(Ok, this post is atleast 2 weeks old, just found the time.) Perhaps the highlight of today is sitting at a coffee shop
in the second floor of a shopping mall, in ‘mid-town’ Chennai and sipping on a
cappuccino and looking out the glass window at the rain-mud-and-filth soaked
traffic below. I neither feel pity nor wear a smug smile as I witness the
rat-race because it really hasn’t been long since I was in the sludge, wading
through murky waters which are obviously a result of our freakin awesome
drainage system. Don’t get me wrong when I say that I’m in the shopping mall
and contemplating life in such elite quarters. Mind you, I’m not a fucking
elite, though I can be and sometimes act like one(and that’s a whole different
argument altogether) just to empathize with things on both sides of the spectrum.
I just freaking hate mindless consumerism but I will hate it from inside a
glitzy shopping mall. I’m a minimalist, a bloody local with thoughts verging on
the extreme. On the rare instances I will pay Rs.90 for a coffee with which I
can sit comfortably in a lounge-like ambience for more than a couple of hours trying to make sense of Dito Montiel’s interview in Filmmaker mag or Arundhati
Roy’s incendiary ‘Shape of the Beast’(ok I ain't going for pretense there). As I wait for the guys to get back, I thought, ok fine, with all the commotion
outside and inside my head, lemme vent out stuff.
Why is today not a dog’s
day? Well, then don’t ask me if every other day is a dog day. Not for me, it’s
not. Today, as with any other day I travel/commute, I witnessed about a 150
dogs, bitches, bitches with babies inside them and pups scattered all around in
the rain doing what they would normally do. Experience a ‘dog’s life’. Having the
life of an ‘underdog’. Spending a Dog day afternoon. Groundhog day. See? More
references. No wonder we termed it so. (ok so groundhog doesn’t have anything
to do with a dog but still they sound the same)And today was more than normal
for them, especially with the cold and almost omnipresent uncertainty that the
rains bring with them. And earlier in the day, before we came to Chennai, we
had to transport 5 wet, shivering pups (who’d been taken away from their
mother) from the soggy paddy fields to our humble abode in the village. Back to
the 150 canines, their faces were so full of implication, that I could write a
page each about what they were thinking. I mean, if they actually do. Or do
they just live in the moment? Taking each day as it came? Surprisingly, many of
our human kind seemed to have the same expression, or were they worse? Can’t
tell. Really. But these days, my guess is we humans are becoming pathetic in
more ways than one. So, pretty soon, to say, ‘it’s a dog’s day’ will become NOT
a bad thing after all. Because, as people, especially as Indians, we suffer
more than we can endure. No I take that back. We suffer uhh…more than what we
think we can endure(coz we can endure shit-just-about-anything), but as we get
accustomed to that, we reach the next phase of suffering and we endure that too
and the chain continues. So henceforth, thou shall pat each other in the backs,
in congratulatory delight, because we love to revel in our hopelessly romantic
status as sufferers. (pic from google)
