To be honest, I think my earlier thought on pain and its descent was something that interested me to write on, however I feel the execution wasn’t a great deal for me to harp on. Just after having published it and reading it a number of times in order to edit and give it a new direction, something else struck me. Guess this is how the minds of a copywriter or rather (to please moi-self) creative people moves ahead.
The feeling that I had while scribbling with the idea of my previous post had me reminiscing a truth about two incidents that happened to me in the span of 24 hours. It all started when I was travelling down the tube and some random poetic lines occurred to me. Coz it was outta emotional malfunction it started as...
“Twice in a span of 24-hoursI was made to meet my failure in the face...”
And the thought carried on generating some more rhythmic overtones, but then I remembered Parul Ma’am’s feedback on how Kindergarten(ish) I’d sound when I try to rhyme. What a constructive feedback – I liked it. Hence I stopped rhyming and ended up with a sad attempt of prose. Not that its her fault, but rather it’s my prerogative not to act like a sadist and inflict pain on those who are to read my blog. Now the point is, I am really bored reading my last article and genuinely it sucked!!! But such is the beauty of great blunders...
Eureka!!! I discovered boredom is worse than pain, any pain I suppose. If you see it’s normal to resort to self-destructive activities just to avoid boredom. Or simply put the other way, the things people do to counteract boredom with the likes of hogging, snorting (you know what...), boozing, and all other illegitimate – ings... So much for the sake of avoiding the common phenomenon called boredom. I remember one of my lectures during the juvenile years of commerce studies, when our professor churned out this mind-numbing lecture which almost had us in splits of our own existence. There I was doused in utter boredom trying to find some comic relief with a destructive scratch on the wooden desk, scribbling – “This is in the memory of those who died out of the boredom of this lecture – May their souls rest in pieces – Amen...” As unoriginally adolescent and obviously hackneyed it may sound, it was my first copy per se in creative writing.
But here comes the catch – Boredom has an innate ability to freeze moments. I know this notion is difficult to assimilate, though such is the effect of boredom. For instance have you ever observed a lot of bored people, in your class, queues or for that matter anywhere you find like souls in distress. A common mass-hysteria is evident when you see almost everyone around you trying to doodle, scratch heads, doze-off or trying to concentrate anything under-the-sun to make them feel anywhere else but there. This is when the victim faces the situation of slow motion or the moment of freeze. I think it would help if I say that when we want time to go as fast as it can, it never does, like for instance awaiting a loved one, where the urge to see them makes every second into minutes and minutes into hours, much in congruence to the theory of relativity.
Now the trick is, once we actually realise how dull and frozen the particular moment is, it slows down time for us .The proverbial time-warp - during which you may get a zillion thoughts and amazingly are able to process information at the speed of some meta-search engines. It may happen to some of us or all of us, at some point of time. But as life takes its course, we tend to overlook such dull moments and miss this rarest opportunity to something unconstructive. With a pleased smile, I’m proud to assert that, in the dullness of my last article, I did see an opportunity to pen something better if not interesting.
Imagine how unblessed is the dawn of today, that we have innumerable options for escapades, there is this infinite tool called the Internet to the rescue, then there is Television rolling 24-hours, not to forget the notorious Indian Media, which will never outrun the repetitive application of the adjective – stereotyped, to keep us off the boredom. But I will strongly resent the sentiment that sometimes Necessity alone is not the mother of invention, it has to be boredom. Sorry more appropriately put forward would be – “Often if not sometimes, discoveries are not a work of accidents alone, but an outcome of boredom as well”. Just wonder what the f*** was Sir Isaac Newton doing sitting under the tree, obviously getting bored when suddenly an apple fell and the gravity of the situation (read as boredom) accidentally made him discover the Law of Gravity.
So my advice folks, next time you come across a still-life world and a point of nothing-doing except being stuck in a rut, don’t bother taking up any conventional vocation such as the TV-remote or grabbing a keyboard & a mouse, rather let the feeling sink in deep down, until its excruciatingly boring, and Bingo! You will actually feel the creative juices flow... and then Eureka!!! You might find something that’ll make a lot of sense. By the way did I made any sense, with all that yap!
