People, I tell you, are tireless treasure-hunters when it comes to faults. My life feels like a public excavation site, and I—the fossil on display. Everyone has their little chisel of criticism, and they chip, chip, chip away as if Michelangelo himself had hired them to sculpt me into some divine masterpiece. Only, instead of marble, they are working on my very mortal self.
“Beta, you walk too fast,” an elderly aunt once declared. “Your stride is like an impatient ostrich.” I slowed down. Another relative frowned, “You walk too slowly, like an overfed elephant.” Somewhere between ostrich and elephant, I suppose, lay my true gait, but the critics weren’t satisfied. They wanted more.
Friends, neighbours, even the milkman—the world had turned into my unsolicited jury. “Why do you talk so much?” they said one day. When I fell silent, like a monk on mute mode, the same crowd asked, “Are you sulking? So arrogant!”
Their words like whips,
Their sighs like songs—
I stand amused, not wrong.
It felt like I was in a Shakespearean comedy where every character is convinced that they know the plot better than the playwright. And in this grand play, my supposed shortcomings were spotlighted while my strengths hid backstage, waiting for their cue.
The irony? With so many flaws “extracted,” I should be hollow by now. Yet here I stand, strangely lighter, as if every criticism carved away some unnecessary clutter. People thought they were plucking weeds; little did they know they were pruning me into a bonsai of brilliance.
At times, I wondered whether these self-appointed sculptors were descendants of Socrates, forever questioning, forever correcting. Or perhaps they had studied under Kabir, who urged us to “Keep a critic near.” Only, Kabir probably didn’t mean critics who follow you into the washroom and declare that even your toothpaste brand reveals poor judgment.
But I must confess, there’s comedy in their constancy. A neighbour once sighed, “You laugh too loudly.” Another sighed louder, “You don’t laugh enough.” Ah, what a symphony of sighs! If Kafka had lived in my colony, he’d have written “The Trial Part Two: My Balcony Conversations.”
Over time, their persistence grew almost poetic. My life became an anthology of alliterations. I was lazy yet lively, careless yet careful, flawed yet flawless. They had turned me into an oxymoron in motion. And strangely, I began enjoying the paradox.
They prune, they poke,
They point, they pry—
I bloom beneath their sky.
Still, my critics marched on, each armed with sharper spears of scrutiny. “Your handwriting looks like it’s running away from the page.” “Your cooking tastes like democracy—everyone contributes, no one wins.” “Your selfies are proof that the camera too has emotions, mostly of despair.”
I laughed. What else could one do? If life was a circus, I might as well juggle. Their jabs, instead of wounds, became wordplay. Their complaints turned into comic couplets in my head.
And then came the ultimate punchline: One day, someone remarked, “You know, after pointing out all your faults, we can’t find anything else wrong in you.”
That was the epiphany. Like alchemists who fail to make gold but accidentally invent something better, they had, in their relentless nitpicking, stripped me down to my essentials. What remained was only the glimmer, the grit, the good.
So now when I look in the mirror, I see not a casualty of criticism but a survivor of satire. My faults were feathers—they’ve been plucked. What’s left is a phoenix, preened and prepared to fly.
Critics may cut,
But they carve my song—
In their sharpness, I grow strong.
And if tomorrow someone still finds fault in me, I’ll simply smile and say:
“Thank you for polishing me. But beware—too much polishing, and I might just blind you with brilliance.”
Dr Ritu Kamra Kumar
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