Mar 2, 2010

The Charge of the Light & Sound Brigade

My TV is a humongous idiot. Having stated the obvious, I will now sip my burnt coffee as I recount the epic (possibly #fail) story of a hero: a hero who in the face of adversity and trouble still managed to advocate ribald dumbness.

In the beginning there was light. Accompanied with sound. Quite a lot of both in fact. When my TV pirouetted with my remote, the whole apartment shook with the screams of football fans, skimpy heroines singing in foreign beaches about Jalsa and of course curve-less models parading to techno. I could make the TV jump through channelized hoops by the mere movement of a finger; it was an epistemological zenith. That sensation of playing God remains, until now, unparalleled, the closest one being the toilet flush knob. Everything was perfect, as my stingy neighbors suffered from occasional cardiac arrests, until the day the love story between my TV and remote ended in a Samsung-ian tragedy. It was, in the risk of repeating myself for no reason, really tragic.

My remote stopped working. The situation hit me harder than I thought. It eventually led me to start watching Desperate Housewives on my laptop. My  pseudo-shy friend found me three days later, wallowing in pink pillows and rotting apples. He failed to understand why I had that sitcom stored in my laptop in the first place. I explained to him that it was a mistake that arose out of a misnomer which currently I do not wish to elaborate (this is a family-known blog and they communicate in the Queen's English). He understood and promptly tweeted the news to almost all my friends who were alive. In 1 hour there were 24 new messages, most of which were concerned about my well-being with a small number of them, making fun of me. I tend to lie. All of them made fun of me.

Driven to absolute humiliation, I consulted a number of experts in the field of Remote Sensing before finding that they were as related to the situation, as Angelina Jolie and her adopted kids. Finally, I turned to my pseudo-dramatic friend who gave me a brilliant idea, an idea so brilliant that it made Google Buzz look like, well, Google Buzz.

He told me to buy either a couch or a bean bag. Now, giving me options is neither a brilliant nor a dramatic idea. You can't ask your son whether he wants to marry Padmanabhan or Balakrishnan and expect him to say 'Krithika' do you? Ok, bad metaphor. That was brilliant and dramatic. Must make a mental note to kick pseudo-dramatic friend for polluting my nuclei with Balaji Telefilms' taradiddles. Meanwhile, the conscious part of me uprooted all my hair out and almost touched the barriers of a drugged Britney-dom. Bald and TV-strung, I went back to my intelligent, pseudo-philosophic friend for advice. He started on a discourse on the anodes and cathodes of owning neither, that lasted three hours, during which 34,781 babies were born in India, some romantic trash called "Will you jump over the Sky?" got released and the Union Budget increased excise duty on unsold TV sets. At the end of it, I thought I was better off watching Trisha insipid women jumping in the sky. Or over it. Or around it. Whatever.

Having exhausted myself of any more grey-cell usage, I went in for the same decision that current Reliance cell-phone users took five years ago - go for the cheaper option. I bought a bean bag and immersed myself in Positional Dynamics of Particle Re-alignment For Effective Relative Positioning of Bean Bag to Idiot Box. I really spent time on it. It is not like deciding on a design where you save the world by wearing your underwear inside or outside or inside out. This was much more important for the simple reason that my TV was stuck at Udaya news and I don't speak jalebi. Especially with the Fourth Estate.

The selected version looked complicated enough to make me proud of my rotting Engineering Degree and no charges for guessing which one. I wasted a whole day in implementing it. Once it was all set, I armed myself with a King-size dosage of fluid donated by fishermen and sat down to watch "Metti Oli". My remote remained impotent.

I was beside myself with anger, and (as all people do when they are breaking up or when they are told that they have Herpes) I threw the remote. It bounced off the wall and lay on its backside, like an electrocuted frog. I stared at the pieces lying on the floor in a jigsaw puzzle and then it clicked.

Fifteen minutes later and 24 rupees poorer, I happily watched the season finale of Desperate Housewives on Star World.

There was an empty Duracell wrapper next to my bean bag.