Cowboy turned Technical Writer

Wanting to become a cowboy landed me in a soup of lecturing dysentery from my teacher and parents. I still remember the expanded eyeballs of my teacher rolling in utter shock hearing that I want to become a cowboy when I grow up. What is so wrong in wanting to tend cows? Did she not know that a person who tends his own livestock and live life depending least on others is the most independent person in the world? Anyway, she reported to my parents that my aim in life is to become a cowboy.

Hell, my parents lectured me frantically and breathlessly as if I had already signed a contract with the devil. They must have thought that bringing up children is the same as flying a kite where one have to pull the string a lot. Older boys in the school make fun of me for being wanting to become a cowboy. I don’t know why teachers and grownups are so keen on asking the dull question “what do you want to become?” There will be some smile or that mysterious smirk if the response is ‘Doctor,’ ‘Engineer,’ ‘Scientist,’ ‘Army,’ etc. Ah, I wonder how many real doctors, engineers, scientists have this question produced?

For my cowboy part, I have to drop it at least in my responses to teachers and elders. But, the picture of me that I visualized then, playing the flute under a big tree and tending cows in the plush green hillside remains like a painting even today. Sometimes I wonder ‘how life would be if I really am the village cowboy?’ The simple answer is; that would also be ‘life’ same as this that I am living sans the city with all its good and bad sides.

Whenever, I see cows and buffaloes in the city outskirt I feel something which is between pity and shock. Pity, thinking that they never will get to see the plush green hillside full of grass that I have seen and shock considering how they manage to survive in a place that has so less pasture and greenery. Well, for them it is the life that they know and have no reasons to complain as such.

I am like an experimental cow brought from the lush green hills to test how it survives in the less green city. Thank god that I am not a cow and that I don’t find it too difficult to live life in a crowded city and most of all, I don’t eat grass, which otherwise would have made me miss the hills too much.

Regarding my aim in life of becoming a cowboy; well, the dream remains unfulfilled. Sometimes, I try finding even a dim streak of similarity between tending cows and technical writing just to prove that my cowboy dream is partially fulfilled, but I think I need more time and philosophy to see that mirage. Moreover, I’ve not been so far successful in assessing how many of my friends who said what they want to be when they grow up are really what they are today.

This blogpost is dedicated to all those who didn’t qualify to become cowboys but landed up in the profession called Technical Writing.