Mishmash

Friday night - went to bed with the most terrible headache ever known to man. You know the kind, it starts from your eyes, slowly moves up to your forehead before winding its way to the back of your head, right at the spot where your neck meets the skull, can you feel that little groove there? yes, right there. That’s the spot that hurts the most. You have this throbbing pain that feels like someone had planted a bomb in there and it is going off repeatedly, sending painwaves all over your head, the deadly tentacles reaching to every cell in your body. You can feel a stinging pain in your eyes, not just your ordinary eyeball-hurting kind of pain, but actual physical pain that feels like someone had pinched the inside of your eyelids. You feel dizzy and weak, like you are going to throw up any minute but you don’t have the strength to get up and walk to the bathroom. I thought I was having a migraine attack. I’ve been plagued with headache all my life, but all the doctors I've consulted always assured me it wasn’t migraine. Take rest, pop a few pills and you’ll be okay.

Saturday morning – woke up hoping to feel refreshed and clearheaded but to my dismay found that traces of headache still lingered. Got up, took the newspaper inside and went back to sleep until noon. Got up again, but was too lazy to do anything, ate lunch, and decided to read in bed. I know reading is not the best solution, but there was nothing else to do. Opened the latest Chetan Bhagat but before I could read a sentence closed my eyes and found myself drifting off…. Ouch!! That could only be an ant stinging my leg. I reached down and found the offender and crushed him. Is that something crawling on my stomach? Another ant, no doubt. Groped a bit, caught the scoundrel before he could make his escape and sent him packing to ant hell. Or heaven. I don’t know if he was a good ant or bad ant in his lifetime, so he could go either way. Another miscreant stung me on the arm, and I found myself committing another murder. Sleeping was out of the question now.

Got up, removed the bed sheets, and started The Hunt. The best way to go about hunting is clean your room inside out, crawl on your knees and inspect all the corners, making sure all squatters are evicted. And when you are finished the room smells of insect spray, a far cry from your regular room fresheners, but you are alone in the room again and that was the goal, wasn’t it?

Speaking of ants, have you noticed that they are most active in the summer? Makes me think of the story of the ant and the grasshopper. You know, the ant working in the summer while the grasshopper sings away and in the end the ant was the guy with all the food while the poor grasshopper could only watch with envy and a hungry stomach. No, I think he died. Make hay while the sun shines and all that rot. But if it was today’s world the grasshopper would be the richer guy (and with a fuller stomach) because we all know how much money a good voice could bring. If you are still unmarried I would strongly recommend you find someone who could sing, thus ensuring children with beautiful voices and their future taken care of, purely because of their heritage. But if they end up with your voice you could only pray that they are smart and good in studies. But still, there’s a 50% chance of them being born with a good singing voice. Life (and marriage) is all about taking chances.

And when is this temperature planning to go down? Of all the hot summers I've lived through, this year seems to be the worst. Met officials say monsoon will hit Kerala on May 3l, that’s tomorrow, but I'm not living in a fishing boat in the backwaters of God’s Own Country, am I? So it’s probably another two weeks before the much awaited rains, showers of blessings, so to speak. Then maybe I could write about happier stuff.

Estha

Estha occupied very little space in the world.

Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn’t an ‘exactly when’. It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. - The God of Small Things.

Sometimes I’d wish that I could be like Estha. Stop talking altogether. Wouldn’t it be rather nice, in a weird way? If you don’t speak and hence do not reply to people’s irritating questions, people will gradually stop talking to you and you could live in your own world but at the same time not unaware of things going on around you. You are not deaf and can still understand what people say, and there is absolutely no expectation or obligation to contribute your two cents worth on anything, anything at all. (Anything a-tall). The world is too full of people blabbing endlessly about things you don’t want to hear, things you are least interested in, things you don’t care about. Like the new flat screen TV they bought, the boyfriend’s name of a friend of a friend, your cousin’s sister-in-law’s niece who has her own flat blah blah blah….

