Chapter XXII: Does That Make Me a Bad Person?

If I can choose one word to describe how I've been feeling lately, it'd be "distracted". I've been no stranger to feeling like a scatterbrain all the time. My attention span for things unrelated to me is as short as my emotional range. So watch out, I have that "air of elsewhere" while you are confiding in me the darkest long-held secret from the shady nooks of your weary heart. I sure am nodding along, brother, but I'm really thinking about why the new Coldplay single isn't mushy enough to make me cry. Thankfully, the good part is that you'd never, for one lonely moment, imagine that I am not interested in God-Knows-What story you are narrating to me. That's my crown. I would still seem deeply engrossed and you'd think that I, perhaps, was the best listener to ever walk the face of this Earth. Well, thank you. But, tell me, does that make me a bad person?

I think the world is celebrating the wrong kind of people. Because I still am amazed that there is no award for ironing a cotton shirt to perfection. Not one! No trophy for the copious amount of time you spend on Facebook stalking people you have no chance of bumping into. Negligible recognition for forwarding cheeky pictures from Cyanide and Happiness on Whatsapp. Brother, now a lot of effort goes into these things as well, but they go as unnoticed as my entire week's hard-work does in the weekly status calls at work.

Now you might think that I am as committed to my job as my mother once was to Tulsi Virani, but the truth is far from it. My distractions are my demons, they are too well-ingrained and deep-rooted. I am certain that my onsite lead thinks that I attend all status calls heavily sedated because I always, ALWAYS, have to ask him at least once to repeat what he just asked me. Why? Because I was cribbing (Yes, I do that a lot, sometimes 18 hours a day) about being stuck at Level 96 of Candy Crush Saga while he was delegating some "important work" to me. I mean are you for real? You give me work when I was befuddled deciding which Facebook -friends wouldn't mind getting deluged with Candy Crush Saga Request Notifications to send me one life. Don't you know how huge that is? I don't appreciate your ignorance, dear bosses. When I can overlook your grammar errors and your obscene variations of spelling the word "come", this is the least you can do for me. I think my Appreciation Award is long overdue, messrs! Let's call it You-Got-Your-Priorities-Just-Right award.

Actually, the trouble is that motivation has never been too friendly with me. Abandoning me long ago, it's been only visiting me sporadically, injecting me with shots of unrealistic ambition that have gradually faded to ashes, yielding nothing. Motivation, you are even worse than Lupita Nyong'o's Oscar Acceptance speech. You and your cogent arguments at making me believe that my dreams are valid have begun to get my goat lately. What does it take for a man to take life at his own pace and not have you, with your inane expectations, pushing him around? Quit playing with me and feeding me your half-baked ideas. You are nothing more than a blinding force and it's extremely difficult to maintain friendship with you. I am better off alone, hanging around with my current best-friend Distraction, in my cocoon, smoking cigarettes and reveling in mediocrity. Whilst you leave, also take Guilt along with you.

Guilt is my nosey neighbour that keeps visiting and says things that leave a bad taste long after it has departed. Now the question is: What could I feel guilty for?  Skipping the first birthday of my adorable nephew, who each day is growing into this inexplicably cute baby polar-bear walking around the room taking such tiny jumpy steps. I tell you, my sister has put a lot of pressure on me. Now, this self-professed war to make the cutest kids in the family is something I take very seriously. But the competition is killing me! One look at Neil, and I know I better settle with being second to best. Because, let's face it, the odds are not in my favour. To me he is the cutest. About winning that war, my chances are slim. Grimly slim.

More guilt is seeping in from the fact that I haven't read something exceptional in a very long time.  That feeling is worse than what I felt after my sister took digs at me at my Adlabs Imagica trip this January. You know, how you mock those people onboard for being such loud wimps only until you sit in one of those rides! I cannot clearly recall the experience of the first ride that I took because I had my eyes shut for the entire duration of 90 seconds and I felt as if I had defecated in my pants. In that moment it dawned on me that those loud people were loud because they were enjoying the ride and I figured who the real wimp was. It was like either my vocal cords suffered a complete failure  or there was a giant lump in my throat suffocating me. But let me assure you that my insides were screaming the loudest. Finally, I did loosen up after three-four rides but in those pictures they take in the roller coasters just before the steep plunge, I looked like I had seen The Grim Reaper. I remember how my sister's kids would run to the screen to look at their pictures and I would excuse myself with "Hey, I suddenly feel thirsty, where's the nearest water cooler?" See, I run away from problems instead of facing them.

I have at least a dozen more issues. Somehow shutting the world out comes easy to me. When my parents want me to call them twice everyday without fail, I don't see the love hidden beneath the request. I see it as something binding, which is what irks me. I feel stifled whenever someone asks me to do something. Especially when asked repeatedly, there's a buzzer that goes in my brain. Loud deafening beeping! It's not healthy. Then, my friends are the best I can ever have, and I am lucky to have befriended them because they have to deal with a mercurial, foul-mouthed and perennially-unhappy grown man who would act over-jovial one minute and then soon would be cursing the concept of living and spewing acerbic comments about everything. Hi, that's me. I could be an undiagnosed bipolar.

