Monday blues.....

It was on Friday afternoon/evening that I came down with the flu. A running nose, certainly running faster than Mumbai's local trains, saw me reach home earlier than usual. The weekend went by in a haze of Vicks Vaporub, D'Cold, Erythromycin and such other futile weapons in that battle against the flu. Confined to bed I stayed glued to the telly watching first Maria, and then David, go down tamely to Serena and Rafa. Not that I was complaining but dammit, those matches seemed so lopsided and mismatched.

Waking up to an overcast and droopingly wet Mumbai sky this Monday morning. Opened the windows to see the railway tracks behind my building resembling an impromptu swimming pool - and then, a bare fifteen minutes later heard a loud thud and a rumble, as if a roll of thunder. A portion of the boundary wall came tumbling down. Water gushed around here and there eddying like some rapids and the skies overhead grew ever more wetter. The running nose, by the way, remained in the race to be wetter than Mumbai's roads and faster than Mumbai's locals....

Nursing a sore throat, body aches all around etc, sipping listlessly at the filter coffee and turning the pages of the Indian Express listlessly, one was down and out, defeated by the energy sapping cold and cough. And finally, casting the paper aside, I took up the Business Standard supplementary "The Strategist" and turned with a death wish to "The Strategist Quiz" (No:308, by the way)..

Back in the days when one was in school/college one prided oneself on one's "general knowledge" - the arcane trivia of "who wrote/said what", "who did what to whom", etc. Currencies, capitals, heads of state, important dates in history, scientific inventions/discoveries, cricketing scores and all kinds of "all important stuff". For about a year now, each Monday has been a exercise in annihilating one's sense of self worth and ego. The BS quiz has a mere ten questions. So, over the course of a year of 52 weeks, of the 520 questions that I've read I've probably known the answers to around 20, possibly two dozen. With each attempt I shake my head in disbelief and the sheer extent of my ignorance. 

The crazy thing is each week I am back, to get another pounding, and am none the wiser because the answers to one week's quiz is given in the next but I am too lazy to go hunting for the previous week's questions. The end result, the answers are there, staring me in the face and I'm damned if I know what the question was in the first place! I continue, therefore, to exist, under an ever deepening cloud of ignorance. 

Will someone tell the BS to shift this damn quiz to some other, more appropriate, day? Wednesday, perhaps? Monday mornings are blue enough already!!