The American (sitcom) dream

If one has offered a box of scrabble letters to an opponent for them to pick seven, one would be aware of the rampant shaking that precedes it, lest the opponent remembers where each letter is and picks to his convenience. That is how I feel my life has been since the last time I blogged - like a box of scrabble letters ruthlessly shuffled to nobody's advantage in particular.

What is the American dream? It is your imagination of how adult life would be, based on stuff you downloaded from LAN and watched hours on end in college. (I am talking about sitcoms - Friends, How I met your mother, Two and a half men, Seinfeld..)

Here's the dream: You work for a couple of hours a day (making jingles or telling jokes) and you spend the rest of your time with friends and food and sex. Alright, at some (drunk) point in life, when I was more honest than usual, I realized that there was no hope for the third. If the sex people were having world over could be quantified and represented by the space in my 1 TB hard disc, I didn't even have enough bits to make character. So I shrugged it off and fitted the dream to the Indian context. No character, no sex. Food and friends were perfection. I had my hard disc to make up for the rest.

Sometime this year, I started working. I was ready to experience life as rich as Charlie's or as fun-filled as Phoebe's. Food and Friends - boy, was I going to have plenty of them.

The thing about being friends with your colleagues is that it is not possible. Yeah, you've found people who don't earn more than you or less than you. That way, you're neither jealous nor guilty. But you never know what could happen if you say something insensitive or inappropriate or just outright stupid. And knowing me, it's almost certain I will. It's not college where they'd just do you a favour and stop talking to you. Here, you can get fired. Which means switching from cribbing about time and money in my office to cribbing about money and time on the road (where I'd rather be than at home).

I have begun to adore food. Sometimes, I think that's what I live for. After all, it is hard-earned and there are different kinds of exciting food in the world. There's pizzas and pastas, noodles and nachos, sandwiches and salads - my mouth waters just recalling the sensational experience of eating. Aaaah. Aaaaaaah.

And in the middle of this orgasmic experience thinking of the plethora of food possibilities on God's green Earth, I realize that I am in the village of Amalapuram, on the banks of the river Godavari, eating rice and pulkhas everyday since nothing else is vegetarian.

I've begun to appreciate aspects of life outside of the American sitcom dream.