It is a strange day. The sun is shining brightly, but it is very gloomy inside the office building. It seems there has been some outage in Hadapsar which has forced the facilities to switch to single tube mode instead of the usual two. I feel very uncomfortable whenever I am in a dimly lit place. I recently had an argument with Varsha, who also happens to be my flat mate, on a similar issue. We live in a single room flat (I prefer to call it "ek kamare ka ghar" instead of the more sophisticated "studio partitioned" flat.) and there are two tubelights to light up that room. Varsha usually comes back before me and switches only one tubelight. Now, when I come back, the first thing I do is go to the other end of the room and switch on the second tubelight. This would have been alright but if you do this before saying a simple "Hi" and after giving a nasty look to your roommate, you deserve to get a good thrashing, don't you?
I used to be a fairly unruffled person. I used to stay calm on a day before my semester exam even when I was fully aware that only a miracle would help me cross the magic no. I usually cleared my subjects decently (thanks to the little miracles), but there were times when I cleared them gracefully (pun intended). I remained my usual calm self when I was being rejected by quite a few companies during placement days. I remain calm when my boss bangs his head on my table trying to make me work, somehow. That reminds me sometimes of a donkey - who remains calm and collected even when it is beaten up and made to carry the load. There is no other specie which remains more calm and sober. I feel a lot like the donkey (even without the load) – calm and collected.
Or so I believed I was. Because off late I have realized that there are many things that make me uncomfortable. I feel very uncomfortable when I twist my leg wearing those goddamn heals. I feel unable to breathe when I find that my top, which I brought from the Shopper’s Stop sale a couple of months back, does not fit anymore. :-( I feel like crying when I have to drive through one of those pot holes ridden office route. I feel irritated when I find one of those chain mails in my inbox asking me to forward the mail to everyone in my mail list so that Amy Bruce, a 3 yr old kid will receive a new life. I feel like going and hitting the person who sends me yet another dumb joke on Sardars. I feel like smashing the TV set when I see movies which show South Indians as funny variant of Homo sapiens. I frequently get those you-are-crazy and have-you-gone-mad looks from my friends when I show my resentment when a young man driving his Karizma (or even Bajaj M80 for that matter) thinks that he is the king of roads and the traffic signals are meant to be damned. You know, even seemingly innocuous comment on how boring Telugu marriages can be from a very good friend makes me furious these days. I think every kind of marriage, leave alone Telugu marriage, is a boring affair. Then why blame one community!! More so, what right does anyone have to pass on a comment like that?
In most of these cases, all I can do is complain and trust me, I do that very well. But there are cases when the mob mentality hurts. It hurts something in me which I call self-respect. It might be my bloated ego as well, I don’t know. But it does hurt and all I can do is get more irritated and more furious. There are things I cannot change but I won’t accept them as a way of life either. Not until I realize the futility of the effort.
I had no intentions of writing this post. But my dimly lit bay made me write this. And just by the way, Varsha and I reached an agreement about the tubelight issue. She makes sure that she switches on both of them before I come back. And I don’t give her that nasty look if she forgets to do so someday. And we have been living happily ever after. :-)
