I have been ill for the past few days. Fever, headache, the works. I am told that I should value the royal treatment I’m getting right now, because there may be a time when I possibly wont be pampered this way. Sigh. Yes, people keep telling me all sorts of horror stories. And I used to think that I’m the only subject matter expert when it comes to those.
There is something serenely delicious about listening to a song like saiyyan on my ipod in the dead of night. The rhythmic pulsating music and the hauntingly beautiful lyrics beat a pattern in the still air like a butterfly fluttering its shivering wings and weaving its meandering way through the fragnant moonlight. And to think that no one apart from me can hear it. It’s almost like eavesdropping on a private conversation without too much guilt.
Apparently, I’m not. Infact, the blogsphere is replete with examples of people who insist on writing only horror stories. Bad relationships, grueling work schedule, james bond-ish relatives who kill with a smile..you name it, they have it. I know life isn’t all hunky-dory but surely once in a while there could be something nice and pleasant to write home about? The most likely cause for this is that the horror stories make good reading and therefore attract more and more blogreaders. Kind of like a ‘lets see whose linen is the dirtiest today, shall we?’ community, maybe. As real and as depressing, as say, world news.
I have been watching Indian idol a lot. Maybe I too have the lowest common denominator taste when it comes to television. But its quite entertaining, really. Most of them are very good singers who probably learnt to sing flawlessly at the age of three and are too busy now trying to learn to be modest about the whole thing. The judges are more entertaining, actually. Especially udit narayan. He’s just not right for this sort of show, where you are expected to walk off the stage every now and then and defend your favourite with flared nostrils and high decibels. He’s the kind of person who probably utters two words in three hours and that too with hesitation. Decision-making doesn’t come naturally to him. ‘Aapne accha gaya’ he mostly opines; with a half an hour interval between two words.
I quite like Shashi Tharoor. He writes a weekly column for the Sunday times. When kids collected stamps, as part of a necessary childhood ritual, he knew about the Slovaks and Yugoslavia and the Gulf war. There was a time when I was similarly interested in world politics but as I learnt, world news, especially the daily suicide bombings in the mid-east can be grueling daily consumption for anyone. Its kind of ironic, that while things like these keep happening, and give enough reason for depression, I do remain contentedly happy at a different level of consciousness. What a bundle of contradictions we humans are. Like a Japanese doll. Layers within layers.
What if decisions could be outsourced? You don’t know what to wear and you get a phonecall and you know. Or you don’t know which girl to get married to and the next time you see someone, she has a big tick-mark on her forehead. No rational planning involved. No intense internal monologues. In a sense, decisions are outsourced. Someone up there makes up our minds for us; we just realize it later. We have to discover the decision , after it has already been made. I just wish the process of discovery could be made easier.
