Musing on Randomness!

I've been a vegetarian most of my adult life since age 10. I still crisply recall the day I gave up eating my most favourite food as a child - Chicken. Growing up, I loved accompanying my father anywhere he went. This would mean sitting on his bike's petrol tank or standing in the front of his other two wheeler and tagging along him to buy vegetables, groceries, hardware, his official visits and every other place. I even recall a day I unstoppably kept asking him to take me to his workplace and he did. One such visits was to a butcher shop to buy chicken. I stood and watched my father converse to the shopkeeper, after which the man went ahead to open a giant, overcrowded chicken shed where there was only enough space for the chickens to stand and not be able to sit on what seemed like flooring laden with manure. He caught one of these chickens by the feathers. The bird was terrified and screaming relentlessly. I was told to not watch the rest of it and distanced from the site ...

This blog post is very dissimilar to all the blog posts here till date. I am only writing this post to share a personal incident that necessarily springs back to me every Diwali, or in the days nearing it to be more appropriate as and when I start hearing the sound of firecrackers bursting, just like the time when I am penning this down. The year was 2005, I was in grade 10. Every Diwali, my father would come home with huge assorted boxes of firecrackers for me and my siblings, which back then, we really enjoyed ourselves with. That year, there was something very uncommon and highly uncharacteristic that my school did before Diwali. Something that i had not even thought of in my so called 12 years of formal education until then. The school tried  (I do not know how successfully, given everybody's attraction towards those assortments and crackers) to organize an Anti- Firecrackers campaign. My first reaction was - "the same old anti-pollution lessons". I really thought...