Musings

Boredom... and a Dancing Woman

Syed Badrul Ahsan

Boredom is beautiful. Well, not always and not for everyone. There are those, however, who need to feel bored at times. It is something that suddenly takes the vibrancy out of life and makes you feel, as it were, that there is between you and the world out there a serious state of disconnect. On your table lies a whole bunch of the newest journals and you cannot wait to get back home and read through them. But then, at home, something happens (you cannot explain what) and you realise you are too indifferent to life to read those journals. You put them away, promising to go through them the next day. Meanwhile, you surf through the television channels, watching nothing in particular. You hear of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali fleeing into swift exile in Saudi Arabia. You are not impressed.

Not every politician is a Nehru or Clinton or Obama, giving you new ideas to chew on. It is always the run-of-the-mill, the conventional, that you bump into. And thus your boredom gets a new lease of life.

And that inability to cause interest to well up inside you is what causes a fresh bout of boredom. Note the point. It is not the printed word, not those television images which take your fancy. It is that awareness of tedium setting in that quite unexpectedly brings you back to life. One who is never bored is never cognizant of the multi-layered patterns of life. Imagine this: a friend calls, to exchange thoughts with you on the state of politics in the country. You haw and you hum and you agree with him on everything. You know you should not, for you have a point of view of your own. But at that point, having passed through the predictability of politics for ages, having come to the conclusion that politics in your time has a venality you cannot wish away, you are just not spirited enough to put up an argument with the one who calls. You make sure that your friend, having nothing more to say – because you agree with him all the way – clams up before he hangs up. Your boredom has done the trick.

Boredom is what you experience, for long moments and longer days, when the one you love is the one you cannot have a cup of tea with. You imagine a landscape of poetry where the wind plays in her hair, where you compose poetry on her cheeks as the twilight glow falls on them. She is not there, to be sure. And yet she is there, in the wigwam you have pitched in your mind. You pick up your phone and dial her number, for her to know at dawn that you missed her in the tempest-tossed night. All this you do out of sheer boredom. Note the creativity which emerges from a feeling of being bored. You become Aeneas and she is transformed into your Dido.

Boredom is what you experience, for long moments and longer days, when the one you love is the one you cannot have a cup of tea with. You imagine a landscape of poetry where the wind plays in her hair, where you compose poetry on her cheeks as the twilight glow falls on them.

When you are bored, it is merely the headlines of newspapers you go through. The contents you deliberately stay away from. Nothing new happens, nothing dramatic comes in to give a jolt to your thoughts. There are the clichés mouthed by politicians, businessmen and so many others. And clichés have this amazing ability to have you detach yourself from the activism you have been subjecting yourself to. You do not have the time or the inclination to go over them again, for they are a waste of time. Not every politician is a Nehru or Clinton or Obama, giving you new ideas to chew on. It is always the run-of-the-mill, the conventional, that you bump into. And thus your boredom gets a new lease of life.

Boredom comes to you in unexpected circumstances. You know you should be reading on the plane taking you to destinations far away and you do. That thick work on Stalin you thought would take you weeks to finish suddenly thins out, because it has been profoundly engrossing, because you had little sense of time as you rushed through it. But not all books can energise you that much. You stare out into the night sky and spot the little villages and towns, the lights flickering along their streets, thousands of feet below as the aircraft takes you home, wherever your home happens to be. You watch everyone gulp down the food served by in-flight attendants and ask yourself where your own appetite has gone.

To be bored is to be incapable of composing poetry. It is to try putting in a word edgeways even as those others around you seem unwilling to stop talking. You try to butt in, only to retreat in haste. By the time you have a moment when you can have your say, you have forgotten what it was you needed to give voice to. To be bored is to want to meet men in the mould of Amartya Sen and not finding them. It is to want to laugh, enough to infect everyone else around you, and then stumbling on the truth that life is serious, life is no laughing matter.

Boredom is in remembering the last time you watched a woman of sizzling beauty dance in the rain and knowing that she will not dance again.