Humour: Beware the difficult route

It’s been hard work, but I’ve finally managed to shake it off. This crippling readerly flaw that masquerades as a virtue. I developed it in my early teens, with the zeal of a literature student determined to cultivate clean reading habits. It dictated that no book that was easy to read was worth reading. There were, of course, notable exceptions like The Catcher in the Rye and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. But even these had to be scrutinised with analytical fervour; heaven forbid reading for pleasure was ever just that. Now that I’ve just about managed to throw off these shackles, I’m noticing how the same annoying habit has crept into other areas of my life. Allow me to explain.

Pro Bono

Any ’80s or ’90s kid with some kind of leaning towards rock music cannot deny the role of U2 in their formative years. They never had the cool quotient of Pink Floyd or even Radiohead, but that’s what we all listened to. A lot. Mock them for the earnestness or pick holes in their lyrics, but they’re still the soundtrack of our teenage years, when we claim to have been listening to prestige bands. Now when U2 descend on Indian shores this December, they’re going to get a lot of attention, right? Here’s where it gets (unnecessarily) complicated.

A WhatsApp group I belong to took U2’s maiden India gig a bit too seriously. No sooner had the show been announced than we turned into 16-year-olds dancing to With or Without You with heartbreaking naiveté. We instantly began to devise complicated schemes to get preferred seats to the gig. This involved hundreds of group messages (mostly involving U2 puns), pulling people into the plan (safety in numbers), making U2 website registrations (that cost us in dollars), pulling strings (that came with their own strings), etc. The bookings did come through, and we congratulated ourselves on the achievement, but the relief was short lived. Turns out, there was no need for the plans and the premium; tickets were easily available right through, with a simple click. We thought we had The Edge, but the world works in Mysterious Ways.

How do you say ‘no’ in Japanese?

The same set of people with a proclivity for complication share a love of Japanese food. Now there is a restaurant that shall not be named that has recently moved from a very tiny location in a Bandra neighbourhood to a less tiny one. The only time I have ever been let into the old premises was when I arrived at 6.50pm for dinner, calling friends to join me desperately before I lost the table. Now the new location is bigger but getting a reservation is about as simple as your first attempt at eating sushi with plastic chopsticks. You book. You wait. You follow-up. You hope. You wait. You finally say ‘Damn them, I’ll just eat the leftover baigan ka bharta from last night.’ My fridge is infinitely more welcoming than this impossible to get into restaurant.

But why let good sense come in the way? A new day brings with it a fresh appetite for difficulty. Quorums are formed, plans made and bookings attempted, only to be mercilessly quashed by hostesses and managers. But with a resolve as strong as horseradish, we carry on. Any embarrassment slides off our expert backs, like oil off a noodle.

Dissing the dystopian

The same applies to TV shows and movies. The stranger, darker and more twisted they are, the greater their supposed greatness. Things have gotten so bad that I have to hide my aversion to dystopian dramas and criminal fantasies: it makes people think I’m a freak. Food isn’t good enough unless it turns liquid into foam, vacations aren’t fun enough unless they involve torturous itineraries, clothes aren’t cool enough unless they’re making a statement. Simple needn’t be stupid, I want to say, and complicatedness doesn’t automatically connote higher standards.

I hereby launch a rebellion against these stifling norms. I promise not to rate the difficult higher than the easy, just because it’s difficult. I will make bookings the easy way, patronise establishments that are happy to have me over, and watch Downton Abbey reruns till I perfect the Maggie Smith manner. Some utopias are actually attainable.

From HT Brunch, October 20, 2019

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