Ek parinda tha sharminda
Tha wo nanga
Is se to andey ke andar
Tha wo changa
It comes to mind that only Gulzar could have penned such apt words for a timeless classic –
The Jungle Book
The loudly sung rustic lyrics never fail to bring a smile to my face. It never fails to remind me of bare-bottommed babies and lazy Sunday mornings when the cartoon first appeared on air. The baby in question being my favorite nephew, Akshay.
Akshay was an aquarian baby with stars in his eyes. Although he did and still does look very sweet, there is some wisdom in those eyes that belies his tender years. Two year old Akshay was the kind of child who forever looked out of the window at the chirping birds and wondered where they flew off to. Akshay searched for rainbows in the humdrum of a life bound at one end by struggling parents and at the other by a day care facility that he used to abhor. He has a kind of quiet, desperate courage that I still admire. So obviously a dreamer trying to survive a harsh, practical world – he is the most “out of the world” person I have ever met. So, it was obvious that the two year old and the college-going Sonika should have a bond beyond the ordinary.
To come back to Jungle book cartoon, admittedly it tugged at something primitive in both of us. Born and brought up in the multi-storeyed flats of New Delhi, we dangled our legs on my mother’s sofa every Sunday, eating freshly steamed poha and dreaming of chasing yellow butterflies. Blissful days those!
Mowgli’s Story
The story of a young child who gets lost in the Jungle, to be brought up by the wild animals. He learns their ways and comes to have respect for their rules, only to realize in the end that he is and will always remain a “man-cub” to them, an alien being – never one of their own.
So, he abandons the jungle to find his own brethren only to find that they also look at him with equal suspicion.
The story of Mowgli was not new to me. Many childhood hours had been spent reading and re-reading the complete works of Rudyard Kipling, living the adventures of Mowgli among the Jungle folk. It never fails to surprise me that an English author could have written an obviously Indian book. This and the timelessness of the characters makes it a classic not to be missed. It was partly because of the indianness of the characters that the English Walt Disney movie seemed a little fake, whereas the cartoon dubbed in hindi was an immediate success.
Coming back to Akshay, I knew with some certainty that his soul yearned to roam the jungle in a tiny diaper with Baloo and Bagheera. I could see that he fancied himself outwitting Tabaki and even the evil Shere khan. He too saw himself learning to catch fish, unfettered by aayahs, teachers and admission exams.
There are children who enjoy, who fit in and who do well by all worldly standards. And then there are the Akshays of this world, lost but happy within themselves. They are square pegs in round holes but have dreams beyond the ordinary. They need an outlet, a different kind of a world where there is a fresh adventure to chase every day and a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow.
This, then, was Mowgli’s world.