"we no longer looked for the basics. ... we had stopped looking at and looking for the fundamentals and the origins of things, more so of ideas, of behavior, of language, of everything."
A day's shopping opens up several lessons in the nature of human and social behavior. Indeed, it is not just a matter of consumer preferences, it is a window to the evolution of society. "I had a revelation today…” is how I started describing my shopping trip to a friend. Albeit, a very confusing revelation.
I approached the security guard, bill and basket in hand, "There is a billing error. I need to go back in". He asked me to approach the customer care desk. I and my friend had already spent ten minutes going over the bill twice. Half an hour more, I thought to myself, and my resolve to resolve the issue sank. But steeling myself to the sight of a long queue of un-cared-for customers at the customer care desk, I approached the entrance. A thin arm shot in front of me, and a proportionately thin woman in a uniform came into view, "You can't go in with that, ma'am". "You see, there is a billing error, I need to go inside". It turned out that I could go in but without the things I had purchased, or possibly not purchased. I could go in with only the bill. Now, that was a real problem because the cashier had billed me for lesser items, and I had yogurt and a jar of jam happily freeloading in my basket. So I tried to explain, "You see I have extra items, I have to give you money". All I got was a sideways head nod. I waited for an undecided minute, went up to her again only to be assured that I definitely could not take the items back into the store. “So should I just leave then?” "Yes". And now I have a jar of strawberry jam I did not pay for.
This was only one of several surprises a day's shopping had for me. This came after I had spent almost an hour in the supermarket looking for thread. Now, thread is a highly underrated and increasingly underused household item. But there are some of us who do not mind mending our hems, and being one of those people, I innocently went in search of an array of colourful threads. Little had I known that I would climb from floor to floor, go from fresh vegetables to the furnishing section, and find no shelf harbouring the poor item of my desire! Surprised sales girls gave me absent minded nods, or a confused "not in this section" after I had told them twice or thrice that I "am looking for thread, dhaaga … for sewing". Some directed me to another section, or the other floor where the attendants were none the wiser than their counterparts downstairs. And when I reached the billing section exhausted, I had to hear a tirade from the woman behind me because I let another person go past and join the shorter queue. In her opinion, I shouldn't have let him go. It did not seem ironic to her that when my turn came, she nudged and took my spot and grudgingly requested to go first because I had "too many items". A deference towards elders made me acquiesce, and swallow the sharp retort I wanted to give.
Murphy's Law must have chosen me for that day because just when I reached the counter, the cashiers had to change shifts. They took as long as the IRCTC website, making me inwardly groan at the 21st century corporate models that do nothing for India's 19th century attitudes. In short, I left the building feeling that I had accomplished nothing. Here I was with holes in my stockings, without a thread and with no idea where to get one in this sprawling city. Just like a few weeks ago, when in the whole mall I was unable to locate a plain white kurta. They had the flared ones, the long ones, the asymmetric ones, the chiffon and georgette printed ones, but when I asked for the simple, white, cotton kurta "like they used to be", all I got was "sorry, ma'am". O! How I miss the kiryane wala, and the local darzi.
To summarise and jumble (for, honestly I can't make sense of it), I could not find the most basic objects that the stores were supposed to have, people were okay with jumping the queue only if they were the ones doing the jumping, and I could not be honest and pay if the cashier made a mistake. Astonishment rose inside me as I realized how fixed our systems and how specialized our demands were, so specialized and mechanized indeed that it was near impossible to find the basics. I felt a realization dawn upon me – we no longer looked for the basics. In being up to date, and in the flow, we had stopped looking at and looking for the fundamentals and the origins of things, more so of ideas, of behavior, of language, of everything.
I had felt like this before. In fact every morning, I have a similar feeling while perusing the newspaper and going through the sad manner in which events like Dadri and M.M.Kalburgi's murder are being handled, the increasing violence against women, the sorry state in which refugees are reaching Europe, the divided opinions about net neutrality, the reports on climate change…, all this and more interspersed with full page advertisements of gated villa societies ready to be booked in such and such location. We as a society are losing the basics. In a frenzied desire for uniformity, conformity and what you will, there is lesser and lesser space for originality. It is harder to be one's own self, whether it be a man eating his well-earned food, or a writer expressing his thoughts, or a woman commuting late at night, or someone wanting to belong to a homeland, or just this planet gasping for breath. There are no basics to be found anymore - no more white kurtas. And when we do set out to mend the fabric of our social existence that is being so ignorantly torn apart - for we shall try to mend it - I am very afraid that we won't find the thread to sew it together.
It may be a stretch to go from a failed shopping trip to a faltering society, but in me at least, the two evoked the same feeling of worry about what the future will hold. In this fast-changing, rapidly evolving world where commodities last for a season and no longer, is there no place for the basics? Where opinions are blared over speakers and made 'viral' over the net but no longer thought over in individual minds, is there no place for the small things that constitute the big whole, like the insignificant thread perhaps?
