Goldilocks and the three bears

There is a lot of fun in messing up with existing stories. To be sure, though, I am not too sure that I can do it here on my blog.

"Time to book a place in the cemetery and the old fool still plays around with fairy tales." I can almost hear you say that. So, what do you do when you have an urge that you cannot scratch? Find a place where you can.

Thankfully for me, my good friend 'The Fool' runs a blog - Three Realms of the mind - dedicated to Science Fiction and fantasy and is currently putting up a series of rewritten fairy tales. There I went to scratch my itch and this is the result.

Little Bear on Goldilock's Visit

Me? Lazy?

I am a much misunderstood man. Oh! I know! I know! Everyone is so busy running around to find someone to understand them that they cannot spare the time to understand me, but that still does not explain why they should misunderstand me instead of merely ignoring me. If they do have to waste time in misunderstanding me, why should they pick on what they call my laziness - merely because I do not complete any task on time?

The problem, you see, is that, by sheer coincidence, I always find so many other important things to do - on just the day when something has to be done - that it becomes impossible to do what I set out to do. Not my fault, and certainly not laziness, since I actually keep busy all day. The problem with people is that they are too quick to assume things about others and, invariably, to the other person's discredit.

Take today for example. I had decided to put together my tax return. I replaced my book in the bookshelf when my eyes caught an old whodunit. This one belonged to the era of the 'Butler-dun-it'. It has been a long while since I read any of that sort, since my tastes had somehow warped to think that a twist at the end was dissatisfying unless it arises logically out of the story. I have recently been convinced that my tastes are all wrong. Therefore, there was this irresistible urge to pick up that book and read it. Oh! I knew it was going to be the butler who 'done the murder' - since I had read it before - but I really had to read it for the sheer ingenuity with which the author introduces the butler into the story in Chapter 20, just in time to be unmasked as the murderer.

Three hours down the line, I finish this engrossing book and start for my computer to begin on the tax return. It strikes me that it is close to lunch time and I might as well finish lunch before I started on it. I switch on the TV to keep me company while I am eating. Can you believe it? I catch a rare movie just starting off on one of the channels. It has this absolutely unique plot line of a scary villain killing the parents, and brothers separating from each other with no more than a song to guide them back to each other in later life. How could I miss this piece of unique art merely for a mundane tax return, that could well be done later?

Four hours down the line and I cudgel my brains for what it was that I wanted to do in the morning. Can you believe it? I just could not recollect why I had thought that there was some work to be done today. Realizing that the best way was to allow the mind to let the thought surface on its own, I go on Facebook and let the world know how affected I was by the ad that kept popping up during the movie. Just as I was replying to the comments, up pops the memory - Tax return!

Now, whoever heard of doing tax returns at night? Maybe the guys who watch horror movies in the middle of the night would love the idea, but I am the conventional sort, who would wake up screaming in the night if I did anything so horrifying so close to sleep-time.

Tomorrow, I swear, that Tax return gets done. Meanwhile, stop calling me lazy, Ok? I have not been idling all day - I have read a book, watched a movie, written a FB status and even this blog post. What more do you want a man to do in a day?

Positively Rich?

Clad in a colorful wrapper, that luscious bit of chewy bubblegum beckoned me with a siren call. Alas, it was not charm that would draw it to me but only filthy lucre - a princely sum of 25 paise, which I did not have. What it would be to be rich and be able to buy bubblegum whenever you felt like chewing on one?

That about summed up my idea of being rich while at school. To be able to fulfill your wants and needs, as and when they arose; to put your hand in your pocket and not find that the coins in your wallet ran short of the price of what you needed to get. As an adult, I supposed I would still feel the same. My needs may transcend bubblegum but the feeling of being rich would be all about having enough to fulfill my needs and not having to do without things that I wanted.

Of course, it was a totally stupid idea. That stemmed from the fact that I thought that the 'positive' or base form of any adjective was all there was to it. Life, of course, taught me that it was the 'comparative' form that ruled the world. When someone says, "He is rich" about someone else, what he invariably means is that the other person is 'richer than' his own self.

