And the World around me sleepzzz...

“O nadaan parindey ghar ajaa”! Mohit Chohan croons inside my headphones. It’s the dreadful hour in a rainy night. I have an Electronics final exam tomorrow and I have this Schilling book lying wide open on my lap. My ballpoint seems to be doing a slow waltz over the paper, pensive and deliberate. Having a feeling of culpability, of not doing it on the right day. The clock ticks like a time bomb, and the hours are passing like minutes.

               I sneeze through my nose, with a pathetic looking face. I feel like I’m the loneliest guy on this planet. So I decided to listen to “Boulevard of broken dreams”. ‘I walk this empty street …On the boulevard of broken dreams…when the city sleeps…and I’m the only one and I walk alone... ’. Relishing the melodious voice of Billie Joe. While the rest of the world around me sleepzzz.

   And so here I am, in a dreadful hour on a rainy night, at my ultimate examination worst. I’m biting my nails, pulling at my hair, consuming my own weight in coffee and generally getting ulcer. I used to die a bit every time I open a book to learn by heart. And my situation tonight is worth deserving. The world is dark, miserable place with smells of dread mixed with instant coffee and happiness is a faint, glittering thing with wings, fluttering at the end of my date-sheet.

I know too well the pressure to perform, the fear of trying and failing. But it’s not that which my anxiety attacks set on a hair-trigger. It’s the choking feeling of not being completely free; the distracting presence of a troublesome itch that won’t go away. Yes it’s the fear of Zahir khan, Ahhhh the fatal and calamitous! It’s the anticipated dread of impending obligations, of no longer being able to stop and feel the quiet joy of smelling the scent of a rainy night as it melts away in a streaming cup of coffee. There’s no safety in numbers. The people who share my misery, my comrades-in-arms, are all barricaded behind monosyllabic text messages. My Facebook homepage looks dead and deserted; my notifications flew away like a butterfly departs the flower. Sleep seems as far away as moon and I’m all alone drifting on a lonely meteor, while the rest of the world around me sleepzzz...