A Sunday during vacations can be tricky. On
an ordinary week of an ordinary month it is a fresh recess from the commonly
referred to, extremely subjective, often empirically stumbled upon drudgery of
work. Not only does it provide the much needed break from monotony, it also
relocates our belief in the theistic conception of a God, who according to
Christianity needed this break on the seventh day of the week. Now, if God needed to take a day off, we mortals act only natural
in following His league. This brings us much closer to Godhead and as a child
of modern political India evokes in me an apparently innate and ‘ambedkarly’
rightful demand of reserving mortal privileges of a second holiday in the week
to construct an opaque distinctive boundary line between Man and God. But we
have digressed hugely from our original point. Let us get back to Sundays.
Ah Sunday, our saviour, the one we cherish
for its enzymatic attribute of coaxing one into switching off the alarm on its
eve and missing the rise of its pagan celestial namesake. Now, imagine a
medicine as authoritatively potent as a Sunday being ripped off of its powers
and thrown in together with hundreds of other capsules of multi-vitamins,
reducing it into just another pill that will only be flushed out of the bowels
the next morning with only a 50% chance of being absorbed by your body. From
rags to riches, from a prince to a frog, from Manmohan Singh the FM to Manmohan
Singh the PM, that’s the magnitude of the fall when a regular Sunday
metamorphoses into a Sunday during vacations. It loses its edge and turns into
a round ball of faded wool that even cats play with only when bored.
It is on such an impotent, incapable, just
another day that happens to be a Sunday that I am writing today’s blog. As my
Saturday was no different from my Sunday in any significant sense I woke up
super late on both these days without an altered bubble of caustic composition
popping in my gut. And here I am still awake at an hour that humanity has taken
turns to call as ghastly, ghoulish, insanely late, nocturnal, or what people in
the west call it much to us Indians’ amazement-- morning.
I was planning on deleting some stuff from
my laptop and I bumped into three extremely popular sitcoms FRIENDS, How I Met
Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory. I know this must be the side effect of the
radiation from this once active now dormant conundrum of a lethargic Sunday
that I got into thinking about them. I found that even though I watch each new
episode of a new sitcom with an open mind without any prejudices, I still
like FRIENDS the best followed by HIMYM and BBT the least even though it’s funny
in a sadly smart way. My dizzying analysis shows that probably FRIENDS always
tops the list because it touches a psychological chord of nostalgia, having
stayed by my side through school and college and now in the professional
sphere. But analytics dare this simple explanation.
An emotionless postmodernist analysis
deconstructs the situation into yet simpler terms of what manages to seep into the
subconscious state of my mind. It is beyond the people who play the roles or
what the storyline is. It is the basic things like what sets are used and how
is the lighting managed. We consciously hardly ever take notice of things like
sets while watching something that’s more appealing owing to its actors or the
plot or the script. But that is not true also with our unconscious self
furthermore observing and storing each and everything we come across ever more
piercingly than our eyes.
In
FRIENDS more public places like the coffee house are used as settings where
most of the action takes place, where many unrelated people come and go and add
to the dynamics of the scene. When showing the indoors the walls are painted in
more vibrant and lively colours, hosting cheerful posters and paintings.
Monica’s flat in particular has windows and even a balcony making it much more
appealing than Joeye’s flat across the hall that has hardly ever been shown
with a window; very claustrophobic, something that my subconscious would never
allow. But most of the action takes place elsewhere or there is a healthy (call
it remedial) movement between Joeye’s apartment and the rest of the places.
Taking FRIENDS as an accepted standard
setting margin, the rest of the two sitcoms appear smaller. HIMYM has most of
the action taking place indoors, most of the time at night. Now let’s not go
back and rewind on our basics why the sun often symbolizes happiness and
cloudy or darkness is for sadness and depression. This plays heavily on my
psychology and I always miss an opportunity to build a rapport with the
sitcom, but right then the costumes come to rescue. With Marshall as the only
exception, to which however he occasionally creates a counter exception thus
becoming in line with the trend with no exceptions at all, all characters wear
bright and happy colours, creating a vibrant atmosphere not with the painted
walls but with the painted costumes. Barney’s character too leaves a positive
impression in the mind for obvious reasons.
This brings us to the BBT. Like Barney,
Sheldon is a talker who loves himself and likes to believe that he is always
correct. Now, many people find him the best character in the sitcom, the sole
reason why they watch the programme. This is indeed true. He is so irritating
and we (read I) find him so annoying yet we want to see him and wait for his
next move however irritating it be. Once again I am digressing from the main
point. BBT offers a strict indoors setting in a house full of nerds proposing
very little fun. There is hardly ever a glimpse of the outside world. This
could have been happening well in an alien soil and so it loses the terrestrial
touch, bringing it at the bottom of my preference among these three options.
Suddenly everything looks quite
meaningless. This could mean only one thing, I am sleepy. I may do extreme
things like write a blog like this which is nothing but a blot to my otherwise
decent blog page, and even post it, but I can never compromise with sweet
sleep, which on a worthless, futile Sunday is anyway hard to come. Goodnight.
