Reboot or Die!

Twelve years ago, when I was still a cub reporter, one morning when I entered the office, I saw a scribble on my soft board -- ‘Sensitivity is beautiful but only in doses… The moment your sensitivity becomes a liability to others it becomes unattractive’… Of course, my editor was referring to my passive aggressive behavior that was causing friction, but the line stayed with me. When we are younger, our sensitivity is all encompassing and no matter how uncomfortable it is to others, we are not willing to look beyond it. It takes a while to realize that when we claim to be sensitive we are actually being so to our own feelings. The truly sensitive people are ones who can put aside their own sensitivities to accommodate others’. But I’m digressing here. The point is that at 22 I was completely tuned in to all the emotional vibes around me and everything could affect me very deeply. It seemed like a great thing then because as a reporter I could pick up and retain these signals even from stars and (between them) to reproduce all of it in my pieces. When I look back I see that I haven’t done some great revelatory or explosive stories but I have managed to chronicle certain special instances in people’s lives with a certain amount of innocent curiosity, affection and respect. Perhaps therein lies the secret of my strong bonds with people. However, as I grew older at times I found myself feeling lesser and lesser for many things that would have affected me earlier. I kept wondering if I had numbed from inside… got desensitized… Now that’s paranoia that I can’t take… That’s when I message Pooja and Ryan (the two pillars on which my life rests). Ryan’s reply normally is “Don’t be dramatic now…!” while Pooja is patiently reassuring. Here I have to admit that the fear of being desensitized is the most dominant fear in my mind (second only to getting Alzheimer’s)… I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t feel like crying in a film or was not moved by street children singing the National Anthem… But like I said earlier there have been phases (at times for over six months) when I have felt nothing towards anything that is not directly concerned with my life and at such times, it has taken fear, anxiousness and at times stronger measures like self-loathing to snap out of it… I was going through one such phase a couple of years ago… I stopped crying while reading a poem… stopped sending messages to express myself, read complete trash and did not write a single line worth remembering for almost six months… No reassurances helped me… I could sense something dying inside of me and I didn’t know how to revive it… Of course I was camouflaging it very well to the world outside! And then I heard her… I will never forget her strong voice singing the first note even as it pierced right through my soul. I had never heard anything so pure in my life… It was Abida Parveen… I heard her first song `Chhap Tilak Sab Chheen Li’ and I knew I had stumbled on something that was extraordinary… The disc went on to the second song `Mose bol na bol meri sun ya na sun… Main toh tohe na chhadoongi o saanware’ and it was enough to make me weep for the next fifteen minutes… I know it sounds dramatic and maybe funny too and perhaps the same song may not connect to others but it was the moment… the words and most importantly the pure notes that really connected so deeply… The reason I quote this incident is it’s common of us get desensitized owing to the pace of our lives where we are too caught up to even realize that we have not `felt’ in a long time… And even when some of us do acknowledge it, we don’t know how to go back to `feeling’… But like computers each of us has a reboot mechanism in us which is triggered by something ordinary, something mundane, something pure… We just need to find it…