Window seats

I once read a book just because the title interested me. I didn’t enjoy it much but I read the whole thing. ‘Window seat’, was the title.

Every average person has this obsession for a window seat, I do too. I love window seats; I am the most satisfied person on earth if I have a window seat.

In trains I love A/c, SL (side- lower); you get a whole long window for yourself, yes luxury, so what? You can lie half awake looking at the blue sky, even better during monsoon, you can sit up and be fully awake and see the paddy fields that go by, the stations and the people, the cattle and cattle people or should I say cow boys?, and the blackness in tunnels. In busses too I prefer A/c; yes I ‘prefer’ luxury. Feel cool even when the sun is scorching bright hot, get stuck in traffic and chaos and yet not feel any of it, enjoy the silence and stillness. Sit at ease and see people engaged in their lives, shopkeepers and customers, pedestrians, stray dogs, stray people, stray babies. 

It feels like watching a fiction, where you have no part to play, where you can just be a mute spectator enjoying the form of art and where nobody expects you to do anything or where nobody even knows of your existence. You are so free of responsibilities. It is so relaxing to be away from reality, to not care, think light, and feel good. Only luxury lets you do that. No general compartment or ordinary busses lets you to be a mute spectator, they get you involved, you have to take the heat, the sound, the chaos and the air and its smells, and you have no choice but care and when you care, feeling good is tentative.

Behind a luxurious window you see, behind an ordinary one you live. Fiction is enjoyable how much ever tedious it may look but falling into it and being inevitably forced to live in it needn’t be so. You cry watching fiction, you remember it, it changes you, you learn from it and you evolve yet there is always an incorrigible distance between you and that fictional account because you don’t really know how it feels to be that fictional character, to face those problems. How much ever empathetic you are there is a threshold up to where you can go, beyond that it is purely the victim’s own, something that is unique and one of a kind. Every individual has this fortune of holding unique pieces of knowledge, and every individual has reason to be respected. Nobody knows it all and nobody has it all. Whichever window is it that you are looking through you have enough within you of which you can be proud of and you have enough to be ashamed of. Making an effort to go up to that threshold and accepting the fact that there is a lot beyond it makes all the difference.

Some get to see bitter fiction while some get to live bitter lives.

Anyway, I was trying to talk about window seats and I have failed to do so, even there comes up richness and its antonym. Well, what I wanted to say was I enjoy looking out of windows and seeing the sights outside while travelling like almost everybody else. I don’t know where all that rant about fiction and threshold came from. My intention was to speak of window seats and only simply that, may be that was a mistake. I am not good enough to write paragraphs about window seats. So I guess I should stop.

Open all windows, see and live, live and see.