The Profanities of Existence

A desire to uniquely place myself undergoes the ritual daily manifestation. Whenever I get my overly large posterior off from the mattress and manage to get the bulging adipose away from the quilt. It takes effort to bear the chilly morning and see your watch telling you that the time has passed for lesser (and slower) mortals to reach the class today. It is that time when the desire is strong, a desire to transcend beyond the immediate needs and requirements – the profanities of existence. A desire to weave eloquence in the undertones of getting up, brushing your teeth, forgetting to comb your hair and rushing to the class, missing the lecture for the nth time this week (Actually its only 5 times a week, but n shows better effect!) . It is then that reality dawns. Transcending the daily routine and wishing for something higher might take more of my time but I realize the HR issues plaguing my life. As the day passes that I seriously realize the need to employ someone other than the full-time employed Mr. Nobody who takes care of all my chores presently.

Wishes to transcend do not translate the wishing away to physical reality. As I aim for the higher purpose (All I think of is high! I practice it too. You really have to see the pile of junk in my room to see that I only believe in things going up), I realize mundanities have made it a habit to hamper solitary contemplations. Soliloquies on what I would do in the absence of quotidian demands on my precious seconds. Perhaps someday, I will get down to finding time for it. Someday I will read the pile of BS (that’s Business Std., what did you think?) lying on the cupboard. Someday I will even get that list of papers I wanted to check out, perhaps even write those DVDs and get some of the laundry done. If I am really lucky, perhaps my 7-book strong book collection will get some much needed dusting. Someday my table will not resemble the eternal dumping ground of all things torn and wasteful.

I discern a few words now and then: costs, processes, culture, equity, value-chain, realignment - the words fly by as I try to catch hold of them. Some of them just come by to spite me I think, to make me realize the futility of getting Mr. Nobody off the job. That fellow has unreasonably high replacement costs. Life goes on, on autopilot. There is the steering wheel somewhere around nearby, but when no one’s holding it, it’s a bit difficult to exactly pinpoint the location. And autopilot is comfortable. You even get to say, you enjoy the moment, that you see the present as a gift. Even put on display some other remarkable facets of imbecile wordplay. To put on the greatest spin, perhaps I can even correlate it in a Calvinistic fashion (the only Calvin I know is from Calvin and Hobbes) to building character. The higher the time it takes you to dig out that Kotler, the more is it a test of your tolerance and perseverance and the more is your inherent ability to withstand stress and the onerous responsibilities of physical labour. The daily effort in finding a place to sit, to lie down is enough to keep one on one’s edges in a character-building roller-coaster.

I do not wish to belabour the point, but it also indicates altruism of character that distinguishes a benevolent personality. Consider this, the total amount of junk in the world is going to remain constant. And if I fill more junk in my room, I make the rest of the world cleaner. If not absolutely, then atleast relatively in a Birbalesque fashion of making a line seem smaller by drawing a longer one next to it. If my room serves as a reference point, most people would be praising the excellent civic spirit of cleanliness in the city of Mumbai.

And think about the drive for cleanliness I spread around. Consider the inspirations and ramifications of the piles of plenty that permeate my room. The day is not far when case-studies on waste management will advise whom not to emulate. ‘Clean it up!’ speech sessions (to be inspired after an inspection of my humble abode) will quote me as example on for a possible futuristic scenario.

Again, to start cleaning up now for worldly ostentation would only show a cheapness of spirit and lowliness of thought. It would be plain and simple cruel to the environment. My room has generated its own healthy little ecosystem. A couple of lizards, incidental mosquitos and a variety of visitor insects dot all corners, building their homes, carrying out their whole life-cycles. Think of the decorations of the spiders, the intricate webs – to destroy them all in one ruthless stroke of maniacal sanitization, would rob the world of its colour and vibrancy. I simply do not have the heart enough to do it.

By the way, to all those on a perpetual cleanliness drive, I would just repeat the old cliché – Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Only next……