Numb Senses

Its been over two years at work and just the one day off every week. Honestly, having toiled the whole six days of the week, I like to just relax on Sundays. Read a book after breakfast and nod off back to sleep by ten, then wake up for lunch. One long unwind session.

But last week, when a good friend of mine suggested that I come over to Bangalore to sit in a park and play guitar, my mind was already there. It didn’t take very long for a coherence of thought to form and soon all my energy was channelized to achieve that single goal. I made it in good time.

South Bangalore is quiet, predominantly residential and has streets lined with trees. Jayanagar has parks with grass and swings, children with their grandparents, and benches and almost everything earthly that’s missing in most cities. We picked a park and a bench that almost called out to us to come and sit. After a few minutes of catching up we were ready to strum. We played tunes ranging from Western Classical to Raghu Dixit. Mixed it up with some Lucky Ali and sang without inhibition. But for a small kid who was probably headed for the swings, no one really paid any attention.

This was both encouraging and discouraging. I am not very receptive to what people feel, and I’d rather not have them take interest in what I do. To each his own, a very liberal point of view was mine. My guitarist friend however, was perturbed. He said he couldn’t believe that there is so less emotion in the cities. In smaller towns, if two people started singing in public, people gathered around to listen. It wasn’t inclination, just out of curiosity. What they did after a couple of minutes was left to them. My only response was that people didn’t have two minutes anymore. They’d rather have their ears plugged up with cables running into their pockets. I was moved when he said that it isn’t that people aren’t interested in the performing arts, people have lost interest in themselves. They’ve become so far removed from being social. This disease has come out of a transformation in society.

When you stop to wonder just what is considered ‘sociable’ today, you can think only of things that most children of the early nineties would view as trivial. Take a look at these…

• Owning a fully loaded mobile phone
• Posing online on social networking websites, presenting to the world a false personality (most people I have met in person appear to be totally different online – an identity crisis)
• Meeting up in coffee shops that pass-off the same rummy drink as 40 different products – drink through a straw
• Walk around in malls – catch up on a movie
• …you should’ve got the general idea

Now consider these…

• Sweat it out in a game of football, or cricket, or bicycling with friends in and around a colony/block
• Pick up a book from a library and read it on buses/local trains
• Wave after kids on a school bus
• Lick ice cream from a wafer cone
• …you get the drift

What direction society is headed in is anyone’s guess. The reason being that no one’s really bothered. It just degenerates and gets conscious about it when embarrassing lapses suddenly surface – massive bribery and corruption scandals, rapes and murders, the irony of famine and silos full of grain rotting in warehouses. Four journalists will cover famine, suicides, infanticide and disease, while 2000 of them will turn up at cricket matches and fashion shows and not one is interested in covering education and health.

Covering education is about finding out which are good institutions and which ones are bad. Where to study what; How to go abroad; This is journalism’s idea of education. Then, we meet 20 year olds who haven’t even heard of Enid Blyton, Biggles, Arthur Hailey or anyone for that matter. But they’d all know when Aishwarya Rai’s getting married and whether Yuvraj Singh is seeing someone. The best part is that trivia of this kind has more social acceptability than what could be more useful to know.

The reasons for this degeneracy are plain as day – Lack of identity, Irresponsible parenting, Unwillingness to change for the better, No visible self conscience.

We frankly have no one to blame when all these inadequacies are exposed to the rest of the world – CWG fiasco for example. Like a friend exclaimed, we can be rest assured we won’t get the Olympics here.

An attitudinal change is needed and there’s nothing like a good pill – a military coup should do it.