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Tuesday 2 April 2013

Idiots guide to nothingness



This idea about the idiots guide to whatchamacallit has been swishing around in my head for a while now. The thing is, open the newspaper and there are a million advice columns there listing the “Ten ways to know your man is cheating”, “How to lose weight without losing your smile” and all this depending upon what season it is. When its valentine’s season, gods forbid if you are single, the advice columns are preachy enough to want to kill one self. If its summer, one is always too fat because everyone out there isn’t, and the favourite is relationship and life advice. If one is to take these advice columns seriously, then our men are always cheating, and whatever we have done, are doing or contemplate doing in the future is wrong, with a capital W.

Seems like there is no dearth of bullet points about how to life one’s life. In my fine country there are plenty of gods and ideologies to choose from about how to do things. If that’s not enough, then one just needs to type “How to” in Google, and it can explain everything from chewing your food right to attaining nirvana and sorting the afterlife.

When things are down in the dumps, and one acts the way one feels is right, or expects to be right, more often than not, such expectations are wrong. Now it’s not a static principle that our reactions or understanding of such situations will always be wrong. So we can’t read the advice columns because, well they are just god awful and terribly depressing! Cannot always count on friends because they are ruled by their own bias and being the same age group, their understanding of the situation wouldn’t be much different from one’s own. So what ought one to do? I thought about it and the following are a few fanciful suggestions:

  • People should come with an easy to read manual on how to deal with them and situations related to them. (This seems futile even whilst I am writing it, because of the cumbersome reading involved and well it is just impractical).
  • One should have a pixie thingi whispering to do the right thing when our words and actions are obviously doing the wrong thing.
  • We should enrol into a politically correct program which brainwashes us into neutral, proper beings.
  • Whence we are talking to the other person and obviously suffering from a foot in the mouth disease, the other should raise a tiny red flag and the intensity with which it is waived is proportional to the stupidity of our reactions.
  • One should learn from past mistakes and never ever make them again.
Now even I find the last one the most ridiculous option!

Fact of the matter is, there is no manual on how to deal with one’s life and situations. As perplexing as that is, one can create as much of a hue and cry as one wants, but there is really only one way (I believe) to actually deal with it. Hope. Hope that we might not fall as hard as before, hope that there will be someone to cushion the blow, hope that our mutual ability of looking past the mess ups and moving forward will not be in short supply.

So yes, it might appear that the rest of the world has figured it all right and has dotted the “I’s” and crossed the “t’s”, it is maybe not that bad an idea to stumble and fall, and maybe pick up a few pebbles of self-wisdom along the way.

Our own little lives cannot be tailored, or fashioned on the lines of cosmopolitan (God awful magazine), and maybe, because we continue to survive, our perspective cannot be all that wrong.

Hmmmm just maybe, at the end of it all, sick and tired of all the preaching and self criticism there is only one thing left to say..

2 comments:

  1. I wouldn't mind the reading involved with the manual!

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    Replies
    1. @ Anonymous- If it was comprehensive, Id probably do the same:)

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