The problem, though, is that we, as a species, specialize at comparing ourselves in a manner that makes us unhappy. We insist on feeling 'poor' by comparing ourselves with those 'richer' than us, except when we wish to make the other person feel unhappy by making him feel 'poorer'. So, we always have a crick in the neck, looking up at people who seem better off than us. So much so, people have to remind us of things like "I felt unhappy about having no shoes, till I saw someone with no feet". Though, I must say, that this urge to compare also seems to drive you to feel happy at other people's misfortunes - and make your contempt for them clear to them - merely to salve your own ego.

And, yes, there is also the climb towards the superlative. 'Richest man in town' etc. Though, since the superlative has been sliced and diced so much, even the 'richest' have other gradations of 'richest' to aspire to - like 'richest man in the country' all the way up to 'richest man in the world'. I suppose I am content with being the 'richest person in my house' and, since I am the sole occupant of my house, that's a cakewalk.

Even the 'positive' version of 'rich' is sullied beyond cleansing. So, if I feel rich when I can get whatever I want, I want all the things that will make me feel 'richer than' the next guy. He has a BMW? I need a Rolls Royce before I feel rich. He goes to Thailand for a vacation? I need to go to Zurich. So, now, you cannot even trust your own needs and wants - whether they arise out of what you feel you will enjoy OR whether you have trained yourself to enjoy only those things that make you feel comparatively richer.

Me? I never grew up. I feel rich because, now, I can buy all the 'bubble-gums' I want AND my tastes have nothing to do with the brand of 'bubblegum'. So, since I do not bother about being 'comparatively' or 'superlatively' rich, I suppose I could call myself  'positively' rich.

Meet and Greet?

It is not enough that you have to learn your so-called three 'R's (And, no-one has given me a satisfactory explanation for why they call Writing and Arithmetic 'R's, when they so clearly are not) and, then, muddle through college, picking up desultory bits of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics and other such obscure pockets of knowledge..no, it is not! Leaving the educational system, happy with the thought that what passes for your brain shall be taxed no longer is a sure recipe for disappointment if not disaster.

I should have known, though. After all, in Tamil we were used to greeting each other with a "Vanakkam", to which the reply was the same. Since that meant a sort of "Hello", it was perfectly all right to reply with a "Hello" or a "Hi". In English, they had this habit of asking, "How do you do?" or "How are you?" How was I to know that this was a question that had to be answered with the same question, instead of a detailed listing of all my bodily ailments? (Would have loved to extend the concept elsewhere - most notably interviews? How wonderful if the acceptable answer for 'Do you know why .......?' could be 'Do you know it?' Alas!)

And, then, I take up a job in Delhi. Around the second or third day there, when I had come to know people enough to greet them, I ventured a 'How do you do?' with one of my colleagues. He replies with a 'Bus aapki dua hai' i.e '(Am well) thanks to your wishes'! Having searched my memory and found no sign of my having wished anything for this chap (could not come up with even his name, now that I was searching my memory), I felt guilty. Here was this guy depending for his well-being on my wishes and I had let him down. Luckily for me, someone else interrupted us before I started abjectly apologizing for having failed him.

Luckily, did I say? I made the mistake of greeting the other guy with a 'How are you?' too and got "Bus aapke chatrachaye mein' for a reply. Huh! I dredged my memory to recollect the last time I was crowned - since the other chap meant that he was happy under my aegis - and could only come up with the information that I had even lost my crown of hair. Feeling that the other guy had mistaken me for a newly anointed Cabinet Minister, I was about to disabuse him of the notion when a third chap, who seemed to understand the look of bewilderment on my face, took me aside and explained that all these were to be taken at par with a return 'Vanakkam' in Tamil.

It did take a while to get adjusted to the situation for me. Things that Tamilians say to each other, only when they were close friends, flow easily and well from Punjabis even to rank strangers and rabid foes. Most of what makes it difficult to trust people across cultures seems to be the fact that all that you learnt of how to assess character from behavior - and how you assessed behavior, too - give you misleading results when applied on a person from a different background.

Back I am, in Bangalore and more familiar terrain? I accost a new made acquaintance and he comes out with 'Oota aayittha?'. Well - I have, by now, learnt that this 'Have you had your food?' is only the 'Vanakkam' of Tamil and not an invitation to a detailed description of what was on your plate in the morning.

AND, there are people who love going around the world? All power to them, I say, but let them first make their detailed guide-books before the rest venture out. Would hate to be beheaded for saying the wrong thing in reply to someone's greeting.