Propped Up Stories

 IIT, Delhi used to have an annual students’ cultural festival, Rendezvous. In fact, all IITs had them with different exotic names; IIT Madras called it Mardi gras, in IIT, Mumbai it was known as Mood Indigo and IIT, Kharagpur had Spring Fest. The ambience of the campus used to be transformed during that three day jamboree. Lot of crazy games, music competition, short skits, Just A Minute (JAM)* sessions and dance contests made the campus alive and throbbing. The competitions were organized among the resident and invited students from other colleges in Delhi and other states across the country. I believe sending invite to other IITs for Rendezvous was almost mandatory and on a reciprocal basis but there was a definite bias in inviting students from girls’ colleges like Lady Shriram, Miranda in Delhi, Sophia from Mumbai and Fergusson from Pune for enhancing the glamour quotient.

The festival used to culminate with a celebrity performance as the last event. I recall one year it was Jagjit Singh- Chitra Singh duo, when they had just begun rising as stars on the horizon of ghazal singing. Another year it was Anup Jalota, before he started singing only bhajans.

Among all competitions I fondly recall prop story contest. In movies and plays, ideas and scripts precede the design of sets and props. However, in prop story competition the workflow was in the reverse direction. Common objects like chair, table, duster, rope, walking stick, umbrella, cycle- tire, hangar etc. were used as props. Each participating team were handed three or four such props on stage just before their performance and they were supposed to spin a story on the spot using those objects. Obviously, the teams were judged how ingeniously they made use of all the props and how interesting story they could weave around those objects.

The use of the props was left to the creativity of the contestants. For instance, a chair was not necessarily required to be treated as a chair alone but could be projected as a human or an animal who could be talked to. A reclining chair could be a patient while a string could be a snake. It required some acting skills to convey convincingly whenever a personality was projected on to an inanimate object but the audience loved it when it was done successfully with good punch lines against the backdrop of an interesting story that lasted only for five to eight minutes.

I was reminded of the prop story contest after years because of a simple incident that happened to me recently. I was moving around in Bhopal city in search of a wider arm pad that is looped above the elbow while using the instrument that is generally kept at home nowadays for measuring blood pressure (BP). After inquiring at many surgical shops I was told that I would have to purchase a new instrument because an arm pad comes as an accessory and is not sold as an independent item. After my futile search I thought of taking a break and went to a popular eatery and ordered for a milkshake. In this café there was only standing arrangement for the customers who could either eat on the spot or takeaway.  I placed the BP instrument, that I was carrying in my hand, at the payment counter for convenience, made the payment and started sipping my shake as I stood nearby.

While I was enjoying my shake, a man of my age came at the same counter. He looked at the BP instrument quizzically and confirmed from the counter billing person whether it was a device for measuring blood pressure. The man at the counter nodded in affirmation. The customer then inquired the café employee, “Since how long have you started this service?” The man at the counter, while juggling with his billing machine, informed him that the BP instrument actually belonged to me. At this the customer gave a good laugh looking at me and delivered a punch line, “Oh! I thought the café is now keeping a BP machine at the counter to monitor the blood pressure of the customers before and after billing their orders”. The remark was impromptu, humorous, contextual and engaging- a type of story that would have earned him a good applause in Rendezvous.

Sometimes people too can be used as props instead of using them as characters. Recently I was attending a dinner party with a gentleman whom I met after a long time. Shortly we were also joined by a retired colleague with her husband. Formal greetings were exchanged and the lady asked this gentleman whether he could recognize her husband after so many years because he had lost all his hair. The gentleman looked at the bald man, then at the lady and retorted with a smile, “Are you taking the credit for the loss of your husband’s hair?” It was a good and spontaneous dig that evoked a sheepish smile even from the poor husband who squirmed a bit uncomfortably indicating that there was probably some truth behind the wit.

I now realize that all of us have been given certain props in life - relationships, job titles, assets, liabilities, beliefs, opinions and circumstances. It is up to us how we use the props to spin our stories to make them engaging. The subtle truth is that few of us may be unknowingly projecting our own personalities on our inanimate props like house, land, car and bank balance. It may be wise to introspect whether we are enslaving ourselves to these props by such projection.

The danger of such projection lies in the fact that props too respond symbiotically because they have a tendency to acquire life on their own at the expense of whosoever owns them. If this idea appears bizarre then how else do you explain road rage cases when a car is slightly scraped by another vehicle in an accident? A car owner who has given his own life energy to the persona of his car actually gets mentally hurt when his car is ‘hurt’. An executive with a sea facing office room feels diminished when he is shifted to an insignificant room with a smaller table or by a change to a less appealing title because the latter is also feeding on his energy.  The same thing happens when the share value of a particular scrip bottoms out. It frequently literally takes the breath out of the shareholder.

The other day I was listening to Shri Sudhanshu Trivedi talking about zero, infinity, the relationship between numbers and the progress of a person on the spiritual path. When one is heavily dependent on many things or deeply attached to them in life, one’s energy is dissipated among those many things. The reservoir of energy at one’s disposal keeps on expanding as the number of things one is dependent on keeps on reducing. It is just school level mathematics that taught us that in division the result increases when any number is divided by lower numbers. Finally, if you reduce the denominator to zero, the result is infinity. Similarly, if the number pf props in one’s life is reduced to zero, one becomes infinite -  the state of enlightenment or merging with God.

In my sunset years I feel that we all will be judged in our life for the use of the props in our stories; not by the applause of the audience but by the tenacity of the memories that we finally leave behind. As for myself, I could not agree more with the following couplet:

कम नहीं मेरी जिंदगी के लिए,

चैन मिल जाए दो घड़ी के लिए

कितने सामान कर लिए पैदा,

इतनी छोटी सी जिंदगी के लिए I

(I look forward to peace. I have unnecessarily created a lot of baggage for my short life.)

Footnote

1.JAM- Just A Minute – is an interesting contest in which a random sentence is given to the participants who have to talk for sixty seconds by building on the opening sentence without grammatical mistakes, unnecessary pauses, repetition of words, stuttering or stammering. All participants have to be on a watch while the first contestant is speaking and they have to object by tapping on the table whenever the speaker flouts the rules of the game. The first one to rightfully object and tap gets the next turn to speak further till sixty seconds of that round are over. The participant who is speaking when the clock ticks sixty seconds gets the score. Marks are also given and deducted for right and wrong objections of the contestants when someone is speaking. In any round the first speaker is decided by the judge based on who tapped first after the random sentence is read out.

2. Mardi gras festival of IIT, Chennai has now been renamed as Saarang.