The Night Club Culture

Night clubs are to Indians, what evolution was to Charles Darwin – survival of the fittest.

I will try and back what I said by describing a normal day for an average-Indian-night-club-enthusiast at a popular destination. 

The entrance to any club is always through a door which is way more cramped than it should normally have been. I believe this is because the owners were trying to be modest while making the night-club. They never expected that the turnout each night would be so high. So, suddenly you enter a dimly-lit room full of screaming people, with music so loud that it can damage your auditory senses and a stench so strong that your appetite is lost instantly. You stand there, at the entrance, for a moment, giving your pupils time to dilate before someone pushes you from the behind in an attempt to join the frantic crowd inside. You cautiously find your way to an empty table and start assessing the high-on-adrenaline-and-alcohol people all around you. Since most of the clubs do not offer butler service, you are forced to visit the bar yourself to get drinks for your date (and for yourself). This is the part where Darwin jumps in like a party-crasher. You push your way through a solid phalanx of drunk, stinky, hairy, middle-aged men in order to reach the bar. Once you have successfully achieved that, you need to shout out your order to the bartender who clearly has more in his plate than he can handle. You just stand there waving money at him so he notices you and hands over your drinks to you. Then starts the long battle of finding your way back out of the mob; which always leads to the same conclusion – your clothes and shoes end up consuming half of your drinks as everybody is trying to reach for the bar, while you are trying to move against the flow. When you finally come out of the sea of effluvial arm-pits (as everyone has their cash-filled hands extended towards the bartender) and head for your table and finally take a sip of the drink (for which you burned roughly around 100-200 Kcal.), you realise that the drink is more water than whisky because the night club owners are a bunch of money-hungry-bastards who always try to save on the cost of drinks by resorting to adulteration. 

After all this wasted effort, you hear a song which you really like and you decide to head to the dance floor with your date (with whom you have hardly spent ten minutes). Again, you work your way through a swarm of sweaty, hairy, frantically-dancing people to reach to the nucleus of the dance floor. Half the song has already been played by that time and you start grooving to the beats. For a guy, it is of utmost importance that his date is not inappropriately touched by other drunken males all around her, and thus he dances less, and plays the role of a security guard more. 

If this satisfies you, you leave the club and head back home with a massive headache or else you start back from the top.

So, for everyone who keeps asking me why I do not like to visit night clubs, I hope I have been explicitly clear. Thank you and keep partying!

The Forbidden Fruit

Let me remind you about the story of Adam and Eve today. God created a paradise of a garden called Eden. There he created a man, Adam, and a woman, Eve. They were given the duty of protecting a large tree in the middle of the garden. The tree was special as its fruits bore the special knowledge of good and evil for the person who eats it. Adam and Eve were also strictly instructed not to eat any fruit of that tree. Both of them ate from every other tree in the garden but could only dream of the taste of the fruits which were hanging from the magical tree. The forbidden fruit with all its mysteries was the only thought that kept running in their minds. 

And hence, one day Eve decided to defy God’s order and plucked an apple from the tree of knowledge. She called out to Adam and shared the apple with him. And as they were chewing their way through the apple, they realized that it tastes the same as every other fruit in the garden. They were highly disappointed. The next day, they were thrown out of the garden by God for going against his authority. 

Now why I shared this story with you is because this happens in all of our lives. We are enticed towards the forbidden fruit. We break boundaries and ethics to achieve the forbidden fruit. We do it, consciously as well as unconsciously. We are attracted by the forbidden fruit and spend weeks and months, just dreaming about its taste, its texture, its smell. And once we achieve the forbidden fruit, we do not feel the desperate need to have it anymore. We are satiated in just one bite, because it is not forbidden anymore; the only reason why it was so appealing in the first place. 

This is what happens in most of the relationships. If the girl is playing hard to get, or just keeps away from guy since he is creepy. It creates this image of the girl as a forbidden fruit in the guy’s brain. Now he has a desperate need to court you and sweet talk you into getting into a relationship with him. He stops thinking rationally; whether the girl is really compatible with him; whether they have similar way of thinking; whether they will ever be able to give each other the required time and space. He just needs to be with that girl. His mind creates an illusion that this extreme obsession is actually love. The boy does everything to win the girl’s trust and convince her that he actually loves her. 

Then one day, the girl says yes, swept by the immense flow of love and affection between them. That is when she stops being a forbidden fruit for the guy. And now, the boy really opens his eyes and looks at the girl, not as a fruit, but as a human. He starts assessing her behaviour, her likes and dislikes, her ideologies, her small irritating habits et cetera. This is when the boy truly realises that he does not love this girl. And hence begins a long series of small and big fights, a few broken hearts, long nights of crying, a feeling of vacuum forming inside the chest and repulsion towards the other gender. 

