It’s a Bizarre World

 

“Iceland is all green and Greenland is all ice”

Well you don’t need to be a Shahrukh Khan suffering from Asperger’s syndrome to screw your nerve cells over the petty thought of why hosts come up with statements like ‘Isse apna hi ghar samjho’  when all that the guest gets is a look of condescension from the host after a day’s stay.

The other day, I went to Barista with some of my friends. It happens to be a small café that oozes with lavishness. It’s not that there was something different about the café but there indeed was something different about the people in there. Basically there were two kinds of them: There were foreigners and there were Indians who underwent metamorphosis and became foreigners before entering the premises of the café.  The former seemed perfectly normal to us but the bizarreness was exemplified by the latter. Mothers conversing with their kids in English and the little ones returned the favors by turning a deaf ear to them. We have learnt that the first language a child learns is his mother tongue, and it takes quite a while to develop a good grasp over that. I am sure the mother tongue of most of the families in Delhi is Hindi, or Punjabi, Bengali but definitely not English. English is a language that one picks up as he strides along the path of Education in his life. I wonder what the one year old kid will comprehend of ‘Son, why do I have to keep telling you not to trip over your own feet’.

So often we come across people who come up with sentences like : “u know it was lyk "ma" budday that day n i had invited all "ma" frends n all "ma" frenz turned up and "ma" mother was very angry and i didnt know what to do.......so i sent "ma" frenz over to "ma" neighbour's house.” I wonder how does this ‘my’ transform to ‘ma’. It doesn’t make the word any shorter for sure. So either these guys love their mothers from the very core of their hearts, which is commendable or they think that the letter ‘a’ is much cooler than ‘y’. A large chunk of the crowd uses the words ‘Hell’ and ‘F***ing* more often than they blink. It sounds cooler, isn’t it? Possibly. I am not denying that. But I wonder how do these words find their way into our vocabulary, so much so that it will be a creative writing competition to write something without using these urban slangs.

Coming to the taste of Music, some love Rock- there are die-hard fans. There are some who cannot withstand rock music at all. Rock is nothing more than noise to them. These two categories of people seem perfectly normal to me. But yet, there is a third kind !! That category consists of wannabes who grow long hair, learn the lyrics of rock songs from the internet, wear a Metallica T-shirt, pick up a can of beer, and play the songs loud so that it is audible to one and all and to top it all, they make sure that the amplitude of their own voices is much greater than that of the music itself. Somewhere inside the heart they don’t have any affinity for this form of music but they ‘seemingly’ love it.

Ah, did I mention beer? Another thing that trifurcates people. First two categories require no mention but there is this third category which finds it hard to withstand the intoxicating effects of alcohol or don’t seem to enjoy the taste of it, but they apparently enjoy all forms of alcohol, be it beer, rum, whiskey or wine, and yes, they won’t forget to add the famous one-liner after drinking- ‘Mereko toh chadhti nahi hai’  which very well seem to be their dying words.

‘A Cigarette in hand feels like a man’

Well, do you need that piece of tobacco to prove your manhood?

Myriads start smoking just to show they can or probably to look cool. Some do so to impress their girl-friends. Well if you need to ‘impress’ them with such kind of eccentric habits and your girl friend loves those apparently cool getups instead of you, I think it’s time to bid her good-bye.

I am very much a part of this world and somewhere or the other I am also a part of it’s bizarreness. But I wonder why don’t we do things which we actually want to. Why do we end up doing frivolous things that others think is cool? It’s ironical. We always want to be someone else. A friend of mine rightly told me, “Delhi strives to become New York and the other Indian cities try to become Delhi.”

Grass is always greener on the other side. That makes the world an interesting as well as a bizarre place. Or at least a third of it.