You meet a friend who asks you, “How's things?” And you answer, “Same old same old.” There's only one meaning I would derive from your reply: that you lead a boring or at best complacent life. But maybe you're just happy with the way things are. You're at peace with yourself. Hmm. Not convinced? That's because “same old” has a pejorative connotation that is hard to shake off. You cannot imagine saying it with your eyes lit up and voice brimming with enthusiasm. Go on. Try it. Your listeners will look at you curiously.
The recent spell of extremely erratic local weather got me pondering the nature of predictability. When does “the usual” stop being a synonym for “boring”? When is change welcome and when does it make one nervous? The first time, last December, that the daytime temperature sank to a new low and I found myself wrapping a shawl around my shoulders at noon as I prepared to meet a friend for lunch, I felt a distinct frisson. I enjoyed the bite of the wind that reminded me of days past. It was, as the cliché goes, a pleasant surprise. Then the fluctuations began. It grew warmer, turned sunny and chill, cloudy and chill, cloudy and mild, and so on until January crept in so tamely that I wondered where winter had gone. I wasn't prepared for this level of unpredictability. It unsettled me.
Actually, I should have been prepared. Every year for the past five years at least, weather worldwide has been so unpredictable that it's almost predictably so. Worst floods of the decade, coldest day in the century, unprecedented heat wave — we hear these terms every year, now in one part of the globe, now the other, and it is hard to stop ourselves from uttering that predictable phrase “global warming”. Our country is on tenterhooks every year before the monsoon. How comforting it would be if the rains were predictable, how overjoyed we would be if, year after year, we heard the same news: “The monsoon will arrive as usual…” I'd give anything for that kind of same old same old.
Back to the Bangalore winter, imagine that daytime temperatures had remained low right through. My pleasant surprise would have vanished pretty rapidly. Surprises don't last long. They are, by definition, momentary. That is why consumerism is such a big hit. You fall for a new and exciting offer that stops being new and exciting the moment you've accepted it. I remember watching, on TV, women being given makeovers on the advice of their daughters. The ‘before' and ‘after' scenes were predictable: the mother feeling nervous as her face and hair were transformed, the thrill of the ‘new look' and her gratitude towards the daughter for having suggested et cetera. How long before the newness wore off and it turned into the same old same old?
Lifestyle magazines are always suggesting ways to spice up one's life, as if change were a necessary condition for success and contentment. Tedium is no recipe for happiness, either, but perpetual change is not everything it's cut out to be. A student once told me, “Whenever I feel too settled in a job I know it's time to quit.” He was deliberately fighting complacence. It may work for a while, but then it could become self-defeating.
Ideally, life should be a happy mix of predictability and surprise. Ideally, good things would remain as they are and the bad alone would change. It is not an ideal world. Same old mess on the road, but oh, there goes another tree. Prices change and salaries don't, colleagues change and bosses don't. But there are occasions when the bad remaining unaltered isn't so bad after all. Take the example of how we look up old classmates on the Net — an urge, I believe, that comes upon us in middle age and after. Revisiting the past is a need to reassure ourselves that nothing has changed. Sure, you're happy when you find a good friend just the same as she was 30 years ago, but how about when you find that someone you never liked is still the same obnoxious fellow he was in college? You might actually feel a sense of relief. I'd like to compare it to my recent experience of eating chyawanprash. I was astounded by how its taste had been so engraved in my mind — the last time I ate it I was just about five years old, mind you! — I could notice subtle differences in flavour between what I had once spooned out of a green tin and was now digging out of a sachet. But that's not what I'm getting at here. My point is that I realised I cared as little for the medicinal taste of chyawanprash as I did when I was a child.
Tastes often do a flip-flop; you could develop an aversion to something you used to love, and vice versa. But, as a writer, I'm glad this language hasn't altered dramatically. Well of course it hasn't remained the same old same old, but imagine if you woke up to find that a new English had taken over, where cat means monkey and sound means light. You'd have a tough time making sense of this column.
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