I love the look on the face of the school kids - that unending gaze in their motionless eyes drowned in a thousand dreams, the supple skin on their little faces glowing in the morning sun, their tiny hands with trimmed nails gripping the cold steel bars of their school busses, bags strapped securely on their shoulders, water bottle dangling in the front, diamond shaped handkerchiefs pinned neatly to their shirt pockets and pinafores and dog-eared badges in plastic covers pinned on the other side. I used to watch a bright yellow school bus brimming with these looks every morning as I waited for my office bus & it lent me a smile in a weird way. A smile that one of these kids would have created in their art classes - used a bright red wax-crayon pressed it hard on the white drawing sheet and liberally drawn a wide inverted arc. Their life indeed is like their drawing books. Everything is well-defined with thick black boundaries and in that finite space dwells freedom in all its opulence. The same freedom that manifests itself like the spring after a cold winter during summer holidays. Life is only popsicles and candy-floss and sometimes a bag of Hershey’s kisses! It’s colorful like the balloons, the pin-wheels and the soap-bubbles outside the local park; it’s carefree like a bunch of helium balloons tossed in the air; it’s innocent and pure like the angles with little wings who rule the goodnight tales. Ever seen them at the malls -Mushroom hair, nose and lips flattened against an impeccable clean sheet of glass, hands spread at the side like an eagle and eyes round as gumballs from the vending machine and that look they hold in them – like they have just sighted the most wonderful thing on the face of the earth that ever existed! I wonder what’s so enticing about this age that makes it so enviable! Is it that life doesn’t give us a second chance to relive the moments and the times we enjoyed the most, or that it always makes the past seem more enviable, or that childhood is when life is like a clean white drawing sheet and all we know is drawing inverted arcs with our red wax crayons!