Hardly a few hundred metres away from my third floor room in the port city of Vishakapatnam on the East Coast, the sea is changing colour every few minutes. I had been watching the Bay of Bengal through the glass window since daybreak because I had nothing else to do.
Sun is not yet out, but the darkness has been swept away nicely by an unseen celestial broom. There is hardly any physical presence on the corniche stretching for close to six kilometers from one end to another. Maybe the usual morning walkers have not woken up yet.
Maybe they begin their routine when there is more light or they must be on their way. All kinds of thoughts keep dancing in my mind screen. Barring a solitary crow perched atop a statue whom I could not decipher, there is simply no action.
At that distance, little waves kept crashing on the shore. What happened to the white foam after it crashed? Where is that whiteness gone? I peep at the water and notice its colour has changed again: from steel gray to something else. Am sure the light is playing dirty with me.
Every second as the daylight is creeping it is quietly altering the appearance of everything. Why only the water? All of us are chameleons: changing our behavior regularly. Sometime acting good. Sometime unfairly. And sometime absolutely deciding stay neutral.
There is an old proverb: you cannot step into the same river twice. By the time one lifted his or her leg and put it back in water, the previous quantum of water has already flown away. But most of us – why, for all of us, the river is the same. The other day, I ran into an ex-colleague and found him crestfallen.
Over a cup of coffee, he revealed that he is jobless and squarely blamed the management for his ouster. I consoled him and promised to help him get another one. He was talented and with the revival of feel good factor in the economy, placement of a talented person should be no tough task.
But I was curious to know the background of his ouster and in no time, the truth was out. If you seek truth, it is there to manifest. The only challenge is that more often we don’t want to know the truth. The friend-in-distress was found have swindled money out of the company he was working for in connivance with another colleague.
Mind you, he was the blue-eyed boy of the management and brought in at a senior position. He was rich enough to own everything in life. He had a good reputation until this ugly episode. Why he did what he did, I wonder. I have no desire to confront him with this truth. I can understand his reluctance to share this fact with me.
Today, he is a changed man: lost his perch in society because unfortunately we give importance to people on the basis of their job profile. Bigger company you work for, bigger is your status in society. Smaller the size of your enterprise, big society associates try to keep a distance. All of us forget that life is transitory. Our behavioural change is astonishing.
The ringing bell of cellphone brings me back to reality and I look at the Vizag front Bay of Bengal again. Once more, it has changed its colour. Now it is azure. Fabulous. Nobody has changed the content viz., the water in the past few minutes when was mind-travelling. Yet it reveals a different personality. I realize it is the handiwork of Sun. Its movement or position at any point of time on the horizon automatically changes the colour of water due to refraction. If water change colour, why not us? What a question. Actually one should not be averse to change because change is the only constant factor in life.
The only caveat is: let us change for the better. Forget not that the chameleon changes its colour not because it is fashionable, but out of necessity: survival.
