Random Enigmas : The Addiction

By: Thejas on 1:29 PM

Addiction is bad. What ever the substance may be. Addiction can never yield anything productive. But addiction may not always be alcohol, tobacco or cocaine. People get addicted to tea, to exercise, to road , to rain, to cellphone, even to work, who we euphemize as "workaholics" .

 In the 12 Step program of the Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step in de-addiction is to accept that you have an addiction. So here goes, Yes. I'm addicted to reading. And don't take it lightly, it has all the symptoms of any addiction, the craving, the fidgeting, the pleasure of devouring it slowly and the withdrawals. But its manifestations are more on a psychological level rather than physical.


 How do you realize that you are a reading additict, you ask?

•  First of all, you cant stop buying books even though you have a million unread books at home. Be it book stores,online stores, second hand stores, flea markets, Higgin Bothams, railway vendors or libraries, you can never say no to a book. 
• You read multiple books simultaneously. At any given point in the space-time continuum you are reading five books and have another 17 on queue. And this is an eternal queue. As soon as you finish one, you start with two others.
•  The craving is also a substantial clue. When the package you ordered gets delivered, you mind gets flooded with a dopamine induced excitement. You dont open the package in a hurry, you first finish all your chores and then take the package and slowly take a knife to slice open the packing tape, trying to conserve the original box. Then you take out and read the invoice first trying to understand the taxation and logistics info written on it and finally you extort the book from the bosom of the cardboard box and take in the enchanted fragrance of ink on cheap paperback pages and your mind has orgasmic convolution. You slowly start reading the acknowledgement and abstracts and all sorts of tiny scribblings  before finally delving into the realm of the story.

 Reading is truly a magical experience. One that is too good to be put in words(there is the irony for you). But it seems funny to me that the 2600 paged text books never seems so appealing, even though physically its of the same composition, it lacks in a certain miracle, that is what we call the "soul" of a book. Now the only question that remains to be answered is , Are u an addict?

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The Middle Class : My Twisted Perception

By: Thejas on 2:12 PM

This is a true incident. Mother promise.


So I was lingering inside LuLu Hyper market, Kochi, about three weeks back, Just looking at random shit, thinking about the miracles of this universe (as everybody does). All I wanted was some sugar and I could have got that from a gazillion shops stretching  my apartment to Lulu, but it was a Friday and I needed to do something different . My pace was snail-y and I was really observing every aisle to spot the "ISRAELI" products, which seems to be quite the trend now -_-.

Then suddenly a family caught my attention. It was a three person family. We have the mother, a woman who could well be a representative of the hundreds of slightly dark " കൊച്ചി വീട്ടമ്മ ", who was (unfortunately)  dressed in jeans and a top which very obviously was not her usual choice of clothing. And  on top of her head she quite ornamentally  draped a pair of the very cheap Fort-Kochi-branded-"RayDan"-sunglasses. Then we had the father. The quintessential dhothi-clad aam admi, who could have easily been an employee of KSEB or Village office. He seemed totally oblivious to fact that he was encapasulated in the grandeur of the mighty Lulu. And finally we have the daughter a little girl of I'd say 9-12 years, who was dumbfounded by the entire resplendence. 


Now the reason why I, and a vast majority of people there, started noticing this family is because of the loud conversation between the mother and daughter. Well, the mother was scolding the daughter in broken and quite frankly pathetic English. When the daughter started retaliating , the mother screeched in a jarring stridency, "You the Talk in the English Only"[read in heavy Malayalam accent]. So now the daughter was looking at her like "Are you bloody  serious?" and the father was looking at her like "Somebody please kill me now". At first they had my curiosity But now they had my attention. I had many doubts, may be they where not malayalis, may be she was her English teacher, may be we are all living in  the matrix. Anything was possible.



But just moments later I found out they were proper malayalis, Proper Kochikar. And She was not her english teacher. And Not shockingly, we are not living in the matrix(yeah, that was a longshot). She was just another victim of the ring of inferiority  that Lulu has brought to the lifestyle of Kerala

.

Lulu is indeed the biggest commercial enterprise that has ever existed in kerala, and if the internet statistics is to be believed it is the Largest Shopping mall in South  Asia. So its inevitable that "The butterfly effect" will come to play.(for those who dont know, the butterfly effect, derived from the chaos theory, is the idea that even something as small as a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world may have unprecedented repercussions in another part.) 

Egotistically speaking, what Mr. M.A. Yusuf Ali, who by the way is a genius, has done is that he has boldened the line between the rich and the poor. Earlier people only knew that  the rich shopped at Tissot and Hugo Boss, but now the materialists among the common men(and woman) could see it, feel it  just from feets away, yet it still is a unattainable Atlantis.  This could very well plunge people into what psychologists call a materialistic depression( okay fine, I just made that up -_-). 

But still this appeals to the very competitiveness that is instinctively human. We are always comparing and judging the people around us to decide who is the alpha male or female (thank you Simon Sinek). "He is smarter than you. He is cuter than you. She is a better driver than you". We are constantly being judged and our-self judging to sort people and place them in the correct slot of the social hierarchy. So in a world where money is one of the forms( if not the biggest) of showing one's dominance,  a sudden display of wealth is a shot of dopamine and instantly makes the "displayer" feel above the audience. That is why all the brands put their logo on the OUTSIDE! They are no good on the inside now are they? :) This ultimately causes people to mimic the lifestyles of people who they are not,  leading to incidents as above.

Now, I'm not criticizing the people who want to raise their standards. Its only human to think of moving up the social ladder. But this probably wasn't the "Empowerment of the Middle class"  that the architects of our constitution had in mind.  Raising standards of the middle class should be an organic process, and any catalyst would be an deleterious influence on this metamorphosis. Its like drinking a whole bottle of syrup in one gulp to cure a cough. Not a very bright idea.

Then again, if you are not really a materialist bloke, You dont really give a damn, now do YOU??

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