Analogikal

I’m sending out an SOS. I’m sending out an SOS.

I hope that someone finds my message in a bottle.

Those famous lines from that old police song. Much like the smell of pencils, beckons different emotions in your mind depending on the age and phase of life you are in. It was different this time though. The voice seemed feeble. The tones seemed deeper. The message seemed clearer than ever. The message in the bottle. And I had quite a few of those to send out. Thoughts. As a result of overthinking. I had a lot of those to send out.  I have no real problems in life. I have a loving family. Great friends. A wonderful job. The appetite of a gorilla and the metabolism to deal with it. Life has been kind. And i have been thankful. My only problem is a spiritual one. One of purpose, justice and virtues. One that consumes from within. The consistent nagging of an inner voice.

Growing up was easy. But living through it was tough. A masculine society demands toughness in physical demeanor and mental construct. My love for arts and the written word did not make it easy. I was bullied to a very large extent. Had it not been for my rapid growth and the genetics to tower above the rest of the crowd, i would have possibly been bullied even further. To be fair, being a smart-ass with a loud mouth didn’t help my cause. Over the years i have been kicked out of class, thrown out of cricket coaching, beaten up across a football field by a weightlifting team (it is as embarrassing and as painful as it sounds). What it instilled in me was a deep understanding of the social construct and an inherent ‘run like hell’ attitude in case of any altercation. At the slightest hint of physical retaliation on the horizon, I would run! Like Forrest Gump on a sugar rush after consuming ecstasy laced gatoradebull. It also inculcated an ability to choose my audience.

Overthinking is an art and science. There hasn’t been enough research done in this area. Because, we overthinkers, just love to think of all the bazillion possibilities as to how a research in that direction would not work. Like all pros I started at a very young age. It predates my present memory. Now, I really do not know why and how it started. The way i see it, at earlier stages of my life, not many people got what I was thinking. Be it the need to create a game from cardboard boxes and table tennis balls and play a version of cricket and have 12 pages of official rules attached to it; or the lack of interest in learning to ride a bicycle or, later on, a car. People just did not get it. Internalizing the thoughts gave me solace. At least I did not seem weird to the common man. I stopped getting picked on so often. The longer I held on to this behaviour, the more the thoughts multiplied. It gave me physical pain at times!

Finding friends who could relate to the same train derailment of thoughts and verbal diarrhea was tough. It was like looking for rotten apples in a carton. You knew they were there, but they were so beautifully disguised. Every juncture in life when I found them rotten apples, it was safe to let loose of my thoughts. Without inhibitions. The sounds in my head could take a breather. In Dr. Lecter’s words, the lambs could finally be silent. The constant relocation and the uncertainties of life meant that the silence would not last long enough. The thoughts and overthinking would come rushing back to me. Like a wave of bottles. Soon the beach of my mind, would look a lot like any beach across India. Flooded with bottles and full of shit!

This blog gives me solace. I do not know whether someone would find my bottles. Whether my message would even reach anyone. But at this point, I couldn’t care less. It is not about getting my S.O.S. answered. It is not about finding someone who can take the burden of these bottles from me. It is just about setting the bottled thoughts free. There are blogs which I finish and do not publish. There are blogs which I finish and feel that a rain has poured down on me. Then there are the ones which leave me in a heap of laughter.  As long as those bottles keep coming, I won’t complain. Cheers!