Freedom or the lack of it...

There are times, when it starts with small petty issues, and before you even know it, things have escalated to such an unpleasant extent that you are left feeling pretty small yourself. So after two months of shifting to our dream home, two months of enjoying the domestic bliss, two months of freedom and late night banter, two months of what was only the beginning of a new journey, we encountered a pretty nasty surprise! Without getting into the petty details of what can only be described as materialistic oneupmanship, when a second hand fridge and a malfunctioning TV destroyed our peace of mind and embroiled us (my gutsy flatmate more than me… don’t know what I shall do without her) in a war of words, we were left defending ourselves against three random delivery men at 10 p.m. Yes, we did have “manpower”, but that doesn’t make it any less repulsive. Life throws you into all kinds of intricate complicated situations and if you manage to survive it, you take back some valuable lessons with you. In this case our learning essentially was that it is one thing to deal with uneducated crude people who try to take you for a ride and do so in an unpretentious way, and quite another to deal with sophisticated and articulate conmen- yes, the second is much tougher. It was no longer about rotten furniture anymore, but about trust, about rapport, about constantly being lied to and about credibility. “Unfortunate” as it, it is the unpleasant truth.

Anyway apart from the rendezvous with strange men late in the night, my life is pretty much boring; yes, I am eating out too much, yes, I barely get any sleep, yes, I no longer go jogging and yes, I am putting on weight and suffering from that familiar “I am so fat” feeling, but yes, it no longer makes me insecure because that extra 3 Kgs of lard is so worth it: yes, even that half asleep, half lost, sucking on an empty bottle retarded look! And yes, covering the whole spectrum from whether debit cards are accepted by Indian Railways to balloon decorations in our living room in a matter of five minutes at 3 a.m. when you are trying to stop yourself from crying as the 12-year old looks on with a smile may not be very interesting, but extremely demanding.

What with the swine flu panic spreading across the city, protection masks and closed multiplexes, the Independence Day weekend promises complete lack of freedom as we look forward to staying cooped up at home.

P.S. We have discovered that the theory of diminishing marginal utility doesn’t hold in case of alcohol… think about it!! I don’t know how it never struck me before…