It’s a hot night and I’m in need of a sip of cool water. So in the wee hours, I wake up, wee, go to the kitchen, open the fridge, pull a water bottle out and as I raise my head to take a mighty gulp, my eyes fall upon the insides of the fridge and my own insides churn a wee bit. Guess what? A fridge packed with boxes of good homemade leftover food. Glass bottles of chutneys, boxes of chutneys, half nimbus, medicines, creams, a huge stainless steel pot of MILK. Even at 3:00 AM I am ashamed. I can’t have the perfect life. Why does Dabur sell its rose water in a plastic bottle? Why can’t it be a garnet colored glass urn like thingy? Why is my fridge cluttered? Why is there a reusable steel pot of milk? Why can’t I have a disposable plastic gallon stored on the fridge door? I trudge back to bed almost ashamed and then it hit me. This was a Desi fridge. My ideals were western. I am all woke about the western influence on body images and I preach to everyone that we are humans and not all of us want to be like ketchup bottles - tall, thin and no head. That is as far as my wokeness goes. I am influenced by the first world deep down and I want a fridge that looks like it came from the home of a tomato ketchup bottle - woman.
I crawl into bed and battle with another squirt of guilt. I was upset at having a full fridge? The ingratitude of it all! That’s how life is. We are so influenced by certain ideals that when we don’t match up to them, we think it’s all wrong. Meghan for example, her whole rant with the mighty Oprah was a first world problem. Who after Diana, didn’t know what royal duties entailed? You become a princess and then you rant because you are expected to be a princess, so you resign from being a princess but now want to cash in on the celebrity of having been one? The Ingratitude of it all! And wanting to kill yourself is absolutely no measure of your misery. I want to kill myself every time a taxi driver opens the door, pulls down his mask and ejects a gob of spit on the road, wipes his chin and gets back to driving. EVERYTIME!
Even in COVID times. Speaking of the entitled, I really feel bad for people who went on only two vacations this past year. Not. What a difficult year it has been - they had to go to Kashmir to ski because the Swiss mountains were inaccessible, and had to make do with Goa because the wretched govt. didn’t have flights to Hawaii. Yes, they contracted the virus, were a burden on the national healthcare system, probably contributed to infecting others around them and put their own children at risk but they were victims. They had to stay home boo hooo hoo. All of us spend considerable time and money acquiring, building, renting, buying, decorating our homes and now we have all been forced to make use of it. How terribly sad and boring! Why make use of the shelter we built for ourselves? Why let it protect us from outside forces? How have we humans devolved into being this stupid that our instagram lives matter more than being alive in real life? The ingratitude of it all!
