Word-ly Unwise.

You listen to a song, you are furtively intoxicated - and it sticks to your ears, endlessly playing within, like a jammed cassette tape on a vengeance spree. You indulge into it further, and as it grows on you - you play it again and again day and night, make it a whistle and a shoutalong phrase (say for your peeing-time in the loo), become obsessed with all the subtleties and crescendos within its riffs and basses, but it still troubles you aplenty, exactly like your servile-obedient girl(boy)-friend wouldn't do.

That nasty little thing is called an Ear-Worm - a sort of phonological loop. But sometimes I also experience these unceremonious Word-worms - Words sticking onto my cerebral lobes like the conspicuous stains on glasses - words that change the momentary perspectives of the world around, and create some sort of tunnel vision for you. Imagine that word falling like snow all over the places around, wherever you try to steal a snap of things around. Imagine feeling like a slave to the mere idea steeped within that word, or it flowing in a stream both from your outward senses and from the conscience within. Imagine being hobbled with a daisy chain of a single-word-rings, as you stomp your feet out of the reclusiveness it has put you into.

One of them, quite a long earlier, used to be that unapologetic entity - 'Ultimate' or 'Ulti...' in short for the deprived ones. Well I strongly refrain from overusing any whimsically-worthy word (any i-know-what-you-didn't-mean-now-shut-up word, any word that appears as your birth-right whenever you utter it with extreme profligacy) - in any sort of parlance, be it's a business-talk, sex-talk, ruthlessly-friendly-talk, friendly tu-tu-mai-mai talk, classroom-talk, sex-talk, downmarket-bargain-talk, jealousy-talk, hopeless-talk, sex-talk, boast-talk, dream-talk, Tendulkar-praising-talk, Lalu-cribbing-talk, sex-talk, scowling-talk, pretending-talk, muted eye-to-eye-talk, self-talk, sex-talk, advice-giving-talk, swear-lying-talk...you just name it. But what could I've done. 'Ultimate' is (was) just so ultimate. You could chirp it in almost all your pranks you did in your college teen years, from your first drink, to your last crush, to your middle years of classroom renaissance (Note-I never had anyone of these). And I felt so helpless when I had to incriminate that sexy word into... say 14-year-banishment. Poor 'Ultimate' must've felt what Lord Laxman had undergone while imagining his predicament. Throwing 'Ultimate' out of my hollow colloquial, ultimately, was the least ultimate thing to do, I tell you.

And how can I slip away from shouting that silk-smooth sounding word - Slick. Oh my god this word seemed always asking for more. More like the newfound fashion in the street, the new-fangled choice of trying to sound impressive by talking something already impressive. Something that is less ordinary, less pale, less bookish. Inadvertently during the conversations it felt like a nicely conspired replacement for the ubiquitous 'Cool' or less-valued 'Awesome' (Cool as in "That's so cool..." followed by lots of exclamations !!!!...) - yes that drooling word from any of your next-door automatic-casual 20 year-olds, gasping in wonderment of his/her newfound obsession with the new high-end celebrity inner-wear making rounds in the market. The slickness in 'Slick' was like the stickiness of the spit. And then I never felt hesitant feeling it, using it. Using it effortlessly in things like "That's such a slick answer", "Wow, see all her shopping's so slick. Still useless", "I like those awfully-artless-noise-in-between-the-slick-beats in those Himesh Reshamiya's number..." For some linguistically-romanticized days slick used to rule everything - from my bathroom soap to the business ppts to my temporary-crushes-of-the-day's tight outfit. And I used to feel liberated in my expressionisms. And then it dawned on me that something's fishy. That why do I resemble the phrase "When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." so much. I sighed.

The latest of the culprit has been 'Cynical' - Like I see some genuinely natural smiles on faces and wonder: "See...How less cynical this person is...How can (s)he be this much so...!". Like I meet a stranger on the road and would just flinch from asking him/her: "Hi! can you help me become a little less cynical!". Like I feel like in heaven when my tiny (actionable) thoughts actualize a million times less cynical that I could imagine...and wonder it can't be me who did so. Like I talk to most of my friends - close and far - new and old - hip or practical or ideal - and wonder why the F*** they sound so cynical all the time. I get to hear a lot of 'Why's and 'For What?'s in the times. I remain curious about all the deceptive impossibilities infested in everyone's thought and try to question them. I can see the sapped down fervor in any of the passions one follows, watch it passing away like a careless sugarcane being churned out of all its juice, slowly. Sorry. I just hope they were a lot less so. I hope I could sponge up that complacent, (in)toxicating, and blighted drug of cynicism from within them all...And then say "Now try your wishes for yourself." And I know that nobody is actually lazy here in sensibilities. Laziness is just such a gainful illusion that it can even make something like...the First Kiss sound insipidly boring. Thou (and me) must confess.

** Well I wanted to talk about another such fixation - Disillusioned - but don't feel like it now. Don't want to see such a thing overpowering again.

** The larger (sole) purpose of this post was to remind you that everything around couldn't be captured in the
ultimates or the cynics or any other ideation that rules your line of thought. So remain sensitized about those parasitic terms you are fixed up with promiscuously. What r they by the way?? :)

** Image: HNTAC, HJI, BELCH, PM.

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