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The train slides into the platform. The rush of adrenaline that surges through the waiting throng is stronger than the rush of displaced air that the train causes.

No one articulates it, but it is an unspoken race. Who will rush in first to grab the window seats, who will get the next best ones facing the breeze and who will the losers be who will have to stand swaying, in hope.
It’s a race, wherever you go.

At the movies, at the bus stop, in taxi queues, or non queues, where by the time you bend down to tell the man where you want to go, someone has opened the door and is telling the driver to go, go go… It’s the same at school admission time, and when colleges start their sessions, and at exam time. Life has become a race, and may the best win. The rest can go do something else.

On television, it is the same story; maybe reality shows are, after all, life’s best mimics.

Dancers, singers, musicians, movies, songs, actors and even directors are eliminated one by one, in show after show, channel after channel, as they fight for the right to be called the ‘winner’.

Sometimes the game is soft pedalled and losers do not really mind losing as much as they should, but usually it is the bloodier the merrier.

The Romans did it with blood and gore, spilling guts out on the sandy floor of the arena; today the various television juries prefer to aim at the self esteem, the confidence levels and the mental equilibrium of the aspirants who leave themselves wide open for judgment.

The very terminology has changed. Look at the ads for the competitions on television, for instance. In the lift I sometimes take, there is a new ad every week on the four walls, adding to the claustrophobia a lift usually causes.
And the wordings usually go: fight to the last; contestants, fight to the finish, or something to that effect.
Fighting and survival is what life is about.

But, naturally, we imbibe some of this fighting spirit, through sheer osmosis. Mothers push children to do better in school, study harder, play harder, work harder at this and that subject and, if they do happen to have a talent, it becomes another burden to excel in it.

So the day is divided into study time, play time — where play has its reasons and its goals — extra curricular activity time, family time… childhood slips past, and the youngster grows up with fangs and claws ready to fight to the top.

School ends with a bloodbath of marks and rankings won or lost and the next fight begins for a place in college, then for a job…. Then, of course, the ladder is waiting to be climbed, sometimes two rungs at a time.

Now, it is all about earning more than our parents did, and definitely more than the boy who left college with higher marks, or the girl who ended up being picked up first during the placements.

It is also about showing the world what we are made of, and the components that make us out do not go under the skin, but on top of it — the brands we can afford, the polish we add on like a veneer which will stay on unless a crisis cracks it.

And then, when life is almost taking a turn into middle age, one stands to take a deep breath to wonder where life has gone.

Where was the time to smell the flowers, to watch the sunset; the butterfly on the bush or trace a rainbow to its end?

Too late, we realise, it is a story of too much given up for too little.

But the treadmills of success keep moving, regardless of high cholesterol levels and shortness of breath, and one cannot get off…not just yet. Just one fight more, we think, and tilt the gradient a notch higher, the sooner to get to the next point.

Stop it. Take a break. Sit down, do nothing. Just stare into space for an entire day, read a book, sing along with your favourite songs, or learn to turn cartwheels.
Life is all about this. Promise!

Email: ssaran@dnaindia.net