The Big Punch From Blue

He thought he could fight. Infact he thought he was invincible, just waiting to be discovered. So one fine morning, he made up his mind, and registered for boxing.

He had never been in a fight before, as in a fist fight. It was unknown territory. He hadn't fought with his cousins either when he was young, probably because they never got to spend much time together. He never stayed with anybody long enough to fight. It just wasn't one of his things.

But this time, it was different. He had just had a dose of rocky a few days before, and he knew exactly how to train, and how to prepare. And he got to it right away. Started running a lot of kilometres every morning, increased his intake of pulses, went to the gym daily, put in a lot of soul into it basically. It was all going fine. And he could feel that it would go well, like the rest of his life had always been.

So after a few weeks of hardening up to enter the world of boxing, and the weight-in, there was his name on the notice-board at the gym. The coming friday, 4:30 pm. And he knew that the time had come.

So on Friday, he waited after school, for his time to come, for they say, you learn a lot about yourself in a fight, and he wanted to learn all that about himself. He was charged, he was high, he was waiting, waiting for a very long time. He felt that the way the scientists had decided about the perception of time was faulted. They had defined it to be linear, whereas he knew from experience that it definitely was not. It was inversly proportional to the importance we gave it.

So after waiting for a long time, according to his perception, he finally got called up for the bout. He was red. Blue was tall, Red was short. Blue was 49, Red was 48. Blue was about to get thrashed, and Red was about to thrash him, or so he thought.
The referee came in between the boys, brought thier gloves together, and shouted box. Red and Blue pounced on each other. But before anything else could happen, Blue slammed his blood thirsty right fist, swinging from the farther end of his body, right on his nose. And suddenly he knew everything he ever needed to know about himself and about life. That was the moment in his small, yet eventful life, a tiny strange moment, the passing of which changed things somehow, and he knew what taking it was all about.

Years from that day, he still remembered that punch when his first girl friend ditched him, when he couldn't make it to the college he wanted, when he didn't get the branch he wanted, when he failed an exam for the first time, when he failed to get a job, everytime he remembered that one punch, and he remembered that fighting was as much about taking the shots as much about hitting your opponent, he remembered that winning always boosted the morale, the ego, but the true mark of men, was the elegance and the grace with which they took the swinging punch from the opponent on the nose, and then came back.

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