Why?

One might remember that this was a question that we all asked most frequently as kids: Why?

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"No, you cannot have that chocolate."
"Why?"
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"Look, the sea is so big and blue. Beautiful, no?"
"Why is it blue? And big?"
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"You are a big girl now. You will be going to school soon."
"What is school? Why should I go?"
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The rest of the story is predictable enough. We went to school. The daily routine of struggling to eat breakfast in the morning, bending over to carry the school bag, struggling to write on the line in class, and finally collapsing on the sofa at home in exhaustion at the end of it all. Most significantly, we stopped asking "Why".
In hindsight, that was the purpose of school. To stop us from asking all those irritating, difficult-to-answer questions. In the race to be the one with the best handwriting, and the first to name all the nine planets (eight, as of today) we concentrated on the has-beens and the "technical details." My school life was largely spent in trying to blend in. So, I became a nobody. A conformist. It took me 2 years in a "hep" college in Bangalore, followed by 4 years in the Rajasthan desert, both environments that offered numerous opportunities, to develop myself. Now, I want to become somebody.

There are, as usual, exceptions to this rule. But that is not the point, right? We want these exceptions to become the rules.