When you are depressed......
I am feeling low and depressed. The shiny black casing of my laptop, aesthetically delightful most of the times, is not helping matters either. Worse, there is no particular reason for this. Something happens at times, and that is it. I should have realised that gloom was in the air when I called it a day at the college, early around seven, sacrilege by ACJ standards. Once I reached the hostel, there was no doubt at all. I was feeling lousy. Don’t even know where to start.
There was nothing wrong with the day. Actually it was one of the better days. No morning classes meant more sleep and this is always a good beginning. What followed was much like any other day. Boring lectures, people always making you aware of the weight of the ever piling assignments, most of which are pointless exercises, a few wisecracks here and there with persons who still cannot be called friends but are not strangers either. Library, computer lab, canteen and the terrace, back and forth between them; to sum it up another day like the many that have come and gone in the past month and a half. But by seven, gloom had sunk its daggers deep somewhere.
These random, whimsical periods of sadness have always disturbed me. They follow no reason or logic; spare you when you are expecting them, startle you when you are not and leave in the same inscrutable way they had arrived. But during the period you are in their spell, you don’t really know what to do. Everything around you makes you sure that it is there just to make you feel miserable. Even small inconsequential things like coins scattered where you usually scatter it, assumes an overbearing presence just to bug you. All of a sudden you realise what a mess your room is, even though it is always like this. The “ordered disorder” of things around you, which you often proudly proclaim as something that heightens your creativity, appears unsettling to you now.
A patch of dirt at some corner of your room, which you blissfully see but still not see everyday, now acquires a profound karmic metaphysical significance. You start believing that it shows everything that is wrong with you and your life, what a loser you are and god knows what not, just because you refused to acknowledge its presence. To top all this you start analysing all this from a post modern pre colonial post structuralist, existentialistic perspective. Reality, hyper-reality, mediated society and other “truths” of this ilk jostle for space in your already- by- now-bonkers mind. God! It strikes you that all the drivel they force feed you in college everyday is finally taking its revenge on your till now uncluttered, ignorant but blissful mind. Damn the armchair-scotch-cigar-executive class traveling, brand of Marxists, Bolsheviks, Maoists, Stalinists you come across everyday in college for making you such a degenerate!
You try to find a way out from all this sadness in the world. So, you call your friends, who even at the best of times leave no stone unturned to tell you what a jerk and a good for nothing person you are. But by now you are desperate. Your muddled mind even then tries to tell you the almost certain futility of any redemption from of your friends. You are definitely not thinking straight so you dismiss your inner voice as some kind of hyper reality and bravely call your friends. Here is what happens. The first one is busy in some corner seat of some multiplex with his girlfriend (decidedly not watching the movie), he answers the call after an eternity and tells (yells) you to go to hell and that after the performance? is over he may just call you and again yell at you for having such a lousy sense of timing. By now, jittery and fast losing your mind, you try your not-so-great luck with another friend. He answers on the second ring and you are already on cloud nine! He tells you curtly, with a butchers’ knife sharpness of a voice that, “can you please call me after half an hour, am waiting for whatever the damn girlfriend’s name is call”. You fall as quickly as you had floated up.
You have now lost it and are in the grip of some primeval necrophilic urge. As you are wondering whom to kill- your friends, their girlfriends or yourself, you gather whatever remnants of courage you can find in your by now battered soul and call this last friend. He answers the call and cheerfully asks about your love life, girlfriend, et al and you want to hang up before you even say a word. Now, you surely want to kill yourself! It also fortifies your long held belief that friends are there only to screw your happiness.
It is the end of the road. There is nothing else that you can do. So after getting to know that your life sucks, friends are useless, so is college, you room is some kind of a garbage bin, so is your mind, your love life is non existent but not your friends’ and that you have just written a supremely bad piece you try to sleep over everything and make tomorrow the sole repository of all your faith. Tomorrow is different story and may be you will get to know about it at some other time…..
There was nothing wrong with the day. Actually it was one of the better days. No morning classes meant more sleep and this is always a good beginning. What followed was much like any other day. Boring lectures, people always making you aware of the weight of the ever piling assignments, most of which are pointless exercises, a few wisecracks here and there with persons who still cannot be called friends but are not strangers either. Library, computer lab, canteen and the terrace, back and forth between them; to sum it up another day like the many that have come and gone in the past month and a half. But by seven, gloom had sunk its daggers deep somewhere.
These random, whimsical periods of sadness have always disturbed me. They follow no reason or logic; spare you when you are expecting them, startle you when you are not and leave in the same inscrutable way they had arrived. But during the period you are in their spell, you don’t really know what to do. Everything around you makes you sure that it is there just to make you feel miserable. Even small inconsequential things like coins scattered where you usually scatter it, assumes an overbearing presence just to bug you. All of a sudden you realise what a mess your room is, even though it is always like this. The “ordered disorder” of things around you, which you often proudly proclaim as something that heightens your creativity, appears unsettling to you now.
A patch of dirt at some corner of your room, which you blissfully see but still not see everyday, now acquires a profound karmic metaphysical significance. You start believing that it shows everything that is wrong with you and your life, what a loser you are and god knows what not, just because you refused to acknowledge its presence. To top all this you start analysing all this from a post modern pre colonial post structuralist, existentialistic perspective. Reality, hyper-reality, mediated society and other “truths” of this ilk jostle for space in your already- by- now-bonkers mind. God! It strikes you that all the drivel they force feed you in college everyday is finally taking its revenge on your till now uncluttered, ignorant but blissful mind. Damn the armchair-scotch-cigar-executive class traveling, brand of Marxists, Bolsheviks, Maoists, Stalinists you come across everyday in college for making you such a degenerate!
You try to find a way out from all this sadness in the world. So, you call your friends, who even at the best of times leave no stone unturned to tell you what a jerk and a good for nothing person you are. But by now you are desperate. Your muddled mind even then tries to tell you the almost certain futility of any redemption from of your friends. You are definitely not thinking straight so you dismiss your inner voice as some kind of hyper reality and bravely call your friends. Here is what happens. The first one is busy in some corner seat of some multiplex with his girlfriend (decidedly not watching the movie), he answers the call after an eternity and tells (yells) you to go to hell and that after the performance? is over he may just call you and again yell at you for having such a lousy sense of timing. By now, jittery and fast losing your mind, you try your not-so-great luck with another friend. He answers on the second ring and you are already on cloud nine! He tells you curtly, with a butchers’ knife sharpness of a voice that, “can you please call me after half an hour, am waiting for whatever the damn girlfriend’s name is call”. You fall as quickly as you had floated up.
You have now lost it and are in the grip of some primeval necrophilic urge. As you are wondering whom to kill- your friends, their girlfriends or yourself, you gather whatever remnants of courage you can find in your by now battered soul and call this last friend. He answers the call and cheerfully asks about your love life, girlfriend, et al and you want to hang up before you even say a word. Now, you surely want to kill yourself! It also fortifies your long held belief that friends are there only to screw your happiness.
It is the end of the road. There is nothing else that you can do. So after getting to know that your life sucks, friends are useless, so is college, you room is some kind of a garbage bin, so is your mind, your love life is non existent but not your friends’ and that you have just written a supremely bad piece you try to sleep over everything and make tomorrow the sole repository of all your faith. Tomorrow is different story and may be you will get to know about it at some other time…..
posted by Saurav | 9:40 pm
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