Good Morning?

Beastly way to begin a day, if you ask me, by getting up from bed. Now what real good does it do? You spend the first half of the day wishing you’d stayed in bed, and the remaining half waiting for bedtime. The longing intensifies after lunchtime, when you're gastronomically satisfied, and the lecturer is doing his best imitation of the sandman. You look around and marvel at those souls who can actually lift up a pen and take down notes, instead of using it as a lever to prevent yourself from flopping onto the desk.

So, getting up from bed. You’re in bed, sleeping, and having the best dream of your life, and just before the hero clasps you in his arms and proclaims ‘Muriel, I shall be devoted to thee until…..’, a shrill sound, quite unlike anything usually found in dreams of this kind, interrupts the proceedings. The hero looks around with a bewildered air, and the sound grows louder. Muriel tugs at his sleeve and urges him to complete what he was saying, when the sound grows even louder and Romeo disappears in a puff of smoke. And suddenly, you’re up. Just like that. Swearing vindictively, you spend the next few moments condemning the inventor of the alarm clock and his immediate family to a particularly oppressive hell in which there would only be this shrill beep sound with no apparent source.

After you find the cursed thing, you proceed to switch it off and try to get a few more moments of rest, to recuperate from the violent stress you’ve undergone. Romeo and Muriel decide to give it another try, when the villain arrives, in the shape of The Dad. Not Muriel’s, nor Romeo’s (they are currently taking part in a street protest against alarm clocks), it’s your own old man. Although there is nothing old about the hands that yank the sheets off you and the baritone that screams ‘GET UP!!!!!!!!’, you resort to giving him dirty looks while demurely murmuring ‘Alright, alright, I’m up, Dad, I was just recovering from one of the more terrifying nightmares’ in a tone of voice suggestive of wishing him a place in the afore-mentioned hell.

Having completed your ablutions, your prospects begin to look up after a cup of tea. There’s nothing like tea for perking you up. Everyday, after class, all the people who had barely enough energy to raise their hands to officially register their presence in class would rush off with undiminished enthusiasm for the tea stall next to the office, where you can get a cup (a glass, really; cups are hard to come by) of tea for next to nothing, while they mesmerize each other with tales of how they witnessed the ruthless excision of an ingrown toenail in the OT earlier that day and other such weighty matters. And after the tea, they would immediately rush to their respective homes, and catch up on lost sleep.

There isn't a more depressing breakfast than idli and sambhar to depress the hell out of you. The ability of the culinary misinvention in this department has been a subject of much debate among those employed in government offices, and although the majority rules against the statement, there is a small but strong minority in favour of it. The majority is not always right, as time has revealed time (pardon the pun) and again.

And people have the nerve to wish you a good morning. As if such a thing actually exists! In my personal experience, there had never been a good morning since the last one on 21st December, 1992, when I woke up to find that it was snowing. No, wait. That might have been a dream.

The best thing to be done is to ban alarm clocks, and throwing the inventor into a concentration camp* where they’d torture* him with ringing alarm clocks the moment he falls asleep, and allow him to subsist only on idli and sambhar. He would beg for mercy, but his tormentors, hardened veterans like Eichmann* (resurrected for this very purpose), would scornfully laugh at him, and sleep in a soundproofed room next to him, just to spite him. And we shall all laugh in glee, and go to bed at night more cheerfully, knowing there would be no alarm clocks to interrupt Romeo.

*I am not in any way, endorsing crimes against humanity.