Wednesday 10 August 2011

Of spinning and living

When I went to office on my first day of work, I thanked my stars for the salsa red of my workstation, the wide-screened magnanimity of my computer monitor, the endless opportunities, the golden smiles and my lovely blue chair that would spin at will. When I wrote my first ever article, it was with avaricious ambition that I played away on my keyboard, like a novice taking her first piano lesson, faltering and blithering, but finding a giggly joy even in raw dissonance. When I drove my own sweet car for the first time, I had the cheek to actually chuckle and swear back in Tamil at all the people who asked me ‘ootla-sollitiya’? Oh and when I first fell in love, it was with the wide-eyed naiveté of a new-born lamb that I entered a land of roses, where Elton John and Paul Anka songs played on loop. I baahed and booed and cantered about happily, my tinkly laugh announcing to the world that I was a lamb in love. Baaah!

Today, the red of my workspace could be a royal blue for all I care, the smiles could be a stale silver. The articles that I write lack inspiration and the sound of my typing reminds me of an old lady from the 80s attending to her government job, striking the keys of her type-writer slower than the rotating speed of the squeaky ceiling fan. The last time I drove my car, I merely bared my fangs at the kena-dog cyclist who dared cross my path. And when I fell out of love, it was with all the tinkling joie de vivre of a zombie that I trudged out.

Of my friends, I have always been the most immature, most prone to spawning ‘heated’ cold wars with best friends, most likely to take a leap without making sure there was a safety net waiting below, much given to laughing like a pig-hyena hybrid at inappropriate times, like when being scolded by a professor for sleeping in class. During my college excursion to Wayanad, along with four classmates, I teetered up a slippery rock path, to the part of the waterfall where many people quite simply slip and die. I refused to be one of the thirty other girls who were busy taking pictures of themselves, prettily dipping their toes in the cool waters. But then, life changes you, doesn’t it? You join work, assume an air of pseudo importance and stick your nose up in the air, convinced that you’re the best thing that happened since the creation of cheese. You kill the toddler in you and go all grown-up on yourself and the world. You enter a relationship as a baby, and while in it, morph into a scary aunty, haggling constantly in a migraine-inducing voice. After this comes a point where you stop caring, build a wall around yourself and get super-fat on a dose of ‘Don’t give a damn’. It is approximately at this juncture that life begins to sing to you in Steven Tyler’s voice ‘Yeah your so jaded, and I'm the one that jaded you’. And sadly, all you can think of as a counter is, ‘it’s ‘you’re’ not ‘your’’.

Thankfully, life, apart from performing tacky covers on Aerosmith, also gives you wake up calls, reminding you to kindly get your limbs to move it, move it; your bottoms to, shake it, shake it. Because, really, what’s life if you can’t dance like crazy cartoons or do a funky Hakuna Matata a la Timon and Pumbaa. What’s the point of getting used to things? What’s the point of not caring? What’s the point of being a zombie, just because you won’t get hurt? What’s the point of being impassive when you can rave and rant? What’s the point of saying ‘whatever’, when you can yell ‘what the hell are you thinking you dung-brained raccoon-face?!’ What’s the point of mumbling about your job when you’re the one sitting there- no one’s dying for you to stay, you know. What is the point of giving up on life when you can give it one tight slap and demand that it ‘say sorry’?

Life is all about getting hurt, pulling your hair out, bugging all your friends and making them laugh the next minute, typing nonsense and then saying ‘now that is called nonsense verse my children’, pulling your window down and shouting ‘daiiii **** **** ***’ at the next biker who acts smart with you. It is about growing angry with your partner but never bored, about doing crazy things because they make you happy, about crying for days on end when love is lost but then looking to the future with hope and a renewed partner-preference list.

Life is about being the lovely willow which bends to the wild tempest and escapes better than the strict oak which resists it. Life is about spinning in that pretty blue chair for five minutes every single day!

4 comments:

  1. Never found so many connect in any story....well written and refreshingly "mast"

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  2. awesome nooshsome!
    the line "my tinkly laugh announcing to the world that I was a lamb in love" proves the authenticity of the name i gave u! Jas-tinkerBell!

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  3. Well, I am so happy you didn't try to(and hoping you won't either)try chastising life with a strainer in hand:keeping the goodies and throwing the sillies out. That would have been a terrible, terrible thing! If I want perfection, there's always Madame Tussauds,right? So keep all your sillibillies and smile on! And yes, happy to connect!

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