A life without distraction
On a rather dull, uneventful and lonely Sunday I am posed with the most serious question i have faced in the past quite a few days. I wonder what is more directionless – a life with distractions or one without any at all. The seriousness of the question must have, by now, given you a fair idea of the rather staid and sedentary nature of my life.
This takes me back to those days spent with my parents in their house. Friends, cricket, TV, movies, girls, day dreaming, speeding my moped aimlessly, getting caught by hawaldars, learning to bribe them and sometimes learning to beg them, writing anonymous letters to girls i was interested in and ultimately settling for girls who were interested in me, staying up all night talking sweet nothings on the phone, setting up day –long dates a day before board exams, laying my hands on and then bragging about the latest porn flicks – these were the chief distractions during my days in school. These, my parents said, were responsible for making my life directionless and detracting me from carving out my own niche.
I graduated from school and thereby my distractions necessarily did the same as well. They graduated into the big league. With my moped and school-time sweetheart gone, now it was down to racing my motor bike, with the sauciest girl in college riding pillion. College politics, bunking classes, flunking papers, small-time brawls and nights spent in detention after beating up random hawaldars began taking up much more of my rather limited time. From enjoying the kick of winning bets of buying condoms from crowded medical stores to learning to use them, marked a paradigm shift in the league of my distractions. Ridiculing peers who still smoked cigarettes, egging them onto more senior stuff like hash, getting caught two-timing, resorting to crooked means towards maximising a rather limited cash flow from home, hunting for free passes to clubs were the high points of college –life. Parents and now even friends, at that point in time, began shooting off exponentially growing number of warnings against these distractions derailing me from direction in life.
Today, I am one of the lucky few around me who are happy with their jobs, I like to believe I’ve made a decent start to what people like to call a career, I can afford most things I couldn’t earlier and have quite a life in a city like Bombay. Yet I am faced with the most serious question I ‘ve ever faced - does my life have any more direction without all those distractions or is it those very distractions which gave direction to an otherwise rudderless , directionless life?
On a rather dull, uneventful and lonely Sunday I am posed with the most serious question i have faced in the past quite a few days. I wonder what is more directionless – a life with distractions or one without any at all. The seriousness of the question must have, by now, given you a fair idea of the rather staid and sedentary nature of my life.
This takes me back to those days spent with my parents in their house. Friends, cricket, TV, movies, girls, day dreaming, speeding my moped aimlessly, getting caught by hawaldars, learning to bribe them and sometimes learning to beg them, writing anonymous letters to girls i was interested in and ultimately settling for girls who were interested in me, staying up all night talking sweet nothings on the phone, setting up day –long dates a day before board exams, laying my hands on and then bragging about the latest porn flicks – these were the chief distractions during my days in school. These, my parents said, were responsible for making my life directionless and detracting me from carving out my own niche.
I graduated from school and thereby my distractions necessarily did the same as well. They graduated into the big league. With my moped and school-time sweetheart gone, now it was down to racing my motor bike, with the sauciest girl in college riding pillion. College politics, bunking classes, flunking papers, small-time brawls and nights spent in detention after beating up random hawaldars began taking up much more of my rather limited time. From enjoying the kick of winning bets of buying condoms from crowded medical stores to learning to use them, marked a paradigm shift in the league of my distractions. Ridiculing peers who still smoked cigarettes, egging them onto more senior stuff like hash, getting caught two-timing, resorting to crooked means towards maximising a rather limited cash flow from home, hunting for free passes to clubs were the high points of college –life. Parents and now even friends, at that point in time, began shooting off exponentially growing number of warnings against these distractions derailing me from direction in life.
Today, I am one of the lucky few around me who are happy with their jobs, I like to believe I’ve made a decent start to what people like to call a career, I can afford most things I couldn’t earlier and have quite a life in a city like Bombay. Yet I am faced with the most serious question I ‘ve ever faced - does my life have any more direction without all those distractions or is it those very distractions which gave direction to an otherwise rudderless , directionless life?
posted by Anish Basu Roy at 7:42 AM
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