The Lazy Confession

Well, the last nail has finally been dug in the coffin. The debatable question was "How lazy am I"? After 20 something years (I don't like to tell my exact age :-)) of self appeasing, elaborate excuses and fabrications, it was answered today...

You know how you tend to make impressions of people you meet. Like when you say that hey, you are a pretty good TT player when you are really wondering whether a dead wall would prove to be a better opponent. Or when you meet a person and think that now you have finally met a gem of a sucker. Some people leave a great impression, some pretty bad ones and some do not strech your imagination at all. And then all of a sudden, along comes a guy, meeting whom, you think, boy, the only reason he qualifies as a homo sapien and not a tortoise is because of the absence of a hard protective shell on his back. Such people define the term "LAZY" in its truest, extremist, oxfordist sense. And when such a person calls you the laziest human being he ever met, you can only look upto the heavens and wonder whether they changed the dictionary without informing you.

Having enough faith in your IQ, I assume that you must have figured out by now that I met with such a reply from such a person today. It has made me look at my life in a different perspective.

To begin with, the only game I am probably decent at is cricket. For starters, cricket is a game which is tailor made for people who flinch at the name of hardwork. Now when I look at it, you almost stand on the ground doing nothing for about 98.2% of the game. Between all the sweat, which doesn't necessarily result from running around but is a natural residue when sunlight falls on skin, you get sufficient number of drink breaks. Added to all this is the fact that my batting talent could only afford me an extended stay at the runner's wicket in most of my matches. And this is not it. I sometimes wonder what is the reason that 90% of the times I got run out. If only piece by piece, the puzzle is getting unravelled.

But you know what. Sometimes it just happens that winners acheive their goals not by working on their shortcoming but by rashly ignoring them. So when I came to U.S., I took up squash. It was never a first choice. I just wanted something to fill up the empty spot left over by the absence of cricket. And as has been proved so many times in history, compromises are often doomed to failure from the start. The one major problem I find with squash is the fact that the makers of the game forgot to put any coefficient of restitution in the ball and everyone following them made no objection at all. I am extremely convinced now that this act should figure in the top 20 heinous crimes against humanity ever. As far as guys like me are concerned, we only go to a squash court to make others feel good about their talents. Personally, when the other guy plays that drop shot against me, I almost feel like the way Poland must have felt against the advancing German armies. Subconsciously aware of my talent of laziness, I almost immediately know the futility of any attempt I might make at returning the shot, but my ego masked in the guise of this self fooling illusion always makes me spend that energy which I value so dearly.

Nevertheless, life goes on and so does squash. Sometimes, I feel guilty of the fact that maybe I enjoy this laziness. Maybe, I am too lazy to counter this view. So it stays very much part of my life. And so does my latest title "The laziest person whom the laziest person ever met".