Not just a song by Pink Floyd.
To me, it’s much more.
Arun Tyagi is a fresh 19-year-old recruit in the Indian Army. A young lad brimming with life and energy. After overcoming all the obstacles of a rigorous training procedure, he is thrilled on receiving his first assignment – the forefront in the war-torn Drass sector of Jammu and Kashmir. He packs his bags and says goodbye to his family, and leaves for Kargil. Terror strikes in a depressing camp every evening as many others like Arun battle through inhuman conditions, and pray for a life that seems increasingly distant to them now. On July 16, 1999, Tyagi was identified amidst a pile of his colleagues, smeared in dust and blood. Clutched tight in his hand was a letter from his parents. On January 26, the following year, his name was recorded one hundred and eighty first in a list of two hundred and fifty – men who laid down their lives for the sake of ours – ‘lest we forget.’ Tyagi is just another faceless name today. Another brick in the wall.
In my old school, there used to be a red brick wall. It was massive and had thousands of bricks in it. My school used to be a very special place for me – simply because I felt that I belonged to it. I loved to look at the red wall, and visualize my name written across it. I secretly knew it was my wall, and I was incomplete without it. School closed shop for me and I entered a bigger world – college. College too has a red brick wall. Except that it’s much bigger than the wall in school. There were all kinds of people I met in college, but since I was bad at remembering all their names at first, my head was often clouded with hundreds of faces. Nameless faces, all of them, and I was one of them. I was just another brick in this humongous wall. A brick with no recognition, one that not many acknowledged or cared for. A truly unhappy brick.
Sometimes I try to picture the entire world as if it were a wall where each one of us is a brick. And sometimes I can’t help but imagine that the world is suffering from an acute case of identity crisis. So many red bricks, each trying so hard to conceal its idiosyncrasies and be like the others. No brick dare break the trend for fear of what the other bricks might say. Only once in a while, we come across one brick that dares to be of a different shape, size or colour. Have you noticed how we are so quick to ostracize it, and immediately rectify the inconsistency before it gathers too much attention? How we force our world to stick to convention, and slowly watch it fade away. Because a brick is a brick is a brick, and we’re “living in a world of fools breaking us down.”
Robert Frost begun ‘Mending Wall’ with the lines, “Something there is that does not love a wall,” and yet we believe that “Good fences make good neighbours.” The poet disregards all that he believes for a ritual that his father passed on to him – a way of the world he can’t understand. “So throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are committed for the sake of those whom we most despise” – because you and I were both unable to read the sense of strange conventions that we are blindly following for generations. And that’s why we build these barriers in our relationships – and measure the distance between us, brick by brick.
The other day, I saw the most beautiful purple flower growing in my garden. It had exactly five small petals in it, and I wondered if they were like bricks. I plucked one of those five petals and my doubts were confirmed. The flower looked as ugly as ever. That one petal made all the difference. And that’s when I understood the importance of another brick in the wall.
I came to college the following week, and looked at that huge wall. I started looking for myself. I started from an ambitious note (!) from the top but my eyes kept lowering. Finally, the search ended in the second last row, middle column – an insignificant little brick in the corner. That was when I thought of the flower. I imagined my brick being scooped out by someone, and suddenly, the huge wall crashing down in my mind’s eye.
It was at this moment that I realized that the wall was incomplete without me. Every drop makes up an ocean, and my brick is surging higher. From that day, I no more felt like just another brick. My wall, my world, and college, already seem like home....
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Nehakirpal writes from India.