Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | NXg | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest |

Funny muck-ups

There are so many ways to muck up things and get mucked up. Some things make us look dumb in our own eyes.

You can walk as, Prasad, a gentleman who often expounds on the problems of the world, recently did in his lane. As he walked past a compound wall he found himself hit with a neat pack of vegetable peelings and eggshells and goo…! Apparently, the lady inside had not perfected the timing of her throw-out. But then it’s not all planned like your wedding. Fighting back the impulse to strike back with a package of his own with a few rocks thrown in, he cools down and blurts: “We Indians have no civic sense. This is our problem. They just take the stuff and fling it out.” This guy was mucked up all over. You must be close to Dalai Lama in compassion not to cuss, bawl or brawl.

Or just as likely and as lucklessly, you might walk back home, as Rajesh, a student, after watching a second show movie. He fell into a ditch our venerable municipality guys dug for constructing drainage. What an idea to transport human beings without any pain! Our service men in telecom department or municipality have the solemnity of a funeral rite while digging trenches.

Recalling his paranormal experience in the ditch and the recovery that gave him his near-original anatomy he was born with, Rajesh, rues: “I was seeing it daily but still….”

Or you could muck up things like Praveen, a software developer, did with his PC. When many files started floating around, he started with a grand human intention of cleaning up the mess. He formatted the hard disk and felt cute. “I wanted important files and they are already gone,” he says, “I felt like a dumb ass doing it without backup.” It was, for him, a muck-up that ‘almost cost my job.’

In a bizarre twist of fate, old people regularly fall in the bathroom, which is tiled and kept clean, go to hospitals, and may or may not come back.

Or when you go along the road in a heavy downpour, our speeding drivers splash you with all the watery muck on the road. Or you could philosophize, like, ‘muck-ups are part of life’, or still better “the potter knows the value of the muck”.

You accept muck-ups as part of life because you have seen worse, or because you are mature enough to wash the muck off without burrowing into the details as to how the muck ended up on your face. You accept them because you have at least done that once to others what they are doing to you now. Or because you keep getting bopped, and there is pretty much nothing you can do about it.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail