Late winter becomes tricky in this place. The much needed rains either overwhelm the weather forecast or totally elude us, giving subtle jitters about a potential water shortage in the warmer months. This year, the nature gods are in a mood of giving. The incessant rains kind of remind me of what my London bred friend once said about the weather out there. "It is grey all the time, so grey that it gets to you" I seem to resonate with that "getting to you" sentiment right now - as the late winter tricks of the trade unfold themselves inside and out and a strong flu strain does the rounds.
It is an interesting combination, to have wet, 'seasonal active disorder' inducing scenes spread outside as a flu bug takes over the insides of you, quiet literally, making you run to the nearest over the counter aisle, filling in the shopping cart with all possible remedies to combat the bug. Hot tea brewing in copious amounts to be used as the drainex equivalent to unclog the congestion and just like that, a couple of days slip by where you do nothing, or rather not have the energy to do anything. It is in such instances that I remember the Telly, the piece of electronics that doesn't get its due in this household, thanks to the inability of yours truly to sit in a place for periods longer than fifteen minutes. The headache didn't allow me to focus too much on the reading material that seems to just multiply in the dark, thanks to the all powerful Amazon prime, where gratification of thumbing through the book you fancy is just a few clicks away. Amid all this sensory overload, I finally get to sync Prime videos to the telly - after being a prime patron for a period of years that I lost count of.
When I enter the wonderland of prime videos, I feel a little dazed at the sheer enormity of this whole thing. Talk about being a frog in the well and being blissfully unaware of all the happenings of the world out there. It takes me no time to realize that Prime videos kind of puts Netflix to some sort of complex and I mentally get a grip over the giant that Amazon has become. "No wonder" I say to myself. "Jeff deserves it." I flip the up and down arrows to explore all there is, periodically clicking on a title to see if it entices me enough to punch the "watch" button. The list seems to be daunting - near exhaustive so to speak, that going through the titles and log lines constitutes of some sort of a prelude to the entertainment I was seeking. As my grey cells skim through the choices, a background thread of the good old Doordarshan days make a flash in my mind's eye. The way we used to flock around the television to get a fix of the Saturday's regional and the Sunday's Hindi movies respectively. A sizable portion of a whole nation used to plan their weekends around these two features and what ever was offered, irrespective of the quality or the watachability of the content, used to be consumed. Amusingly, I saw how the abundance of the the millennia that I so often rant about in my mind while raising my kids also gets into the lives of the co-existing gen x veterans like me. I for once, sense how too much of something can be deterrent to happiness first hand. We seem to have one too many of every possible choice out there, that it numbs and desensitizes us to the vastness of our own resources.
I couldn't really watch much on prime, partly due to that antsy condition I am born with which doesn't allow me to sit still for long, that goes hand in hand with the inability to look at movies and TV as a part of entertainment. I think there is a weirdo in me that cannot seek to be entertained. The weirdo demands food for thought. I did end up watching a movie - The words. Who could resist a title like that? and a ponder over that experience demands another entry here in my lonesome virtual mindspace, wherein I type what Anne Lamott calls the "Shitty first drafts" without a single care. There isn't a need to sound smart, or a want to be understood - now that is liberating, among the many curses of the modern life, upon which I intend to ponder in the coming days.
It drives home a very important lesson for me. That simplicity is a talisman that unlocks a peaceful, content life. The less things, the more clarity. No wonder, back in the day, the blessed day of moderation, our predecessors led lives much different than ours. It is probably just on the solid ground of the mantra of needing less and living more.
