Obsessions and Opinions

To stop obsessing about things and people was on my agenda this year. Let things flow. Let things happen to you. Let life come to you. Don’t push the accelerator!A couple of week into another year of my life I find it a struggle to break out of old habits. They persist. More than that in fact – they find ingenious excuses to make an even deeper habitat inside. They have managed to convince me that we all obsess about something. The obsession in some cases seems harmless – I mean, as long as it isn’t the “I am obsessed with you and will stalk you” variety – it seems fairly harmless right? Well, think again! The more I look around the more obsessions I find and here are few to make you wonder if you are ‘obsessed’:
1. Facebook – this is top of mind cause I guess I am fairly obsessed with updates and sharing stuff with friends. This obviously creates a fair amount of controversy among more ‘private’ people who would want their opinions and life to be layered and not exposed to the scrutiny of random acquaintances. But each one to his own. Facebook to me if the best way to stay in touch with friends who I don’t have the bandwidth to call frequently, and yet you would want to keep in touch in some way.
2. Food – Gluttony is a sin. I don't know how to sustain entire conversations about food which last for hours. So is obsessing about the calories that you added to your already perfect body with one freaking cup of coffee!! I am frankly done with people who eat cattle feed or worse vitamin supplements and endless protein shakes in the hope of a muscular toned body. Of course you need to be healthy – but there was a reason why desserts were created…just like why fire was invented.
3. Blackberry – You must have noticed people who obsessively check their hi-tech cell phones or blackberry for the latest email that would have popped into their mailbox. The email could be as inane as “ FYI..” on an issue – yet to check the phone every 5 minutes and reply to every mail is more a non verbal expression of “ I am busy and sought after”. Please grow up – we know you are busy.
4. Music – I love good music and most music other than house, grunge, rap and other stuff which can be attributed to my age – am from a different generation. Have you noticed people with their ear plugs on in queues grooving to the music and strumming invisible guitar strings? All this on Howrah station which is the most chaotic station ever with people being shoved around, smelly fish being ferried out of trains, and people clambering onto unreserved compartments while stepping on each others toes. I know you love music dude – just pull up those low waist jeans before they slip off your backside and stop acting like you were born listening to rap!
5. Pronunciations – Find me a soul who doesn’t get irritated when someone picks on them compulsively to correct the pronunciation of each word uttered. We are Indians and our mother tongue isn’t unfortunately the alien language where the the ‘d’ is silent in Wednesday and the ‘p’ is silent is psychology! Come on, we all appreciate corrections – but not to the extent of it being a superiority thing. Look at Professor Higgins – he taught the language to the flower girl and made a duchess out of her – all without ridicule and mockery.
6. Clothes – A friend of mine was telling me about his girl friend who was a beauty pageant winner. She would obsess about what to wear for an occasion that she would drive the man out of his mind. Guess what – some men do the same! Do I pair the grey pants with the white shirt or the black, do my pink sandals go with my pink dress? This is so “last season” - what on earth does that mean? I love your Prada shirt – I would love fro such people to find the exact duplicate of their “prada” on linking road in Mumbai and then find the difference.
7. Travels outside India – Am sure each one of us knows people who have traveled extensively and appreciate the experience and culture. Am sure – we also know people who fly over a country and pick up its accent. They come back with every conceivable comparison between that country and ours and donot miss any opportunity to point out how much life outside India is better. Please stay back in that country and save India some population explosion is its so unpalatable here.
8. Spouse – this is rare, yet in people who have this – its fairly unbearable. Talking about your spouse / partner to some extent can be attributed to love, hormones and mutual dependency – yet making every conversation an eulogy to the larger than life spouse is not cool. People ought to realize that not everyone would be interested in the person.
9. Looks – Ah! This more often than not affects women. The constant checking out the reflection in the mirror ( I do it too) , the toss of the head and resetting the hair, the widening of the eyes to accentuate the effect it has on the observer and the periodic fishing for compliments by implying they aren’t attractive. Men suffer from this too – they never fail to expose muscular arms and shoulder muscles if they happen to have them. I am biased – the type I like best are the “carefully careless” types whose hair is just a tad out of place and the shirt loosely tucked into the jeans.
10. Gadgets – Call me archaic and anti technology – but gadgets just complicate life more. You cannot take a holiday without being hounded by calls. You cannot watch tv without emails dropping into your phone. Come on – I think the 2 best big discoveries were the fridge and camera – it lets me store food and lets me store good memories!! People sitting and discussing the latest model of cell phones, cars, bikes, laptops, music systems drive me mad. You can travel on a bullock cart if u love traveling and you can play flute by yourself if you love music. The rest is a want, not a need. I could go on forever with this – and it isn’t stuff that I am spared from. Rather I suffer from a far longer list of obsessions I cannot possibly write down. Yet this stuff gets to me!