On Getting Bored and Boredom in General: a victim’s narrative!!

I met her at a party – she was barely 25, married for just around a year.
When introduced to me, she asked me ‘So, you are here for the vacation?’
‘Vacation?’
‘You are in school, right?’
Well, I do not know if I am supposed to have taken that as a compliment, but the truth is that I was irritated beyond what was right – and thus I began to consider her ethnographically, one of the worse kinds of punishment one can bestow on another.
I was about to suggest that I am almost-30, but couldn’t; someone else came in “Hiiii!! Long time, no see….”
Somehow she continued to retain her interest in me – whatever that means; she sat close enough to me, and started – ‘So, what are you doing here?’ referring to my stay in Mumbai.
‘Working on a project with an NGO.’
‘Oh! Don’t start about projects and all; I don’t want to know!! Projects bore me.’
Well, I really did not know if I had been keen enough to tell her – about a project on obstetrics care!
‘No, I won’t’ I assured her.
Yet she persisted.
‘So, where are you from?’
‘Kolkata’
‘And how long will you be here?’
‘Well, depends – maybe another month or maybe for the next 6 months even. Depends on a few factors’
‘So, you’ll return to Kolkata?’
‘No, not sure either. That too depends’
‘But you came here from Kolkata?’
‘No.’
‘But you said you are from Kolkata!’
‘Yes, I am from Kolkata but I came here from Bangalore; for the past 2 years I had been living in Bangalore.’
‘So, you will return to Bangalore from here?’
‘Very slim chance; chances are more that I might go to Jharkhand from here, or maybe Delhi.’

She gave up on me for sometime to come. But she seemed a very rigorous woman. She returned to me soon.


‘So, Rakhi, what do you do during weekends?’
I tried to keep it easy.
‘I usually catch up on sleep!’ I laughed stupidly.
‘Yes, but other than that?’
‘Well, to be honest, the weekends are when I try to catch up with my own project.’
‘Own project?’
‘Actually I am doing my PhD; so, during the whole week since I am busy with the NGO project work, weekends are the time when I can do my own thing, because I need to keep sending my progress report back to my institution.’ I explained lovingly – I cannot do injustice to the love of my life by truncating her, the PhD that is.
‘Oh. So what is your PhD on? Physics or English?’
Whether I was supposed to have been spoilt for choice, I don’t know; I just managed to be slightly dumbfounded. Guiltily I said, ‘No, it’s in social science.’
Apparently it was not stimulating for her, for she did not touch it even.
‘So, when you are bored, what do you do?’
I was becoming quite nasty and naughty.
‘Umm…I don’t get bored much’
‘You are like always into studies and reading?!’
I smiled. Sadly. I was a non-conformist.
‘Actually, nowadays I cannot give the time I should ideally give to studying and reading; I get tired over the week and spend up mostly sleeping on the weekends. I actually should give more time to my studies and reading.’
‘Oh!’ she looked sympathetically at me.
‘Like discs and all, you’ve never been to?’
I wore an arrogant cap for a moment.
‘Actually, I’ve had my share of it to an extent – for around 2 years I was in the media. I have a fair enough idea of nightclubs, discs and so on. And this shift I made is a deliberate one.’ I smiled. Actually quite like the malicious women who attend such nightclub parties.
‘You don’t watch cinemas?’
‘Rarely.’ I lied.
‘You can come over to my place; we can go…there are some big shopping malls close-by.’


I nodded at her benevolent gesture.


And then came –


‘You don’t get bored?’
Ms. Malice I was.
‘No, actually no.’
‘You never get bored!?’
‘Actually I have so much to finish always that I do not get the time to get bored.’
‘Whole weekends…you never feel….?’

Her voice trailed and the waiter came in with juicy kebabs…
She carried a leftover pain in her eyes for me – a person deprived and denied.


Before leaving she suddenly hugged me. Repeated the invitation for window shopping.

I realized, as we drove back in my brother-in-law’s vehicle, the night sea-breeze caressing my oily-tired face: in order to prove that you are not a bore, you should get bored with life, always. If life seems happening enough such that you do not have the time to get bored, you are not a happening enough person!
What an irony Sir Ji!