Aaya mausam thande thande Dermi Cool ka!

Well ladies and gentlemen, brace yourselves, it’s that time of the year again. It’s time you resume cursing the administration for not having enough air-conditioners in the college. It’s time you yearn for a daily bath instead of being pushed to the bathroom by your friends for stinking too much. It’s time, to ditch the faithful coffee and milk in favour of the acerbic tang of fresh Chach and Nimbu Paani . Enter summer 2018.

Summer has a special place in the hearts of many a people. It brings back the fond memories of school vacations, the tempting smell of delicacies being cooked in your grandparents’ home, the freedom to play with all your might, all day long, the thrills of traveling to new places. Ah! Those days..

But Ping, your melancholy minister has made an unfortunate observation. The jubilation and glee of summer vacations becomes more and more elusive with each passing year. It all begins with the sinfully innocent Holiday Homework given to us as school kids. Fast forward to High school, and congrats!

You’ve got all day coaching classes during vacations to crack an exam whose difficulty makes Priya Varrier’s eye antics look easy. You come to college with the zeal to travel the world and develop elaborate plans to satiate your appetite for exploration. Just when you are about to finalize your itinerary, your phone pings, and a mail regarding the Summer DIH projects drops in your inbox. Now when all your friends are utilizing the summer to beef up their resumés, your conscience ain’t gonna allow you to raft down foaming white rivers in Rishikesh, will it?

Speaking of resumés, vacations during jobs aren’t too rosy either. Oh wait! There aren’t any summer vacations once you get a job. But still, your hunger for travelling is pretty much alive and kicking. So, to hell with money! You exhaust all your remaining paid leaves, take a few unpaid ones, pack your bags and head for the mountains to find your calling. Except, once you are on the foothills of the Himalayas, the only call you find is the perpetual drone of your daughter whining about how steep the mountains are, and how one more step can cause bruises to her fragile feet. Perks of getting married, you see! Alright, so no more hiking, let’s just engage in some peaceful bird-watching, shall we? But where cellphones abound, how can peace thrive for long? In two hours you get two hundred calls and messages asking your whereabouts and while you were busy explaining your boss why you are on vacation when the company’s sales are at an all time low, the three toed woodpecker you were so painstakingly observing pecked all the wood it could and flew into oblivion.

All that leaves us with in the life of a human then, is the grandparent stage. Your body is days away from becoming an artefact of the past, without your glasses you cannot differentiate between Salman Khan and the Blackbuck he shot, all sentences you enunciate begin with “Ek Baar Ki Baat Hai…” and with your grandchild in your lap, it becomes hard for people to differentiate who is responsible for the wet floor underneath. Making it to the washroom in time is a chore, let alone exploring the unexplored.

Thus concludes my breathtaking observation, ‘The fun of summers is inversely proportional to one’s age’. By the time you read this article, you must be on the verge of moving to the next year of college and summer vacations would be just around the corner. Let’s see, how you choose to live these three odd months. But with Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Incredibles 2 and Silicon Valley Season 5 hitting the screens, one can see the future straight away, can’t he?

- P rocrastinate I s the N ew G reat

A.k.a PING