I think I am deceitful. If we go by the theory “Birds of a feather flock together” then I ought to be outgoing, talkative, friendly and annoyingly cheerful. But I am not, while I seem to collect friends who possess the aforementioned qualities. While I might exhibit those qualities some of the time, there are times when I have been called boring. To my face, yes. And I have been asked why I keep quiet all the time, why I am so unfriendly and unapproachable. Maybe I don’t like you, maybe I have nothing to contribute to the subject being discussed, or maybe I always find myself short of words. Maybe I don’t feel like talking, maybe I am preoccupied with something more important than what you are saying. Maybe I have run out of conversation and have nothing left to say.

Russian Roulette

A crazy game invented by a bunch of crazy people looking for fun and adventure. Supposedly invented by Russian prison guards who were probably bored out of their skulls and decided to place bets on who among the prisoners would be the lucky winner to get the bullet in the head. Notice that the guards didn’t play the game themselves. How cruel is that? And the game came to be played by fools who saw it as some kind of bravery test. How stupid can one get? If you want to die, kill yourself in some other way where there are no chances of failure. I wonder what the player must be thinking as he put the gun to his head. Lord please don’t let the gun go off, but I have to do this because I don’t want to look like a weak person. Remember The Deer Hunter, where the players were drugged out of their senses and made to play the game? Very sad movie. I hoped that Christopher Walken’s character would not die in the end, I wanted him to get up and walk out, but he played and lost. Very disturbing scene.

Why do people commit suicide? Did they completely lose faith in themselves, in others and in the world? Did they just get tired of living? Some people kill themselves because they wanted to hurt their loved ones, the people closest to them. And I guess some did it to escape the shame and disgrace, to save face. Whatever be the reason, suicide doesn’t solve anything. You take your own life and in doing so booked yourself on the direct train to hell and eternal damnation; you hurt your loved ones and make them ask “What did we do wrong?” There is nothing glamorous in it. And I think it is a cowardly act. Things go wrong, you become sad and depressed, you think life is not worth living and that nobody cares about you. It happens to everyone, we all go through times like that. But look at the bright side, there is no place to go but up. Things can only get better. If you think that nothing will ever become right again, you cannot be more wrong. Give yourself time, be patient, and sooner or later the sun will shine on you again.

This and that

I love playlists. You could add only the songs you want to listen to, arrange them in the order you want, remove a song from the list if you get bored of it, create a new list any time you want, and permanently delete a list. If only life was like a playlist!

I am not the type to rant and rave but I do have my share of things that irk me no end. One of them is newspapers not folded properly. Finicky, you say. Maybe I am. I hate it when I try to read a newspaper and find that it is messily folded, and that too somewhere in the middle page. How much time does it take to return to the first page and then fold it? And another thing I don’t like in newspapers is the single sports page they inserted at the very last page. If you are like me and read a newspaper back to front, you open the back page and immediately this loose sheet falls out, every time!!! Not good, not good at all. Causes hairfall and scratched scalps, and induces hatred for sports.

Another thing that really tests my patience is those cellotape things bread people use for tying up a pack of bread. You know what I mean, twist the polythene cover into a spiral, run the cellotape around it a couple of times, and paste a small piece of paper on the ends so the tape doesn’t stick to everything around it. A grand idea, but not so grand when it comes to the opening part. Yes, I've heard of scissors, but what I want to do is tear off the tiny itsy bitsy piece of paper, and then unravel the tape. Not as easy as it sounds. And definitely not fun.

Traffic police. One job I hope I never apply for, no matter how tough times get and even if I fall into the lowest pit of desperation. Why is that so? Firstly I don’t think the neon jackets would look good on me. Secondly I cannot stand for long hours. Thirdly I don’t like being in the public eye. Fourthly I don’t think I could remember whose turn it is to go and may add mayhem to the existing one, which is the best way I could describe our Indian traffic. But don’t get me wrong. I respect the police and I admire traffic policemen. They are very important and one can only imagine the chaos that would ensue on the roads if all the traffic policemen quit. Half of the traffic signals don’t work and you know how Indian drivers are. Give me a half inch of space and I would move forward. Other drivers coming from the other three directions? No worries, if I am the first to occupy that half inch I would be the first to leave this chaotic scene. Only problem is, the other three drivers think the same way. The rest I leave to your imagination.

There is something else I want to write, but I cannot remember what it is. Oh well you can’t win them all.