Monday, January 12, 2004

PERSONAL : A Clockwork Orange at home

I've been Clockwork Orangized! The credit to that goes to P, my former housemate till about 6 months back. I moved in with P, more out of compulsion than out of choice when I returned from the US and was unable to find a good place for myself. Before getting down to the dirty, let me explain what the concept behind "A Clockwork Orange" was.

In the famous book by Anthony Burgess, later popularized by Stanley Kubrick as a movie, Alex is a 15-year old juvenile who embarks on a path of looting, rape and destruction along with his cronies. Caught and sentenced, he is then made to undergo a "new and special" treatment where he's exposed to too much violence and killing through control experiments. The result is acheived, where he becomes so sensitized to violence that he can't take the smallest iota of violence to the extent that he can't even defend himself when he's in the world out there. The treatment by over-exposure was a novel idea explored in the book.

Coming back to P. P was a strange chap. And I mean that. I would go home for vacation for 2 weeks, come back to find the house dirty like hell! In the middle of it all, was sitting P - in his undies and baniyan - eating curd, sitting 2 feet away from the TV.

We had this longish slab in our hall, where the TV, P's gods and then those odd junkets which are part of a bachelor household used to be placed. Once it so happened that I split some water on that slab and worrying that it wouldn't reach all the way to our sacred TV, I started cleaning it up. It was at this point I realized that the slab wasn't a natural brown in the first place. Some careful scrubbing with a steel brush and some Rin Shakti soon restored the 8-foot slab to it's former glory - and lo behold! it was a sparkling marble slab!

Before I stayed with P, I was like a regular guy - can stay with a little bit of a mess around me, don't notice those specs of dirt which women seem to fix upon. Worst comes to worst, I could survive cleaning up house once a month.
Now, I'm like a maniac. Order is the key word for the day! P got me so sensitized to dirt that I can't stand the look of it. In fact, I think I'm my own worst nightmare.

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