My precious wish, pretty please

'Every day I meet the hawker crying, "Bangles, crystal
bangles!"
There is nothing to hurry him on, there is no road he must
take, no place he must go to, no time when he must come home.
I wish I were a hawker, spending my day in the road, crying,
"Bangles, crystal bangles!" ' ----"Vocation" by Rabindranath Tagore

I still remember from my middle school, this poem in my English class where a little school boy expresses his innocent little wishes to avoid school and play outside. I wish wishes were that easy now.

On the pretext of being practical, logical and prudent, I seemed to have forgotten the idea of making a wish. I realised I'm denying myself the luxury of even having a pure thought of joy,maybe to protect myself from being disappointed.But then , an old gentleman proved my theory wrong.

I went for an open air exhibition at Rotterdam with a happy bunch of friends, mostly Italians, which made the group even happier. A couple of roads were sealed off for cars, so there were people everywhere on the streets, a lot of umbrellas, an adult version of card board hide and seek and a lot of other stuff that dint make much sense to us, so that is for sure art. We battled our way through the crowd to meet another group of friends who were enjoying the smell of the fresh cardboard boxes and listening to the DJ on the street playing classic old numbers from gramophone records. I was way too surprised to hear 'Mera Sapnon ki Rani Kab aegi thu', an old famous Bollywood song in that setting in Rotterdam. After the DJ had to wrap up, we again had to work our way out of the huge crowd, to sit along a canal and 'appreciate' the umbrella art.A couple of makeshift benches even broke bearing our collective weight and enthusiasm. After settling down under a tree and discussing heavily about the creativity of the umbrella artist, a congenial man of 60 walked up to us and asked if we would like to make a wish. 'What would it cost'? was the first question on all our minds but one of us was frank enough to ask him directly. He replied with a smile that said 'Oh you poor little children, listen to me', and gave each one of us a little butter paper packet, with a seal on it. We all had a wish in our hands, of someone we never knew or will ever know.

I'm no believer in any out of the world powers, but even I was holding that little package as if it were a fragile treasure and noticed all of us had that tender expression of possessing a good thing. As a kid, making dandelion wishes dint seem very silly, but now I was very close to thinking that this man is completely crazy. But I chose not to. He had a fantastic idea. A hair dresser by profession, he collects wishes and as a signature a hair from the wish maker and distributes it around. Spreading joy and hope, precisely. I shed all my prejudices, and wrote down my little wish in my native tongue though, well no one here can even recognize the language. I'm not hiding anything, just making it a bit more intriguing. I sealed it and gave it back to our old friend, and so did the rest of the group. I wonder what everyone wished for.

We all headed back home , we all live in the same street and I noticed none of us opened the packet we got right till the end. It was a precious little secret we were protecting and hoped whole-heartedly that it come true.

I'm cynical enough to differentiate clearly between goals and wishes . So I don't want to restrain myself from hoping that my mighty dreams come true. Little experiences change our way of thinking sometimes , and then you have this whole new perspective. Mine being less skeptical and more cheerfully optimistic . After all, life is all about the art of living it and loving it.

And like Andy Dufresne said ,'Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things and no good thing ever dies'

So the little packet of my unknown wish-maker friend is pinned against my board, unopened.