fall of the times new roman empire

third edition in four weeks man yall should like pay me or something for delivering my delulu to your inbox this regularly

It’s really late on a Friday, and no surprises but I’m home because (after a particularly reckless and extravagant past weekend- I had a grand total of five drinks) I am now a homebody. I’m like a thirty year old philosophy grad- without the three cats and pile of unread messages from Mom that are mostly rishtas from cliche matrimony site because I refuse to get married- Marx and my bank balance both forbid it, not necessarily in that order. I don’t even know why we just dunked on philosophy grads, they’re nice people. I mean I think they are, I’ve never really met one. See, that’s the level of credible writing you’re dealing with here. Isse accha so jao yaar. Anyways, so yeah it’s blah blah Friday and I’m blah blah home and it’s almost midnight, so I don’t have anything to do so obviously I decide the best thing to do right now would be to take a shower. It’s been raining the entire day so the water is chilly and the cold keeps me from thinking the thoughts I do not want to think. Aap follow kar rahe hai ya main apne fractured sanity pe aur jokes maarke samjhau? And since I live in a society (I mean yeah we all do, I just meant the housing type, not the eighth-grader-needs-someone-to-blame-in-school-essay wala society) with a fairly constant supply of water and also happen to have no concept of guilt whatsoever, I do it. I take the shower, convincing myself for 14.5 minutes that everything in my life is going to be alright (Spoiler Alert: it isn’t)

I get done and think this is a good time to write a bit, so I head to my desk and am about to start, when I notice that something is off- the wifi, quite literally. I go to my modem and see the dreaded red light. My internet service thingy has been shaky all month, so this is not really a surprise. I switch to mobile data and proceed to DM my internet guy for the third time this week. Internet is not working, I type and hit send, expecting the usual response of Address batao (address has been batao-ed 10 times, but he probably doesn’t care enough to scroll up and I clearly don’t have the patience). Except this time, my message doesn’t go through. It’s not getting delivered. The imaginary camera I hallucinate in my room so that my internal monologue seems less deranged when turned external, goes haywire into shaky, slanted angles. It’s horribly edited flashback in Hindi TV serial time. With terror (not really, more like a misplaced “Arey yaar”) I realize that my data pack has expired. And I haven’t renewed the damn thing because giving money to telecom companies is for cowards and governments in heavy debt- and I’m neither. I realize that I’m truly, disconnected from the outside world at this very moment. I’m literally air-gapped from the world. An asteroid could hit my neighborhood and I’d only find out about it the next morning. Because yeah while it’d make a great deal of noise, every time there’s a loud bang in the dead of the night, as an Indian you’ve been conditioned well enough to know that a transformer, somewhere and somehow, has exploded. I have no idea of what a transformer actually looks like (I’m like 5% sure that it isn’t the Optimus Prime variety) or what it means when one of them actually explodes (I’m thinking combustion is involved, not sure though). But I’ve been conditioned to believe that, mostly by society (this time, not the housing one- aha callback pe subversion I’m like Abbas Mustan-ing a little too close to the sun rn). I’m so oblivious right now that a certain government could decide to change the name of an entire country and I would have no clue, going about my business the next morning saying the old name everywhere because a toaster doesn’t become Pankaj Tripathi just because you decided to call it so. Okay, bohot digress ho raha hai. You can get up and go drink some water or something, tab tak main ye toota hua flow of writing theek karke aata hu.

So yeah, I’m panicking like a deer in the headlights. Or like KL Rahul at the crease. One of these is worse. It feels weird to be this disconnected, and that too when you least expect it. I’m not someone who’s on their phone 24/7, and I’d happily go off the grid if I could (okay ab thoda zyada ho gaya but Karan Johar kare toh cinema, aur main karu toh exaggeration?) but this moment, I feel oddly unnerved. A slight panic starts to set in, and my mind is starting to race through options for things I could do right now that don’t involve the internet. I could read. A stack of five books (three of which are still in their half opened Amazon packaging) looks at me from my desk. Unable to match gaze, I turn towards my laptop. I could watch a movie, I have loads of them downloaded (sometimes torrenting is the ONLY answer). But then, the incredible weight of unlimited choice paralyses me. What do I even watch? I mentally run through five other options. I’m going through these options, cutting some down based on pros and cons and weighing how much time I have for said activity until it finally hits me like a fucking brick- I could just sleep. Why is my first response when I seemingly have nothing to do at 1 a.m. , to just think about other things to do? I have been so consumed by the idea of having some antidote to my boredom easily available at any given point of time that the prospect of just turning everything off to go sleep at a humanly acceptable time seems incredibly alien. It’s a weird affliction and I’m not really sure how to get rid of it. Do I just accept that my attention span and dopamine needs are fucked and will never be the same again? Am I just doomed to scroll up and down for eternity, afraid to stop because the world just seems more palatable when I’m looking down at it on a six inch screen? As I go from one thought to the next, I feel myself spiraling into this abyss of overthinking, unable to hold on to a single tangible thought that makes even a shred of sense when- BUZZZ

I look up. In the darkness of the room (I switched the lights off at some point, I don’t remember when) a rectangular slab of white light interrupts the shadows. BUZZZ, again. The buzzing starts to get more frequent, and eventually there’s so much that the sounds just cascade over each other. I pick up my phone. The WiFi’s back on. Thank fuck. Anyways, what was I saying?

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Before you say it, lemme just say yes, I know. I’ve been using brackets and italics (believe me I resisted the urge to CTRL+I on that word also, but I guess with this italicized bracket that you’re reading I lost anyway). I’m not using it as a crutch, while I do understand why it may come off that way. The real reason is much more embarrassing. Mere internal monologue ka khudka ek alag internal monologue hai. So with every line I write I’m consciously resisting the urge to not write four other caveats and anecdotes for that because na tumhare paas woh patience hai na mere paas woh work ethic. But yeah, that’s that.

The other day I was watching reels on Instagram (I know, girl dinner) and I came across one that had a fOrMuLA for photo dumps. A formula for photo dumps? I’m somehow relieved that George Orwell didn’t live to see this day because that sentence would break his heart. It doesn’t get any more dystopian than this- you have something that is supposed to be random, supposed to be haphazard and now just because it starts working according to the algorithm now there’s a method to it. Nahi rakhna mujhe blurred main photo followed by food photo and end with travel photo. This is my ganne ke khet moment. I will rebel and put cat photo first. Honestly sometimes I think a healthy percentage of the population is, without doubt, just losing their minds.

Anyways, we’re slowly entering the festival end of the year, where every week there is some reason to socialize and dress slightly fancier than usual. I could care less about religion (any, to be honest) but I really like festivals for the socializing. I know this post started with me talking about how I hate to go out but for festival szn I will make exceptions (multiple, insaan ki toh fitrat hai hypocrite hona). I like that you get to meet so many people you rarely see, and even when it’s the people you interact with on a regular basis (friends, family, Vijay Mallya’s twitter account- that for some reason always only tweets on bank holidays, go figure), you get to see a different side of them during the celebrations, and I love it. For brief, interspersed moments, people are happy. And in this economy, that’s like a miracle or something. So yeah, I’m looking forward to the next few months. As your office HR rep and Ravi Shastri both like to say- the fourth quarter might not always be the best, but it is always the most memorable.

And on that note, I look away from the screen for a bit. I catch a glimpse of the clock and realize it’s midnight, again. I’m gonna go take a shower now, and I’ll see you guys next week.