Entertaining Boredom

I just finished watching an episode from the 2nd season of Roswell. Yes, its true, I’m terribly behind the curve….by at least 10 years! Hey what can I say, I guess TV series were never really my cup of tea. For that matter, I never was big into TV itself. Now before you decide this article is going to be one more ’conservative agenda’ against the idiot box and skip this page, let me say I don’t hate TV. In fact, I’m a big movie buff and love watching movies, on the tube and big screen alike.

However I did want to talk about the ‘alternative’ forms of entertainment that prevail in our society today. Now before you label me a fossil, let me go on the record and say that I just turned 30. So I’m not exactly disconnected from the ‘latest thing’. But I did want to bring our attention to the ‘devolution’ of the types of entertainment our culture are searching for today. You can relax and drop your eyebrows now – I made up that word! What I meant by ‘Devolution’ is the supposed backward, downward or regressive pattern of what we call recreation today. Let me extrapolate:

Recreation, on the rocks please

When I got out of college and got a job, I decided that I wanted to ‘get a life’ and live it up a little. I had spent most of my teens dependent on my parents and also bearing responsibilities that were beyond my age. And now that I was bringing in my own ‘moolah’, I figured, it was time to loosen up some. So my friends and I started hanging out atleast twice every week. An average outing would usually consist of dinner, a movie or a long drive, an exotic dessert at an exotic place, finishing up with some post-midnight coffee. Everything was fine until then. And then my friends decided to add another ‘constant’ to this equation – liquor. Everything started to change after that. We had to decide which restaurant had an attached bar to it. We had to make an appointment in case the bar was full. We had to choose what we ate very carefully incase it messed with our ‘spirits’ later. We would end up ordering bottles and bottles of liquor instead of dessert. And we always had to have the one sober man to be our designated driver and drive us back home. Once the agenda was put into place, the drama would begin. Unending sob stories of nagging wives, accidental kids, the boss from hell and money. These animated conversations also had a healthy ‘peppering’ of crass jokes, name-calling and double-entendres. Yes, this version of male-bonding I find quite embarrassing to the Testosterone Fraternity. And the most interesting topic that comes up – Philosophy. Oh how the liquor melts the macho man into an introspective puddle of ‘self-reflection’! Birth, death, life, happiness, peace and afterlife was all served up on the buffet of drunkenness. You could almost hear the likes of Aristotle or Plato turning in their graves! And what did I do amidst all this? Being the non-alcoholic (not because I thought it wrong, at the time, but mostly because I hated the very taste of liquor), I was usually the silent spectator sipping on his Cola. I tried liquor just once in my life and the aftermath was not a pretty sight. I’ll leave it at that. But what baffled me was how these once bright, intellectual and respectable guys voluntarily chose to have an evening that ended with them looking like slobbering, babbling fools! Alright, enough with that. One more round please….(hick)….

The Rhythm of the night

Over a couple of years I had watched a few movies, the themes of which primarily revolved around dance. ‘Save the last dance’, ‘You got served’ and ‘Shall we Dance’, are just a few that made it reasonably big at the box-office. Some showed dance in a very elegant and artistic light while others interestingly showcased dance being used as a therapy or even a competitive ‘weapon’. And being a connoisseur of the Arts, I always found it fascinating to explore the various myriad facets of human expression. I also find it encouraging that people from different cultures are starting to value the different styles and enroll in the numerous dance agencies or companies sprouting up that offer tutorials in the various styles. Over the recent years, I’ve seen Salsa and Tango become a rage in my native place of South India; two types of dances that were virtually unheard of in the subcontinent less than a decade ago. And then, I noticed an institution that catered to another form that reared its mirror-balled head about a decade and a half ago, atleast in India – the Discotheque

I always wondered what it was about strobe lights, ear-splitting base beats, and smoke that made people gyrate like semi-naked intoxicated serpents! I couldn’t answer that until I went to one myself. Something about the place made you loosen up, force the extrovert out of you, make you loose your inhibitions and eventually some degree of control. Some older folk reading this who have never witnessed a disco/club in the new millennium will not understand what I’m talking about. Gone are the days of asking your girl’s permission to dance, waltzing in tailored suits or gowns and finishing by taking a bow and sitting down for a formal dinner. Dancing in the Y2K has morphed to something else – anybody can hook up with anybody, usually decided by a simple gesture as an inviting smile or a wink. Dancing apparel would leave nothing to the imagination and body contact is nothing short of an R-rated movie bordering on soft porn.  Welcome to modern day clubbing! Now a message to those clubbers reading this: This is not a public address announcement to boycott discos. This is just my failure to understand the nuances (if I may call it that) of modern discotheque dancing. I’m not against it; I’m just saying I don’t get it. Again like I said earlier, in case you missed it, I was born in 1979, so I’ve been through the 80s, 90s and just turned 30 two weeks ago. So please don’t dismiss me off as some cranky old-timer reminiscing of better days. What is it about this form of entertainment that appeals to so many people?

Someone I knew from my younger days in Bahrain, would go out to a club every two weeks, party herself out to the core and feel in the pits for the rest of the month. Twice she really got attached with some guys she met there, who made all sorts of statements of undying love to her and then dumped her (which took her a whole month to recover from). A couple of times she got too drunk and had to be carried home, to her parents’ dismay.  Another time she was violated by a bunch of perverts and yet another time practically raped by one. “Why do you bother going back?” I asked her. “I don’t know, I guess I cant think of anything else that doesn’t bore me quickly.” was her reply. What a price to pay for relief from boredom – personal violation, embarrassment and hangovers?

And if you’re about to say that ‘she was an exception’, even YOU know that you’re wrong. I bet half the people reading this article right now know somebody who has had one or all of the above incidents happen to them! One question rings loud in my mind – IS IT WORTH IT? And now, I will say something to which I openly advocate that I am a bit of a traditionalist. I love a movie at home with popcorn, I enjoy taking long drives, I thoroughly enjoy the sunrises or sunsets at the beach, I enjoy going out to the movies with my friends, I enjoy reading, I enjoy playing basketball with a bunch of friends, I enjoy taking long and solitary walks in parks and I enjoy having a big meal at home with my family. Something I used to do a few years ago was hangout with my siblings/cousins in India. Every weekend, we would take a drive somewhere, go to a movie or have a sumptuous dinner together. And I enjoyed it thoroughly and miss those times terribly. I still reminisce on those days. Is this all getting too ‘warm and fuzzy’ for you?

So call me a sap if you want to, but there is not ONE negative withdrawal symptom or consequence that I suffer from or regret later from, by doing any of those things I just listed above. There are many forms of entertainment that are available these days. And I have not listed many of those. But what does stand out to me and baffle me much, are the two forms I listed above. Have we developed some sort of ‘allergy’ to good, clean fun these days? Let me get a little philosophical here – I’ve noticed to my dismay that some of the things in life that are good for us, we don’t like and some of the things we like are not good for us. And that’s understandable. But how much entertainment do we want anyways? And whats the price we’re willing to pay?