So remaining in context, shutting out comes really easy to me. I could be telling you about my life's story yesterday and I would quit talking to you starting today thinking I had divulged too much or that I find your company restricting in some way. I have this insurmountable urge to break free and I then cease to imagine how this impulsive crack-head decision of mine would affect you. I am supremely cold and I never get to thinking that far in my quest towards my "freedom".

You know, after my very good friends left Hyderabad and my old flat-mates and I fragmented, I learnt to do everything all alone. I call that part of myself as Dora The Explorer. I travel alone on weekends, take wrong bus routes or get off a few stops before I should have just to be somewhere new and then walk to wherever I was supposed to go. Travelling alone has led me to meeting quite a handful of interesting people whom I would have never struck up a conversation with, had I not been travelling alone. Conversations with strangers are always charming, until you tell about them to your mother. Then they suddenly turn deadly and dangerous. Mothers have an innate behavioral pattern of assuming that if there's anything devastating that can happen in the world, it will happen to her child far away. How I just love mothers.

From watching movies alone, to going for dinner, to shopping, to discovering roadside dhabas, to baffling security guards when I give them a disarming (I take the liberty to call it that) smile or to exploring new parts of the city- I do it all alone. It amuses me how an innocuous  smile would bewilder them and only rarely get reciprocated whereas avoidable things like a useless altercation on a traffic signal with an auto-rickshaw driver would go on and on.

And if I may say, the movies that I have gone alone for have been the best times I have spent in any movie hall. I prefer alone, because that eliminates the overhead of asking everyone you think is tangentially interested, then get tickets booked and finally call it " the plan". I detest that kind of dependency of my plans on someone else. Or disruption of my routine, however worthless, by someone else's presence. It's not something I am particularly proud of. I can foresee the consequences but it's too hard to change, and I haven't got a reason weighty enough, as yet.  

This is why my friends have christened me Desi Sheldon for this weird obsession with having control of everything I do. It's very wrong and petty that if something belongs to me, I cannot tolerate that thing to be around someone else even for a nanosecond. I don't care if it is my water bottle, an A4 sheet I just got from the stationery or my reclining chair at work that I adjusted just to suit my needs. At that moment, you might tell me that I won a free trip to NASA but all I'll be thinking about is my water bottle that shouldn't be on your desk!

I am emotionally constipated or unavailable or whatever you call it because I couldn't care less. Nothing comes close to how I feel when someone touches my plate. That instant indescribable disgust! Brother, while you reach for the crispiest edge of my samosa, let me tell you that you are inadvertently pushing my mind off the edge of good behaviour and sanity. You are pressing all the wrong buttons, unknowingly. If you want it that bad, go get it, the world is full of crispy samosas. It's simple, there's no abracadabra to that!

I often like to think of myself as a Holier-than-thou soul who has a cutting opinion about everything insignificant, pretty much like that protagonist from the Catcher in the Rye. I am an ever-grumbling, insensitive garrulous load of horse-excreta. Undoubtedly, I have a wild list of things that get my goat and I may be acting all judgmental about them right now but I am sure I have participated in them once myself. One of those things is "stereotypes".

Stereotypes kill me. They really do. Whenever people say that they couldn't figure that I am a Punjabi, it kills me. Mister, you sound like a narrow-minded sexagenarian. And what do you mean I am not a Punjabi? Oh, I see. Of course, I am no Punjabi. Because I am calm and too hard to provoke. There's no Punjabi without a temper. I can't fight or own a "Bult" or be a gymnasium enthusiast. My arms are stick-thin and not the size of your thighs. My built screams of the dearth of Desi ghee that should have gone down my throat. My paunch isn't quite up to the mark. I doubt if anyone's ever heard me yell. They can't even hear me when I am over the phone. Go figure! I am not an overly jovial personality with a tongue that has expletives on its surface, ready to be dropped like bombs. I can't even talk in Punjabi without sounding like someone from Bihar attempting it. My nickname is nothing similar to Bunty, Shunty, Billa, Shampy or Pinka. In fact, I don't even have a nick-name. My grammar and diction are pretty tolerable and do not evoke laughter. I eschew drinking, so that eliminates any chances of getting me drunk at a party and on account of my "drunk behaviour" me being the butt of jokes at all the parties after that. It's just that I am Punjabi, but I'm just not fun.

I don't appreciate these labels. Stereotypes. They are confining and suffocating. Who let you decide? I am not trying to conform to an ideal. I am unfazed and unapologetic about it and way more comfortable in my skin than I ever was. To the world: Go ahead and judge me. I'm unapologetic about it because that is who I am. And honestly, I find solace in them christening me Sheldon (although I barely know who he is or whether his antics are as infuriating) because it makes me feel that I am not the only one. It's a validation. I have lived my life seeking validations for my actions and behaviour. I never understand why. 

There are some questions that are not so straightforward to answer, like what reason can you attribute to men's irrepressible urge to spit out in the urinal after they are done. It's inexplicable. Similarly, does all of that make me a bad person? That's one question that I often keep asking myself. It's inexplicable too. For all I know, even if I end up alone, I will still be in the best company ever. For one can never find anyone as companionable as oneself.