Weighty matters

I can only blame the British for this. I mean, we were going along rather nicely with a sufficient surplus of languages and they had to come in and add one more to the mix. What is worse, the damned language that  they saddled us with has converted what were seen as positives into negatives. So, instead of feeling proud of how I look, I need to skulk around and look shame-faced when I am espied.

When someone says, "Ah! Suresh is here" a few seconds before I actually enter a room, I used to take it as clairvoyance. It is only a shade later that it struck me that my belly makes an entrance much before I do. Now that used to be a matter of pride - after all, in Hindi they say, "Sehad ban gayi aapki" ("You have become healthier") when you manage to bolster your waist. Of course, they also used to say, "Kamzor ho gaye ho" ("You have become weak") when you lost weight which adds to the impression that it is good to gain weight. Of course I rarely had to hear the latter insult. Life would have been happy and I would have been proudly strutting around but for this idiotic English which contributed words like 'Obese' and invested them with so much contempt that I make apoplectic efforts to suck in my stomach and merely manage to look dyspeptic in addition to obese.

Not that the absence of English alone would have been sufficient to avoid this sort of inversion of viewpoints. Human beings are an irrational species and very seldom maintain consistency. There I am eating just about as much as the next guy, doing just about as much physical exertion (which is next to nothing for both of us) and very seldom miss on adding a couple of inches around the waist every year. There is that next guy who proudly claims to be able to eat as much if not more than me and still remains painfully thin. People end up giving him admiring and envious looks while they reserve their pitying looks for me. Can you think of that happening in motorbikes, say? I mean if both of us were bikes and if you filled the tanks in both and rode us for the same distance and if one bike's tank is empty and the other still had something left do you not consider the latter bike as more efficient than the former? Why is fuel efficiency more laudable in bikes and held in contempt in humans - merely because the presence of the saved fuel is registered by a comfortable roundness around the waist? Absolute proof of irrationality let me assure you.

Nowadays I can hardly enter any social atmosphere without people thrusting diet options on me. If at least one of them sounded savory it would have been nice. Unfortunately, all of them sound so dismal and so like starvation that I end up gorging on everything that I can lay my hands on merely to drive away the nightmare visions of utter deprivation that those diet plans evoke in me. The net result is I add an inch around the waist in jig time thanks to diet plans. I would not be so concerned about that matter but for the impact it has on my wallet. Changing wardrobes once every six months does not come cheap - and the result is that most of my T-shirts look like the blouses that women have stopped wearing. Thank God I am not married or I would have been accused of wearing my wife's discarded blouses to parties.

The sheer injustice of this matter weighs heavily on my mind - almost as heavily as all the stored energy weighs on my lower back - and I am sure to revisit the matter again. Meanwhile, will you guys please  strive to understand that when you look on an obese person what you are probably seeing is a more efficient engine than you. Unless, of course, you already know and all your cheesy comments arise out of mere envy.