Humour Armour!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 There must be a hidden sense of humour in this.... am quite convinced that there is.... whoever, I have narrated this to.... the reactions have ranged from a grimace, to a smile, to a burst of laughter... and I fail to understand why... so, either my ability to notice and acknowledge humour is lost OR worse still, never had one in the first place...

So, the jest started with my driver who attempted to reverse my new vehicle ( a very expensive one) by looking at the side mirrors... he had seen me accomplish that successfully; and obviously was upset that he found it tough to do so without having to turn his body at an angle of 90 degree, crane his neck over the drivers chair, and (not to forget) quickly calculate the distance between the car and the pillar and the wall. Well, he tried, failed and the result was a depletion in my vitamin M (money)..... the so called 2nd free service was hardly free... the service station welcomed me, the mechanic smiled at me, and my life came to a screeching halt on looking at the bill ... Anyways, this was just the beginning of a day in my life which would seem to unfold unlimited reasons for people around me to giggle.... and I was the only one far from being tickled...

Clearly, I shoudn’t have displayed my ability to reverse my vehicle without having to crane my neck.... If I had adopted the acrobatics that my driver uses day on day, I wouldn’t have been spending so much time in the gym or on those innumerable massages that promised me a slim waistline!!!!! A twist of my waist, a turn of my neck would have ensured a slimmer ME and a FAT pocket.......

AND then I go and narrate it to a colleague who responds with “you mean women can park a car using the mirror?????”..... and that was funny???? Coz the sentence is punctuated with a LAUGH... and so do some of my women colleagues... So, are they laughing at his remark, my depleted bank balance, or at themselves??? I am confused!!!!!!

The point being - there is a framework that we seem to be all operating in... my driver is supposed to be more adept than me, my colleague believes that as a gender there is a WAY in which I will always operate, and myself of course, reacting to a so called bigotry (and I choose to call it bigotry coz it sounds advantageous to me ....)

A series of events... starting with my car, my colleagues reaction and then with a friend who raises an objection at work to the kind of humour that is depicted at an official gathering. .. She was ‘objectified’!!! And the men apologise - ”if you find it insensitive, we apologize”...

IF - the word endorses a hypothetical situation... the event is not hypothetical, the humour is for real, the bigotry is glaring... and the word IF dangles! All hell let loose, leaders upset.... it is the event and the starkness of the bias that one is NOT SUPPOSED to harbour that enrages all... and all efforts made to ensure that the ‘right’ message is flaunted....a series of warnings!!!!! There is laughter at the crass sense of humour and a repleted smile at actions taken and my colleague is beaming - All’s well that End’s well!!! A Shakespearean end to a corporate drama.

And I am all the more confused! What sense am Isupposed to make of this???

There must be some sense in this action ..... Warnings to eradicate bigotry!!!!! Admonitions to ensure that we respect women! And all this done and finally laid to rest with a smile of satisfaction... Judgement given, jury dismissed..... A Hamletian comedy of errors! Imagine, Hamlet voicing ‘to be or not to be’ and his twin miles away trying to just understand the word BE and then attempting to translate it into her every day existence.... one confused between options, the other not sure if there is an option at all...

There was a time when I was aware that there were issues that one dealt with ... and I was then convinced that the issue in such instances was far more fundamental and therefore could not be addressed by speaking TO the event. We had to look at what 'drives' the event - a thought process! There was a time when I thought I knew what the thought process was... today, I don’t....

For an entire race to look at an event and pass a judgement - there must be something that drives them to do so....and this entire race cannot be suffering from myopia .... and if there is a sense of comfort in being myopic, then there must be a sense of humour fraught in it.... a sagacity that I have not been privy to! And, I am calling it a sense of humour as I am convinced that “the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humour in it” - sayeth Frank A Clark who ministered thousands of people through his one panel newspaper cartoons......

There is a problem...can someone VOICE it for me... and even more fundamentally, find the right words to voice it... and then find the humour in it.... and please even explain it to me... coz I seem to be the only lonely confused sole amongst the laughing souls!!!!!

Weaving a diary of words....

I learnt a new word today ... velleity, meaning “a mere wish, unaccompanied by an effort to obtain it”.... And as if there were these amazing linkages that the world has in store for you, the mere word triggered the thought of an uncle of mine who was a palmist and would often read my hand whenever we used to visit his place in Mumbai... and tell us of the wondrous days that was in store for us. I would on my way back as a young girl look at my palms and wonder where the words were written... and back we would go to him again months later and the process would start all over again.... seemingly telling us that the writing on the palm may have changed or perhaps have changed. Was it the soap that I used? A simple question for a 10 year old.... but a question that hasn’t gotten answered as yet.

And today, when I heard the word ‘velleity’, it was like going back to one of those moments when I asked my uncle if I would get all that I wished for (am sure there was something objectified there... and am assuming that a young girl could have limited her wishes then to dolls, books, nail polish... or the like... things would have been different though)... he smiled, and heaved a sigh, (the sigh was more like the puff of cigarette smoke that emanated from his mouth when he would step out to smoke... and all of us would stealthily go to watch him smoke)... well, he heaved a sigh and said “ if you really want something, and want it strongly, the mere power of the desire will get you to your destination”..... I have often wondered what that meant and it was more like those dialogues that you listen to in movies, that stay with you.... some driven with powerful feelings, a few by its potent words, and many a times by the prevailing presence of the artiste...

The feeling of wanting was the same always through the years.... the direction changed though... books, cosmetics, travels, clothes, person / people you longed to be with.... and as always the power of the desire stayed the same....Some desires satiated, some not so .... And one wonders if those insatiated cravings were due to the frailty of its very nature... is there a measurement for it at all? Working in a corporate world, one gets conditioned to measuring everything... or perhaps it is the Indian mind so obsessed with the power of the zero that we get attuned to deal with ambiguities.... unravelling the power of null that plays its central role in all mathematics.... So is the null / the zero / the absence of wanting something so integral to what we term as the SUM of life...

So whether it is the power of the zero, or the knowledge that Velleity exists, guess I have today gained strength from what the late Harivanshrai Bachchan once told his son ...”Man ka ho to achha, man ka na ho, to aur bhee achha”....call it velleity, or not..... I am satiated with what exists and also not exists.... the power of the word I guess... you learn one word and that triggers a range of thoughts .....