Hamster Wheel Of Life

By Paromita Chakraborty

Staring through the glass window, as I sat in my office cubicle, my fingers on the keypad of my laptop, my mind wandered…

Wandered across the concrete jungle, the highway full of traffic, the crowded marketplace, the slums at the outskirts of the city, the airport.

It stopped at a little quintessential town, located in the heart of a blue-green valley surrounded by archaic mountains and pine trees.

My mind dawdled amidst the laughter of the children playing soccer, the sight of the apples and squashes freshly plucked from the orchards, the smell of the apple pie being baked in the kitchen, the mist in the air, strands of hair falling on the forehead of the little boy trying to push his little sister sitting on the swing tied to the guava tree. Mom calling us to finish breakfast. There, there lies all my happiness.

I forced my mind back at the present. I tried to concentrate on the public static void main() written in the laptop screen. And a storm started inside my mind.

The dreams getting shattered,

the fear of starting from the scratch,

the fear of missing out,

the fear of getting trapped in the cobweb of responsibilities, ethics, society, rat race, failure.

Is this why we are born for?

In the quest to free ourselves we get tangled more and more in the hamster wheel of competitive life.

By Paromita Chakraborty