Walks. Through City Roads.

I walk. Long distances.
Presidency to Ballygung Phari. Or Kalighat Metro Station to Ballygung Phari. Or City Centre to Hyatt Regency… and those countless other routes.
I walk whenever possible.
Walking is my most favorite means of conveyance.
It also gives me the feeling that I’m not depending on anyone else to transport me elsewhere. I’m independent.
Walking lets me soak in so much of the city.
I walk past so many people.
Some look lost. Some look determined. Some look too pleased with themselves.
Some walk alone.
Some walk with another person. Just one. A friend. A parent. A lover. And sometimes, even a stranger.
Some walk in huge groups.
Some walk as a cluster of a few-similarly clothed individuals.

However, something, most unfortunately, is common among all of them.
They, (almost) none of them, really look around to See. To absorb the world around.
They do not pause to look at the careless wall-graffiti on the walls on both sides.
The incessant wars being waged through those ‘dewaal-likhons’.
They do not pause to admire the delectably marvellous sight of sunrays seeping through pauses and recesses between those hundreds of tree leaves, that could have otherwise formed a green dome overhead.
They do not perceive the sheer bliss in the smiles of the children that call the roads their home.
They do not look at how every alternate manhole is left uncovered in a certain central Calcutta street.
They do not enjoy the aroma of the scented flowers on those trees the names of which they mightn’t know.
They do not derive the immense sadistic pleasure from kicking the small pebbles lining the pavements, from being able to dislocate them from where they had been resting peacefully.
They do not experience the wrath unleashed by the rain-gods on the little kittens that try to desperately find shelter and end up meowing relentlessly, in tones that evoke terrible sympathy.
Hence, they lose out on an extreme variety of potentially motto-of-life altering experiences, encounters, events and/or episodes.