Doogie-ing

The time is 12.45 am. Its usually that time of the night when I would have just completed my first dream and getting onto the next. The only connection to the two being a regular and rhythmic snoring drone. And yet, here I am, like Doogie Howser, typing away on my laptop the thoughts that are incessantly coming to my head. As they say, for an author - if I can be so rash as to call myself one - when words come to the head, they have to be channelised onto the paper, or the e-paper.

The last couple of days have been really hectic at office. So much so that I had to skip my violin classes. Clocking more than 12 hours a day has become a daily routine. The project in which I am working since 10 months is about to go into production (the date and time of production install is the day of my marriage – how’s that for coincidence?!!) and a number of defects are being raised at the nth moment, causing the whole project to go into haywire, and along with it went our daily routine! No swimming, no sauna and none of those pleasures I was describing in my previous few blogs.

But this working long hours and on weekends, much to my surprise, did not bring any disappointment to me. I wasn’t wary of going to the office early in the morning to another hard day’s – and night’s – work. I was rather looking forward to it. I thought about it and asked myself as to why that I wasn’t repenting such hard hours in office with no personal life whatsoever.

The answer was pretty obvious. It was because I was in the project since its inception and since I was working on it for 10 months now, it was almost like my baby. And with baby, comes affection and love, and you want it – the project, in my case – to be as good as possible, defect-free! Such is the power of love, that one’s toil doesn’t really affect one’s pleasures. It is that time when you don’t think about how much you are being paid, how much it is worth it all, but you just go there and give your best, just for the sake of your project, for your baby. And at the end of a hard days work, be it a weekday or a weekend, you will feel satisfied, you will feel deserved for the money that you are being paid, you wouldn’t really think about the lost weekend or the lost time in personal life, you will be remorse and guilt free for doing your best, and that’s what counts most. To deserve what you get. And when such a thought comes, along comes satisfaction. And with satisfaction comes that happiness, which is what everyone craves for. It was quite a realization!

So, there I was, basking with this realization, when along came some relatives to the house. As is often the case with relatives, the conversation starts of with ‘How is so-and-so?’, ‘Did she-and-she come back?’, ‘Is he-and-he doing well now?’ etc. The talk is mostly on other relatives. Invariably, the conversation somehow leads to two people in our huge family tree who are suffering from some rare diseases that no doctor on earth has been able to cure. Such is the type of diseases that it will occur in 1 out of a million cases. Absolutely bed-ridden. One of them is in her early fifties. And it is said that the only cure out of this tremendous pain that they are suffering is death itself.

It’s the most heartening for me to see such people. Really rattles the heart to think that in this era of great innovations and inventions, such diseases still prevail where Man is just a onlooking passerby with his insurmountable knowledge and wisdom. Really a pity.

When topic about disease and the victim comes up, it leads to the question of ‘Why him?’ or ‘Why her?’ Then comes the long list of good deeds that the person has done in his or her life, and one really wonders, what the person really ever do to get such a treatment at the hands of Providence. As one of my elderly guest relative put it, “Is there really anything called Divine Justice?” Very true words. Food for thought indeed.

One thing I have noticed about this elderly set of people, the people who ruled the world in seventies and eighties, is that they are really very dignified. Very composed and dressed very well. Very eloquent in their conversations. Very gentlemanly and courteous and it’s a real pleasure to talk to people like that. Sort of old-world charm, one might say, but there it is. “The real juice”, as Wodehouse would have said.

Well that’s about it. Doogie would have done a better job, I guess, to surmise this whole thing into one beautiful sentence, as he always does. I liked that part in every episode. But then, he was a child prodigy…

:)