Of Escape

A frank confession. I haven’t had a great holiday. In fact, it’s been quite terrible. I can go into the reasons, but I’d rather not. What I will take from it is the discovery of television as a useful medium to block everything else out. There have been numerous occasions when frustration has gotten the better of me and I’ve found solace in the ‘idiot box’. I now know why it’s called that – you sit there and scan the channels and finally pick something and all the while you’re sitting there and watching, you aren’t really paying attention at all. Your mind is somewhere else, thinking of a hundred other things. But the visual medium is so distracting that you are able to lose yourself in it, despite the hundred other things. And then you just sit there, like an idiot. Numb in the head. Running away from everything that seems scary in the world outside.

Running away. I never did think of myself as an ‘escapist’. Sure, there was a period when I thought it was ‘cool’ and in my head, I toyed with the concept. But that was a phase. As it turns out, it’s a phase I never got over. Hard work has never been my thing (At this point, a normal Indian would jump up triumphantly and say that I’m lying; I got into IIT, which implies hard work is totally my thing. To him I say, a rat just runs without thinking. He’s not capable of conscious decision making. The more rats you put behind him, the faster he runs) and that’s left me with a terribly short attention span when it comes to doing things I don’t enjoy immediately.

A holiday is supposed to be a break from the pace of college life. A time when you just sit back and laze around, meet old friends, spend time with the family and get set for the next session of Rat Race. I’ve been busy doing nothing. There are people I should have called, things I should have done, places I should have gone and a life I should have lived. But the escapist in me won out and I ran.