So all we need to do is realise which attractions are towards a human, and which are towards a fruit, and we are good to go!

"There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable." ~Mark Twain

Intelligentsia

One of the greatest challenges which 21st century has in front of it is finding other colonies of living beings in this vast universe. There have been a few reasons, and theories, to believe that extra-terrestrial life is a possibility. But so far, the greatest of minds have dedicated their entire lives in this conquest, and still nothing worthwhile has been discovered. Humans and machines have scouted vast parts of the unknown space and have found nothing but flying pieces of debris. The scouted area might seem humongous to us, but from a larger perspective we haven’t even covered a spec of sand, in this huge desert of a universe. 

The reasons behind this failure to find another life source can be two:

1. We are the only lucky species to be occupying the only life-capable planet in this whole universe. 

2. We are still not that technically and mentally advanced which enables us to yield positive results from this search. 

I strongly believe that the latter possibility is the actual reason. 

I feel so because of the rising number of dumb people all around me. I am not saying that I am the most intelligent person to be alive in this era. But I am saying that I definitely have an abundance of people with below-average intellect around me. 

People on Social-Media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube keep proving me right, time and again. 

I am tagged in pictures in which I am not present more often than on pictures in which I am actually there. I am tagged in pictures with ‘good morning’ and ‘good night’ messages. I am tagged in pictures with beautiful scenery as a background and some random shit which is supposed to motivate me towards life scribbled all over it. I am even tagged in pictures which is a selfie of a friend whom I haven’t met in ages. Perhaps, a few of you people do not know why a picture is tagged. Tagging means showing people who are in the picture; not people to whom you want to show the picture. 

Newly married couples keep posting lovey-dovey messages on each other’s walls on Facebook. Mostly, it is done while using your personal Laptop or iPad or Smartphone, while lying right beside your spouse in your bed, in an awkward silence. Today people prefer conveying their love through a public forum on the internet on a website to a person who is sitting eight inches far from you. 

Today, social welfare has gained an all new meaning. Social activism is ‘Liking’ a picture on Facebook which has a caption “1 Like=100 Prayers”. Social work is ‘retweeting’ a message which says “#1RT=100 #Prayers”. Today, before helping a crash victim, taking a video and uploading it on YouTube is more important; because it will bring ‘views’ from people on YouTube. 

People lie to their family members about where they are going and then ‘Check-In’ themselves at places, so the entire unknown world might get to know about it. People are less concerned about the taste of their food compared to its presentation, because they want the pictures of their food on Instagram to look good. 

If this does not prove that our world is becoming dumber with every new generation, I do not know what will convince you about it. We still have time, let us take a space-ship and roam in this universe, to find a smarter race. Or we wait aimlessly, hoping they do not run away after seeing our explicit display of stupidity, if (and when) they find us!

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." ~Albert Einstein

Acceptance

Who defines social norms? Who sets the protocols- which need to be followed in order to be called normal? What is normal?

Our society drives pleasure from others’ misery. The people, who are the happiest, are generally also the most critical. They might not be perfect individuals, but they do the job of evaluating the shortcomings of others perfectly. 

The kind of life which I choose to live seems wayward, meaningless and rebellious to most people I know! The people who are in a position to judge what kind of a life you lead; the people who might/ might not have achieved anything substantial in their lives to evaluate whether you are leading your life in the right direction. But society does not choose such people on the basis of how they have fared in their own lives, but on the basis of how long they have lived and how much they have criticized. Everybody has a right to their opinions, and I have every right to feel offended by their opinions about me. 

The dense beard seems wrong to them. The body-art makes me an outcast in their eyes. The outright questions I put forward to all their social diktats make them feel I am rebellious towards their authority. And these negative vibes which I get from them drives me. I feel empowered by their disapproving stares. I become headstrong by their inaudible whispers behind my back. 

But in the end all I want them to know is I want to be how God made me. I want to live the way I feel right. I want to do things I am passionate about without the fear of “What will the society think about it?” running continuously in my mind. I want to have a fulfilling life; and a sense of fulfillment comes neither from money, nor from love, nor from power - it comes from being happy. I cannot find a way to be happy, if I am not being allowed to be myself. I crave for acceptance of certain people, of people whom I do not want to lose, of people whom I love and look up to. But I cannot alter myself in order to be accepted by them. Because then I am not being true to myself. I want to live my life as it seems fit to me. And I want to make my own set of mistakes while I am at it.

“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” ~George Bernard Shaw