The Coffeeshop Conundrum
I am a fairly punctual person. It doesn’t work out so well in a place like Delhi. If given a certain time to meet, people in this city automatically assume it to be at least half an hour later. To which a delay of another half- hour could be added, attributed to thunderstorms, traffic snarls, death and typhoons which may have inconvenienced them en-route. Since I have the unfortunate urgency of getting everywhere on time, I almost always am left with time to kill.
Time to kill. Another dangerous commodity in this city. If you happen to have any time to spare, it’s probably going to cost you a sizeable amount. Why? Well because we live in a highly ‘consumptive constituency’, which is our globalised world. We have but one solution for every need: Buy. Hungry? Buy. Tired? Buy. Sad? Buy. Happy? Buy some more. Idle? Buy again. When was the last time you took a perfectly purposeless stroll to nowhere, and didn’t end up buying anything? My memory fails me. When was the last time you were doing ‘nothing’ and not forking out the cash for it? Fails yet again. Unrealising, we have bought (there..bought again!) into the whole mesmerising myth that is capitalism. Okay, this is not another one of those unceasing socialist tirades against the capitalists. But, haven’t we gone a bit overboard?
I don’t really drink coffee. I used to, but I’ve outgrown my fondness for the frothy cup of Java-joy. But nonetheless I find myself at the coffee shop atleast thrice a week. I don’t really know what I go there to do, but its more often than not, that I seem to have time to kill, and end up sipping a pale cup of lukewarm jasmine teabag tea. At this point, drowning in the sea of ennui, I begin to unknowingly eavesdrop on conversations taking place in the adjoining tables. They are always variants of a similar script, one eerily similar to the one in the first Jungle Book cartoon, between the bored “Beatles” vultures:
Buzzy (yawns): Hey, Flaps, what we gonna do?
Flaps: I don’t know. What you wanna do?
Ziggy: I got it! Let’s flap over to the east side of the jungle!
They’ve always got a bit of action, a bit of a swinging scene.
All right?
Buzzy: Ah, come off it! Things are right dead all over.
Ziggy: You mean you wish they were!
[they laugh]
Dizzy: Very funny.
Buzzy: Okay, so what we gonna do?
Flaps: I don’t know, what you wanna do?
Buzzy: Look, Flaps, first I say, “what we gonna do?” and then you say, “what
you wanna do?”, they I say, “what we gonna do?”, you say “what you
wanna do?”, “what you gonna do”, “what you wanna” – let’s do
something!
Flaps: Okay. What you wanna do?
Buzzy: Oh, blimey, there you go again. The same once again!
Ziggy: I’ve got it! This time, I’ve really got it.
Buzzy: So you got it. So what we gonna do?
This loops again and again and again. In this day and age of the ‘speed, glitz, glamour, bling’ spectacle, are we all just a bit jaded? Behind the lazy steam rising from the coffee cup, is there nothing of substance? Are we all performers in an old play, simply playing out our well-rehearsed bit-parts of Consumption in the hope that it will lead somewhere? Are we just so consumed by consumption itself that we cannot look for substance elsewhere? We go on like a stuck record, playing the same notes over and over and over in the hope that someday the song will end. Or is it just me? It is not a higher purpose I seek, but the rediscovery of the beauty of aimlessness. Of a place where one can meander along without purpose. A place which isn’t pre-packaged and re-sold to me as an ‘experience’. Where I could be, as Pink Floyd put it in a song from their very aptly named album, Animals, “Carelessly passing your time in the grasslands away…”
