An ounce of snail-shell solitude

 

The new sarpanch has rewarded a man for casting vote in his favor. The man has been appointed as the shouting announcer of public news in the village. He is around fifty and has spent most of his time as a goatherd. He walked with his little flock of goats and sheep looking for ever-thinning strands of grass and bushes. The world sped by. The people who rode bikes, now travelled in cars. The people who had mud houses, now stayed in big cemented ones. The world was up for grabs and those with strategic intent and higher occupations made their realm more impressive. All through these decades, he was passing his time in the silence of still remaining patches of wilderness, just whistling or making clucking sounds with his tongue to guide his herd. Then the last tufts of wild grass vanished and he found it difficult to keep his herd alive. He sold it and there he stood on the shiny stage of life, feeling lost and wondering how much the world had gone ahead on the wheels of progress while he was slowly moving with his herd.

So now he is there on the main thoroughfare of village life. He takes his shouting job very seriously. The problem is that all his front teeth are gone and decades of shouting one-word instructions and clucking of tongue in various ways to guide his flock have put him in a position where he sounds clucking his tongue to hark attention of the entire village folks whom I seriously doubt he finds like a big drove of sheep. He is loud enough to be heard across a few streets but his words slip out in a strange shape. It’s a big challenge for the people to make a head or tail of the public announcement. You have to give full focus with your entire attention to latch onto some odd word and then build-up your version of the information. At least he trains people in the art of focus and a kind of brain exercise to build up a meaningful narrative out of the strange smatterings of words. Well, he seems happy with a feeling that he is herding a bigger flock of sheep now, while we try to nibble at his smatterings of words.