The Chinese rocket may not have shot into space this week, but the price of Indian tomatoes certainly has. Not fair! So not fair it’s time to get a new complaint.
You first suspect life’s unfair when you’re knee-high; how her hair or his nose or some other body part is better than yours. Not fair! Your parents’ sole reason for living, of course, is to be as unfair as possible. Why does so-and-so’s mother allow him to sleep at 9, while you have to sleep at 8? ‘C’mon, which loser sleeps at 8?’
“You,” smirks your older brother, who is allowed an extra hour. Life’s not fair!
You rant passionately against the adults till you realise you’ve grown into one. Till you hit the peak teens, when the world forgets to rotate on its axis and focuses single-mindedly on making your life miserable — acne, hormones, girls whisked away by the college jocks, while you’re being the nice guy, the good friend, the tauba tauba — ‘rakhi brother’ — not fair! Exams postponed — not fair! Exams not postponed — not fair! Exams themselves – not fair!
You are the first male protester along with the girl students, against the unfair ban on short skirts. Who dare dictate who can wear what, and who can catch a glimpse of what! Unfair!
In fact, you foam at the mouth at the very word ‘unfair’. How unfair is ‘unfair’? How racist, how elitist, how colour-ist, how fill-in-the-blanks-ist!
As you move up, you adopt new complaints that deserve your social standing. This week for instance, you’re smarting over the soaring price of tomatoes. However, with your important salary, you can’t talk tomatoes. Your tirade should instead be against the price of artichokes, avocados and asparagus, not that you’d recognise an artichoke if it sailed out of space and danced before you. “Queeeen-oa,” your neighbour exclaims, “What a rip-off!” You nod, not sure whether that’s a fruit, a new tax or emu-meat, now that the cow is not kosher.
Topics that are worth your ire are now the high-rising price of high-rises. Or politics. Definitely politics. You must choose between complaining about the people in power, or complaining about the people complaining about the people in power.
And oh, have you arrived when you tut-tut about how the latest set of wheels (at the price of a small house), just doesn’t drive the same way in India as it does on the autobahns. Since you can’t advertise your globe-trotting, your complaints should — the queues at Prague or the quiche at St Moritz — nothing must please you.
Finally however, complaints come full circle — to those trusty (now rusty) old body parts.
“My knees are collapsing. I can barely stand,” cribs your golf buddy. “Be thankful for that. My hernia doesn’t even allow me to sit,” says a second.
“I have such insomnia, I can’t even sleep,” boasts a third. There is silence, because nothing beats that. Until you claim victory with: “But of course, I have a heart pace maker, so I can’t even die.”
Where Jane De Suza, the author of Happily Never After, talks about the week’s quirks, quacks and hacks
