Seven

It has been almost a month since I posted the last post in Decagon, and Seven is out now. Seven is the most special post for me, and it is because seven has been my lucky charm number since childhood. I remember how when we were small, we had this Children’s Day Fair at our school. For those who don’t know, in India, the fourteenth of November is celebrated as Children’s Day. It is the birthday of our first Prime Minister of independent India, Mr Jawaharlal Nehru. So the schools usually try to make this day special for us; sometimes they show the children a movie, sometimes the teachers perform for us, you know, like dances and one-act-plays. We used to have all this, and along with these, we had a ‘Mela’ or a fair. This fair was only for students, conducted by all the teachers. There were food stalls and game stalls, and a ‘request corner’ where people could dedicate songs to others purposefully and anonymously. The others would keep dancing there, because most of us, at that time, were relatively middle-class people. We did not like to spend much on the fair, so after a while when our money got over, all of us used to come and dance. That was fun. Sometimes a teacher would join us in dancing, before returning to her stall. ‘Her’ because most of our male teachers did not dance, ever. Oh, I almost forgot to mention how seven being my lucky charm is even remotely connected to this.

It was in my class seventh that I first fell for someone. I really liked her a lot, but I could never muster up the courage to go tell her. A year later, in our eighth grade, the same girl dedicated a song to me at the request corner on Children’s Day, and that is when I got to know she liked me too. The entire affair was very short-lived, I was a lamb back then, too afraid to speak up, too afraid to say or do anything, and too concerned with what others would think about me. Turned out that wasn’t girls really looked forward to. Once we broke up, things were never the same again. We stayed friends, got disconnected when we changed schools in the eleventh grade, got back through a tuition class, but never dated again. It was strange how I had mustered up all the courage to take it forward and again lost it in a matter of months.

Seven is the number of evil, much like three. The Seven Deadly Sins, also known as the Capital Vices or Cardinal Sins, is a classification of the most objectionable vices that has been used since early Christian times to educate and instruct followers concerning (immoral) fallen humanity’s tendency to sin. I read about these four years back, and it is a really nice article which shows the development of this theory and how the seven sins have changed over time. I never posted it here because it was not an original article, but I can provide you a link to it, if you ask; but I am sure most of you already know about the seven sins. Martin in his books is very fond of the number seven, he has seven kingdoms, seven knights, seven Gods, and as per latest news, there will be seven books; if things are kept in concordance, there will be seven seasons of the television show it is being churned into right now, though I really hope Martin really lives that long to tie up all loose ends of the book.

February is already here. A month over; this year is moving faster than I thought it would, and rather uneventful. Time passes fast when you do not have memorable things to count at the end of the month. It may be so only because of the work pressure that is trying to bury each of us deep down, but as they say, one hand cannot clap. You need two hands, similarly, you need efforts from both ends, much towards the same goal, so that the resultant force does not become zero because of opposing forces, but doubles due to aligned ones. Have a great month ahead!

Six | Eight