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The Issue: Not Going To Work

The Soundtrack: Santa Monica

I did a strange thing on Monday. I didn’t go to work. It wasn’t as if I had planned a picnic or a Dilli darshan or a long lunch with friends (most of whom had a chhutti thanks to Guru Govind Singh).I didn’t even have housework like clearing the junk from the study or overseeing window repairs (which I’ve been postponing for the last three years). I didn’t go to office simply because I didn’t want to meet people.

Sometimes, this notion of hermetically sealing myself off is so appealing that the very thought keeps me awake for hours at night. But the truth is that I’m a sucker for human company. Like going to sleep and going under the shower, I shudder at the thought of starting an evening with friends or acquaintances. But like once I’m asleep or under the shower, I’m loathe to end an evening with friends and acquaintances.

But on Monday I had set up things perfectly for a complete shutdown. Not only did I not make any plans with anyone, I didn’t consider making plans with myself (which isn’t what it sounds like but refers to activities like reading, writing or watching telly). Instead, I looked out of my bedroom window, scared the fornicating pigeons away with a particularly raucous-looking red broom, and then looked out of my bedroom window again to see a winter’s-coming sky from my seventh floor home. What made me sink inside a virtual tub of quiet joy was not so much the wonderful way in which the world was dressed up on a Monday, but the fact that my colleagues were at work ploughing away like farmers in the Gobi Desert.

It was such a strong and pure feeling that my trademark emotion of guilt was buried under the rubble of happiness. I proceeded to eat throughout the day and watch as many films on DVD as possible. In between an early lunch of sausages and left-over kakodi kababs (whose whole point of existence seemed at that point to be to enter my mouth and settle in my belly) and a late after-lunch of many other delightful things from the fridge (that included chocolates and fish cakes), I kept thinking of how the day was an ordinary one for those who had not had the good fortune of staying home and not doing their bit of making India the best economic country in the universe.

Well, I could have had a drink or two or three, but my mind was more sated by the song that I decided to listen to so as to fit my mood: Everclear’s Santa Monica. While the sea-less Mayurvihar in the east of north India is quite a distance away from the American west coast, the song pretty much summed up why I felt such a rush of happiness even without any help from a tab of Ecstasy or two. Each time I heard Art Alexakis shake out the chorus, We can live beside the ocean/ Leave the fire behind/ Swim out past the breakers/ Watch the world die, I realised two things: one, that I missed being close to a water body; two, that ‘watching’ the world suffer from atop my perch is quite an addictive spectator activity.

Today, of course, I’m back at work, still carrying some leftover of yesterday’s joyous quarantine. As I recall late last night, I realise that I was so impervious to the normal world that I didn’t even get down at around 2 o’clock at night in anticipation of the next day (today). Management rats will have some fancy term for this — ‘Recharging batteries’ or ‘Happy Take Outs’ or ‘Maximise Your Output Through a Temporary Outage’. But all I know is that by not stepping out of my house on a day that suggests the beginning of a labour cycle, I got the best front seats to watch a circus where I am a pretty competent clown.

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Posted by Indrajit Hazra on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 7:20 pm 
Filed under Music · Tagged Guru Govind Singh, housework, joyous quarantine, Management, Santa Monica, shutdown

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