The day that wasn’t!

1.     It is a Sunday morning. You wake up with a big smile and do first things first; check your mobile. You receive Good Morning messages from three unknown numbers and they have profile pictures of Lord Shiva, Marigold and Deepika Padukone. You wonder for a moment is that the real Padukone and then you smile at your joke. The messages have heavy images of garden and a rose and one good morning video that eats up mobile data yet doesn’t download. Your day has begun by getting annoyed.

2.     There is another WhatsApp and it is a forward sent by your uncle regarding heart transplant help for a poor child. It talks about forwarding it and the help that WhatsApp is going to provide. You have received this message for the thirteenth time and the same uncle had forwarded it six months back. You type a long message about hoaxes on social media and internet and just before pushing the send tab, you take a deep breath and delete it instead.

3.     You love Urdu poetry and read it to cheer yourself. You spend an hour with Ghalib, Jaul Elia and Faiz Ahmed Faiz and you have found that one couplet that has already made your day. You cannot resist sharing it on Facebook and within one minute, there are three comments and no likes; ‘All ok?’ ‘What happened?’ and ‘समझ नहीं आया पर अच्छा ही होगा’. You feel like banging your head on the wall but hold yourself.

4.     You want to be a rebel and think about torn Jeans for the first time. You contemplate about your old-fashioned self and the urge to be with times. After couple of hours you decide to take the plunge and now debate in your mind regarding from a store or online. It is an hour of serious thought and the deciding factor is indolence. You spend entire afternoon browsing online shopping websites. After risking credit card details at myriad places, sharing your mobile number and email id for receiving future spam, you are successful in payment. You pat yourself on your back and smile on being a man keeping pace with times; just then there is a curt auto generated sms that the product is out of stock and you can claim your refund.

5.     You spend another hour trying to locate the refund section on their website. You know all about their offers and products but you fail to find what you were looking for. You give them a call at the toll-free number and the auto-response system offers three options after every one. The diagram of the nuclear reaction chain comes to your mind and just then you hear a beautiful voice. The lady is extremely professional and polite, and asks you a dozen times as to how she could help. Just when you ask for refund, she cajoles/forces to go for another online purchase and you buy a Water jug. Your first online purchase was a success.

6.     You are desperate to rebel this day and you head towards a swanky apparel outlet.  Salesmen there outnumber shoppers by a ratio of ten and their hungry eyes struggling at their sale target evaluate the new sacrificial goat. Two salesmen are always behind you trying to sell perfumes, wrist watch and a best friend of the bridegroom outfit and you look at your receding hairline before discovering courage to ask for jeans that is torn (You mom already has many old ones that she has never thrown and some could be further torn but rebellion not prudence is the primary objective). You are embarrassed to look at price tags with prying eyes evaluating your purse and you end up selecting a seven T-Shirts and two trousers instead.

7.     You head towards the payment counters and scan length of the queues, efficiency and age of the billing clerks. You run various algorithms in your mind to decide which one would be the fastest. The time spent in the queue is full of anxiety and you hate to see three other queues moving fast. Just before your turn is about to come, you find a beautiful smiling girl heading towards your counter with just one item in hand. You pray that the person standing behind objects but even he does not and the obvious happens. Word stupid comes to your mind but you try to beguile yourself with chivalry instead.

8.     You come home tired and open the Idiot Box. Gaudy looking housewives are busy taking revenge and there is a beautiful lead who took two years to get married and will take another three to consummate. There is also a Nagin nearby along with black magic and predictable storylines. You convince yourself that you are here for the background music score and you love to see the camera focussing on face when it plays. The solace is that they always have some beautiful faces prepared to directly attend a wedding function after shoot. You become snobbish after sometime and tune on English news. Arnob Goswami is taking to task a timid guest and though the guest tries to murmur a protest, his mike has already been muted. It brings on that eerie memory of a unreasonable teacher/bully who could never be wrong and you turn the television off. 

9.     You open your diary to clear your heart and try to pen down things you do not like. The list goes on and on. You scribble that you don’t like stupid people and the majority in this world is already left out. You hate pretensions so you have nothing much for those who pretend to be smart. No one should be banal hence you can’t even tolerate one neither dumb nor smart. You also hate those who don’t get sarcasm. You think about a perfect man and after a long time you can only find one; the person scribbling these notes in diary.

10.  Your day wasn’t the one of your dreams but you always believe looking at the positive side. You thank god for everything that you have and whisper a small prayer in your mind. You turn off the light and are fully prepared to doze off. Just then your mobile beeps and a SMS declares that a lady on South Africa has bequeathed you ten million pounds. You just need to send them five hundred pounds as fund transfer charge. You smile and thank God for all the humour that goes around in this world.