Worry, That Staple!

'How can you be so indifferent?  After all, this is a bosom friend of yours, right'?  My very-distraught-dear wife demanded, arched eyebrows and arms akimbo as the situation demanded. She was being eloquently emotional in her criticism of my refusal to be unduly stressed about a bothersome situation a friend had inserted himself into.  One must hasten to add that her accusation was not that I did not empathize with the friend - she didn't suggest that at all.  Actually, both she and I had spent enormous time and effort to help the family in whatever way we could and had also committed to further assistance, as required.  My wife was actually haranguing me that I should be more worried about the friend than I seemingly appeared to be. Now, that flummoxed me. I have never been able to figure out how, my long-distance worrying about him from thousands of miles away, was going to please him or ease his plight.  Unless, of course, he was the truly sadistic type who wants everyone to suffer with him. And, that is the crux of the matter!

Worry is that sizzling (because of ongoing combustion) and shining (because constant use keeps it well burnished)  pot which every family has in a special corner of the home,  It is ceaselessly boiling with all kinds of unhealthy ingredients added each passing day by the various constituents.  Now, if each household boasts of its own share of patients with hypertension, diabetes and the like -- age being no bar for the early acquisition of these ailments -- we all know why.  Our own over-worked doctors would vouch for this.  Questionable lifestyles and habits apart, one major common denominator in all such cases is the tendency to worry all the time about everything in and out of sight.  Mothers think their motherhood will be questioned if they stop worrying about something/anything at all, even during toilet breaks.  Actually, may be that space provides privacy to even shed a few tears to water that plant of festering worry.  Those furrows on the foreheads of mothers, ploughed by stress, are no less symbolic than the stigmata.  Fathers are probably marginally less prone to worrying, but are emotionally flogged into joining the bandwagon to avoid being labelled `irresponsible'.  While I am not willing to be drawn and quartered for this, I am making bold to venture a guess that women (especially if they are in a group) worry more than men. Now, please don't ask for meta data analysis to support that.

A few years back, I caught my father and his good friend, stricken by some unseen bug and staring ahead vacantly, an indication they were not all there.  Last seen and heard, they were passionately discussing the state of cricket in India and for the life of me, I could not figure what would have propelled them from there to that orbit of despondency. I decided to let them be and went out for a while and when I returned, there was no perceptible change in the sombre atmosphere.  So, I decided to investigate.  The two gentlemen danced around the periphery a bit but came clean after a few blandishments. My father's friend sheepishly confessed that they were heart-broken with worry by the prospect of India potentially losing to Zimbabwe in a test match by 2 runs in the last possible over, in about five years' time.  Whether the cause would be India's abject deterioration or Zimbabwe's upward climb in cricket, he could not coherently clarify but I was so flabbergasted I left with in a daze. What a thing to worry about!!

Recently a friend went through the depressing hospital circuit with age-related issues, got diagnosed with problems which are par for the course for his age but got home without any apparent, serious damage. While we were all relieved and happy, the subject continued to luxuriously wallow in frothing and comforting self-pity.  He shut down routine operations, went monkish, ate sparingly, spoke seldom, sniffled and moaned endlessly -- causing untold agony to the family. When all sympathy for his erstwhile medical status dried up completely, in justification of his behaviour, he summed up his worry thus: `I wonder why I got these ailments?  How did I deserve that'?  As if he was part of some specially chosen tribe of God, exempt by right from normal human infirmities. As if he would have been happier if the rest of the family got afflicted instead.  This worry seems to be the life-force that keeps him going today.  A very sorry state of affairs.

Some other outrageous worries this author has come across:

-- A grandmother worrying about Trump needling Kim Jong Un into launching nuclear weapons. That is bad enough in itself; but this sheer idiocy gets compounded,  if the latter was to get confused about the co-ordinates and send that missile to Mylapore in Madras.

-- A lone individual, sitting alone in a chauffeur-driven car in messy traffic, worrying about most cars having a single occupant and why people are not sensible enough to share rides.

-- Someone in Asansol looking up at the evening sky and worrying about if and when that blasted, disintegrating Russian satellite plunging towards Vladivastok would change direction and shake him out of slumber

-- An inveterate worrier in his mid 60s being stressed sick about losing his contract job as and when the inimical combination of Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality would invade in his small world.

But this one should take the cake and all the baking paraphernalia too.  Some decades back, when my mother was sitting alone in a very pensive mood, I asked her what her worry was -- now that all her children were married well, settled down in life with nice families, holding decent jobs, the entire brood in good health.  Without batting an eyelid she said `My worry is that at this rate, there will be nothing left to worry about'!! Beat that!