Tuesday, May 3, 2011 (9.27am)

At the risk of intellectualizing everything and preventing my essence shine through, I must say that I am continually amazed at these people who are able to follow like cattle. Truly amazed. For example, when the attendance is taken at the first class of the day, when the instructor calls out the names, if someone answers “present”, he/she is told to say “Om” instead. Why? Because that’s how it is. Then at the end of the day, when we sit for the most glaring waste of time of ages – Yoga, Science & Consciousness, a subject which could be truly interesting if it wasn’t taught by a garrulous old fart who thinks he is the authority on everything and so uses the most disparaging tone to tell us how uninformed and doomed we are – where we are told that we should not move or turn are head or twiddle our pencils. Why? Because if we did, apparently, we would never be chosen at an interview for a management position!

Of course I have beaten to death the urge to tell the old fart that I’ve never failed at a single interview and I quit my job in a management position to drop off the face of the earth in the vain hope of never having to deal with garrulous old farts like him!

I realize I am being very rude, maybe even “violent”. But I honestly feel like it’s the least I can do to shake myself up from the stupor that threatens to engulf me here. Of course the reward for my pains is the tiny bald patch which seems to have sprung up out of nowhere above my left temple. But you know what? I would give all my hair to be bald and beautiful me rather than any of these fuzzes.

Sure they think I’m crazy the way I get all excited when someone tells me to do something that makes no sense and try to make them see the pointlessness of following such illogic (probably because they also think me a little odd seeing that I don’t clutter my room with cheap east Asian plastics or hideous Indian stainless steel vessels. But I live a fairly hand to mouth existence here and don’t see the point of hoarding so much that my already conservative room turns into a walk-in closet. But I am happy as hell and I intend to remain that way.

Today one of my classmates (the most sober of the lot and so I thought, the most sensible with the exception of Jin of course) returned a book I had lent him last week. It was Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger which is a truly remarkable book which very realistically portrays the life of the poor in India and their view of her development. He had found it too “violent” and therefore did not want to read it.

Now considering that he was one of those peppy Indian boys who is ordained by his proud parents to become a lawyer/doctor/(software) engineer and does so with all zest, I had hoped that he was not entirely lost since he had after all quit his job and taken up the study of yoga. But when he termed the book too violent, I just saw him as absurd as an ostrich. Well he can stick his head anywhere he likes. Violence is very much the reality of life, especially the life of the blindly growing Indian empire. And God save us all if this is not to the “taste” of this pretty excuse for a human being.