The mad man talking......

I saw a penguin in the park the other day. The park is my home for now. I spend most of my time there. It’s not the beauty of mother nature that keeps me bound to this place. It’s not the landscape nor the lawns and neither the well situated seats for people. It’s the people. I come here everyday to see God’s greatest creation. The other beautiful things, I believe, were God’s failed attempts to make something really wonderful. His triumph lies in making the humans. A fully automatic machine. I think God also might be really proud of what he made. In fact if God does hang out with his divine friends, he surely would be boasting. ‘You see that thing down there. Yeah that one putting its finger in its nose. See now that’s called a great invention. I didn’t tell it how to clean its nose. It thought of it itself. What do you say to that huh?’
And they might be going like ‘That’s the coolest thing I have seen since the big bang! That was one hell of an explosion!’
And some other divine figure might go like ‘How do you explain those things walking around that thing digging its nose? They all are making a weird face?’
‘Yeah I can explain that too. See those people are disgusted by him. This is also one of the things that I didn’t teach them. They do it for themselves. It’s basically something that these creatures do to announce to the world that they are well mannered. But to tell you the truth, half of the people making a disgusted face do it themselves when they are alone. Isn’t that smart?’

Okay I think I am getting carried away. I have that habit of deviating from the topic. Most people call me a mad man for that. Many of them stare at me in park. Well I don’t blame them. After all I do the same thing the whole day. I sit on a bench and I stare. That’s my job. And that is perhaps why parents tend to keep their children at a safe distance from me. What they don’t realise is that if I were really capable of hurting somebody, I would hurt them rather than their children. So they should be the ones running away from me. Why would I hurt them? Because they think of me as a person who hurts for no reason. I swear I have never hurt anybody in my whole life intentionally. And I had a proper explanation for tying up that fellow upside down by the fan when I was in the mental hospital. I did it because he asked me to. He was asking me to do it everyday. Every morning I used to wake up, I used to find this fellow standing besides my bed with a rope in his hands. I don’t know how he got that rope inside. I used to tell him that it will be painful. But he never listened. And so I finally did it. That was when he realised that wasn’t the way to die. You were supposed to hang by your neck. He realised it when he didn’t die! I was sorry for him. But I did my part for him. They gave me terrible shocks for doing that to him.

I am sorry again for deviating. So I was saying. I saw a penguin the other day. It was in the park. And it didn’t move at all. And its colour was not exactly like a penguin. It was more like brown. But the weird thing was that the words ‘USE ME’ were written on it. And that got me into thinking. What can this penguin possibly be used for? If you ask me, I think it was dead too. How do I know that? There was a rectangular hole in its chest. No doubt it wasn’t moving. You can’t have a dead animal as a pet. Some day its folks are going to come looking for it. They are going to get information about you if it’s your pet. Then they are going to turn up at your house. And then they are going to see their loved one lying dead there and they are going to see you applying jam on a bread with a knife. And unfortunately for you, the jam is going to be red! Next thing you know? Your folks are looking for you!

So why would anyone take this penguin as a pet. But I had sympathy for this dead penguin. There it lay dead. And nobody would even touch its body. They wouldn’t even give it a nice funeral. In fact I saw a few people throwing dirt on it. This penguin might have been terrible to everyone when it was alive. But that didn’t mean it deserved this after death. So I decided it then. I just got up, walked to the penguin’s body, squatted in front of it and hugged it. There were murmurs from the crowd. It was clear that many didn’t like it. They even started calling me a mad man. But I was used to it. I just sat there like that for a long time. And finally I was separated from it. That car which comes to pick me up everytime I escape from the mental hospital was there again. And people pulled me inside. I left the penguin. I believed I had done enough for it. And now I am back in my cell. Thinking of that dead penguin. Just when I heard two people talking outside my cell.
“What did he do this time?”
“He was hugging a dustbin in a public park.”
I felt really bad that they hated the penguin so much that they called it that. Maybe humans are not really God’s greatest invention. I hate them sometimes.


P.S Another new creation out of the closet of joblessness!