This post is an entry for The Surf Excel Matic #SoakNoMore Contest on Indiblogger! Enjoy :)
It was just a month ago, July of 2012. My friends and I graduated from school this year. No one's college had started. We were in that wonderful stress free stage where no one had anything to do or anything to worry about.
All we had to worry about was how to fill up our long summer days. One of our adventurous ideas was to go ice skating in one of the biggest mall of the country-Ambience Mall in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi. The monsoons still hadn't arrived and we hoped with all our heart that an ice skating ring would give us some relief from the heat.
The minute we arrived at the skating ring, it started raining. Ofcourse we only found out much later when we got frantic calls from our parents. Our parents worried that the rain was so heavy that we wouldn't be able to make it home. We ignored it, thinking of it as just another exaggerated concern.
When we came out of the skating ring and into the mall, we suddenly saw why our parents were worrying. The ice skating ring had been on the 6th floor of the mall. The roof was right above us. And it was leaking. The sweeper's of the mall were running all over the place with buckets and mops to somehow keep people from slipping on the wet floors. (Now if any of you reading this are from another country, I would like to clarify, that although some houses in India may leak, malls normally do not. I am merely trying to emphasize on the harshness of the rain).
Neither of us had the luxury of a car to drop everyone home. And since most of us lived in Delhi , we had to take the metro. There was no other way to get home. Calling a radio cab was not an option. It was 8 pm, which meant people were returning home from work.
Peak time+rains=Chaos on the Delhi roads.
Our two options were to either wait till the rain reduced or to take a chance and run out and look for an auto that would take us to the metro station. That is when we thought, "what the hell! We have nothing to lose. If we can't take small risks like this at the age of 18, will we ever be able to?" We had been taught all our lives to be cautious. Don't bunk school. You may get caught. Don't go out now. It's too dark and unsafe. Don't date boys. You're too young.
Although this really wasn't that big a deal, it meant a lot to us. Going out there in the rain wasn't simply a matter of getting wet. To us, it meant denying everything we'd been taught. I don't blame our parents for teaching us to be cautious. They only did it for our safety. It's more like living in a city such as Delhi that made us so cautious and scared of little things.
So that is exactly what we did! We ran out of the mall while the entire crowd who was waiting for the rain to die down a bit stared at us, wondering which devil from hell had gotten into us. The rain was amazing. It was the first monsoon shower that Delhi had been anticipating for the past month. To some people it meant better weather, to some others it meant that their crops wouldn't die and there family would have enough food for the winter. And to us? To us it meant a free spirit. This was the first time since graduating school, that we actually tasted our freedom. We realized that we were new adults in the world, in a free world, where we had the liberty to do whatever we wanted! So the city is a little unsafe! And maybe some people can harm us. But we didn't see why that should affect what we do.
It was the rain and the soaked clothes and the splashing in the puddles that made us realize that. One monsoon shower was all we needed. And I cannot be more thankful for that.
If that is what one monsoon shower did to us, I say "SOAK MORE AND MORE AND MORE"