06/07/2025
CHICKEN'S BICYCLE RIDE
I was in Class 8 when we had just moved to Kolkata from Gujarat. Everything felt new to me. The food, the language, the way people behaved, even the smallest things felt unfamiliar. I was slowly trying to adjust and understand this new world around me.
One day in English class, our teacher gave us a writing assignment that completely confused me. We were told to write a letter to the editor of a newspaper about how chickens are tied upside down to the handles of bicycles and transported to butcher shops. The idea was to express concern about the pain these chickens go through during this process.
Coming from a vegetarian family, I had never seen anything like this, chickens hanging on upside down tied on a cycle. But some of my classmates had, and they explained it to me so clearly that I could picture it in my head. Chickens tied upside down, five or six of them together, hanging from the bicycle handles, being taken to meat shops to be sold and killed.
Just hearing about it made me feel really bad. I looked around and saw that my classmates had already started writing feeling emotional about the chicken's discomfort in travelling.
But i was thinking, " if they’re going to be killed anyway, isn’t that even more painful than the way they’re being carried? I honestly didn’t know which part was sadder. Maybe I was just thinking too much for one English class.
Still, I tried to write what I was feeling. I remember writing something like this:
I feel bad for the chickens being carried like that. But what troubles me more is what happens next. They will be killed. Their heads will be chopped off. That seems even more painful. So I don’t know what we should be more concerned about, the ride or the end.
I truly thought I had written something honest and thoughtful. But my teacher didn’t think so. She said it was rude and off-topic. I was surprised, and honestly, a little hurt. To me, she sounded rude for not even trying to understand where I was coming from. I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful. I was just confused and trying to make sense of something that felt very far from my world.
That day I realised how different people’s perspectives can be. What’s normal for one can be completely strange for another. What one person writes with emotion, another might write with confusion. I wasn’t trying to be smart or funny. I was just being real. And sometimes, being real makes people uncomfortable.
Looking back now, I smile at that memory. It was just a small classroom exercise, but it taught me something much bigger. How we all think differently, feel differently, and carry our own truths.
Even something as simple as a chicken on a bicycle can teach you how complicated the world really is. And honestly, even today, I’m still not sure what’s right and what’s wrong.
Aashish Choudhary
