I am an urban madwoman. That is being decidedly different from the provincial madfolk, for instance, the treatment does not usually consist of being locked up inside a room and flogged by a deranged witch doctor, or being force fed villainous concoctions, or married to sad, howling domestic animals, or drenched in bone-chilling cold water and made to roll hundreds of imaginary chappatis on the floors of temples to appease some starved god...
The city's madfolk are not the crazed-looking tramps with the ever-glinting eye, slouching in dark corners, under flyovers, or outside malls. They are not shaking dead geraniums these days, certainly. And they certainly do not sit waiting their turn at psychiatric clinics. The city's madfolk are out to conquer the world, reveling in the knowledge of their madness, strutting their insanity for the world to see and comment upon. And nothing's better than making it to the papers or on silver screen, whether they're being booed and spit upon by critics for their sham gentility and unwarranted obscenities, or lauded for adding queer angles to the boring normative. And garlanded or garroted, they enjoy the controversies they generate, and the followers they inspire and command.
The city is proud of these mad hatters, for it gets to share the spotlight with them. Our famous ones have staged weddings and breakups on national television, following it with never-ending gossips of honeymoons, infidelities, public spits and spats, marital violence, patch ups, stinkingly rich reconciliatory gifts, more infidelities, sex tapes, bare-all biographies, disturbing divorces, alimonies, nervous breakdowns, character assassinations on Oprah (or Koffee with Karan), drunken driving, ODs, more sex scandals, romps with religion (and not just metaphorical ones), doing time, doing drugs, doing the neighbor, finding true love, transformation, remarriage, introspective interviews, and a general commitment to world peace. "Here's where I sign off, darling, for I'm over 40 now, and a happy parent, and there's nothing more I love than to sit back and watch the sun go down over the sea... mhmmmm ... By the way, I have not had a boob job ever in my life, and I'm suing the guys who said I am deaf in one ear..."
We'll never hear the end of them. And then of course, there are the large organizations of mad people, blowing up other people in coffee houses to prove their religion is the soundest. Or condemning advertisements because they called the cow...a cow! Burn the book because the author's gay. Don't use condoms because God did not need them... Hell, God did not need to have sex at all, in the first place, but that's OK, we'll make up for it.
But this kind of madness is, in part (and in a large part at that), affectation. It's fashionable to be slightly off your rockers in an contained, not particularly violent, and preferably rich and luxurious kind of way. Like getting an orgasmic wave of pleasure on seeing carnations in bunches, or committing oneself to philanthropy and poverty alleviation by eating phuchkas (paanipuris) from the poorest of roadside vendors...or venturing into seriously questionable businesses like alternative agriculture with home grown miracle sugar substitutes...
Designer eccentricities, if you wish. But the truly mad, the truly, urbanly mad are those in whom the city inspires strange phantasmagoric fantasies, like wanting to believe that believing in something makes it possible, like probably believing that the chair in the other room, that I cannot see at the moment, does not really exist, but exists only when I go into the other room believing that it does. Or believing that if I believe really truly, I could do a back double somersault, finishing with a perfect landing at the door that's 12 feet away. Or even believing that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy does state a possible truth in its theory of flying.* After all, no one's ever tried it, or even believed it could work. Who knows what's the true power of belief, even though the religiously oriented have a lot to say about it?
The certifiably mad ones are those that only occasionally seem to veer from the beaten track. The beaten track is undoubtedly the hardest one to travel on, because you know what's ahead from the scores and scores of forerunners, and there's almost nothing to look forward to, and the spotlight is almost never on this particular road. In fact, the government does not even bother to replace the occasional street light, 'coz they'll anyway be stolen by petty thieves the very next day. In spite of the effrontery of barbed wires on the poles, that is.
The unchallengeably insane are always perched on the fence, for the fence offers a chance to belong to either side and yet to belong to none. And not just this comfortable ambivalence, but also the perfectly complementing discomfort of being stuck in a limbo, without any sense of belonging and a general look of blight and despair that leaves one indistinguishable from the millions of faces we meet every day.
And over and above all there is a perpetual doubt that hangs in the air like a December fog in Delhi... Am I mad, or is this just the stirrings of a great beginning? A creative ember that's sparking amidst the ashes, waiting for the right fuel to begin some momentous conflagration? Maybe, madness is just a projection of the intellect into another plane, an alternate existence, and the mad live and breathe in a time warp that the rest of us are just unable to perceive. Or, scientifically speaking, perhaps these mad folk just have many more bulbs blinking along the mysterious circuits of the brain...
By the way, yesterday, there was a monkey menace in our apartment complex. But I did not catch a glimpse of the marauding intruder. I was disappointed... But it did bring back memories from my childhood... hordes of monkeys and little monkey babies jumping from rooftop to rooftop, never shy of the proferred banana or potato (yeah, they ate potato)...swinging from electricity lines or clotheslines, playing with drying undergarments...little moments of delightful madness in an otherwise bland, boring world.
*To read more about the Hitchhiker's theory of flying, visit: http://www.skygod.com/quotes/hitchhikers.html
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