Once a while we all pause and take a good look around. It could be just for a moment or may be for a minute or it may last even for eternity. It all depends on what you saw first when you stopped. One of my friends saw his own shallow, mean life grinning at him; his pause continues even till this date — a good four years have flown by. A mind’s quest for meaning? I too had had a handful of such pauses, stillness and episodes of reflections in my life. I am not dead sure how long these pauses typically lasted, but the latest brake consumed a few long minutes. It came as a surprise when I opened my eyes and realised (and confronted) my fetish for bags. Well, here I am not talking about esoteric beings like Prada, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Bugatti, and so on that are mainly interested in elite females. I am more about the real stuff. The backpacks, duffel bags, messenger bags and the assorted ones that you find in Amazon sale on a daily basis. But I must say life was so simple when all these animals were just classified as ‘shoulder bags’. But I had not relented, it seems. How on earth did this happen? When did I hit ‘Buy Now’ for a laptop bag the first time? And why did I not stop it even after the sixth instance?
Our brains have a smart way of processing the loads of sounds and sights that try to engulf us every second. The routine inputs of the eyes and the ears are just bunched and pushed over as the background. Once the noise is out of way we see and hear only those things that seem to be more important. If the bunching fails, we fail as functional humans. But the grouping does not guarantee accuracy or freedom from madness. In fact, on the contrary, I went mad confronting the dozens of cheap (economical, discounted) bags that fill my room; the bags my brain had pushed to the background. I am sick of them.
Only until the next big sale day in one of those online shops. Tote bags are so tempting. You just can’t have four.
(From the internet, By Linda Mears)
So I call up this semi-psychiatrist friend of mine who is yet to clear his solitary arrear. The paper that has been troubling him was on sleep disorders. But I bet there is no way he is going to clear it. He firmly believes insomnia is not a disorder, but a way of life — especially for a student of medicine. Now he takes a good look at my room, and expectedly his visual cortex is bombarded with the images of bags of multiple colours, shapes and designs; All of them dangling intimidatingly in the fan wind like crazy chimes performing a death dance in silence; His brain is unable to process it beyond a few seconds and he quickly gets out of the room, and shuts the door. He opens it again with the same speed and pulls me out.
Now he sits with me to know more about how it all began. Whether I had used bags during my school days or I just carried them on my head, and stuff like that. We do our usual chat for over an hour, but this time after his last sip of tea, he dramatically announces, ‘The session is over.’ I scratch my head. It did not make sense. He said, I (my brain) was full of ideas; that there was no stop for the constant stream of ideas my one hundred billion neurons generate. Sadly, my brain is unable to handle its own input as the synapses get into an inferno of tricky, unredeemable loop of self-generated stimuli. I stopped sipping my cup of tea. In shock. Forest fire ablaze between my ears? But luckily, he said, my brain has developed its own mechanism to handle it. And that is how I end up buying bags. Though his whole diagnosis felt like a Christmas cake made out of camel milk, I restricted myself to just one question — Of all things, my friend, my dear semi-psychiatrist friend, why bags? Amazon also has deadly deals on digital clocks and designer umbrellas.
He was cool when he said — I bought only the bags and not cheap pyjamas or tooth brushes as I was unconsciously using the bags as containers to store the countless ideas that constantly oozed out of my brain like the infinitely tireless waves that lapped the shores of great seas, regularly powdering the huge rock here and the mighty mountain there, neither with remorse nor with vengeance but only with a touch of mechanical beauty in monotony.
He stressed ‘unconsciously’ and thumped the dining table almost shattering the tea cups when he announced it was a form of, hold your breath, offence mechanism.
Now, I am on the look out for the friend who is in search for meaning. May be he could help me. I also have things to discuss with my medical friend’s professor.
