Pailful of Panacea

It is unfortunate that most of the human race is forgetting about the best remedy to all human ailments : laughter. There are people who don’t know how to laugh, and unfortunately no school or college teaches the pupils how to laugh. The parents who had never laughed in life after their wedding, do not know how to transmit this lovely and lively art. There have to clubs who teach people how to laugh and be happy, and still when they twitch their lips, the natural laughter refuse to pop up, and they turn out to be worse than they were earlier. That is where every person likes a good dosage of comedy on the screen, and that is the reason why Charlie Chaplin is more watched even today in subways and railway stations, where the degree of disappointment and disparagement is at its peak, than in cinema halls and multiplexes. And at this juncture, we need another Chaplin to turn the minds of busy-bees to lighter side of life and laugh heartily.

Killer (the Polish title being Kiler), a movie from Poland, was a real treat to the audience; because it was not to do with cheap bawdy comedy, but one that provoked and ticked the lighter side of our sensibilities and there were smiles followed by bursts of laughter in the audience, and there were times when the viewers laughed heartily, the sign of any true comedy. The plot was nothing so serious, but could be put in one sentence : a taxi driver by name of Kiler is suspected to be the killer of a leader, and at the end grooms himself to be the killer, and at the end confronts the real killer, kills him to keep his new identity as the killer. The twists and turns in the course of the film were quite entertaining, and one was not aware how the 65 minutes passed by. I am quite sure that many of the people who had watched the whole of the film (there were some who were too old to learn new tricks of laughter, who walked in the middle of the film), would have had a peaceful sleep and a fresh and refreshing sleep.

I really pity those who do not know how to laugh, an art which unfortunately cannot be learned by any specialized centers; but if one wishes, one can train the body and the mind to carry half the smile always sticking from the face. The revered Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thick Nhat Hanh, in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness: A manual on Meditation, recommends that we train ourselves to “smile”. Here is his exercise : “Hang a branch, any other sign, or even the word “smile” on the ceiling or wall so that you see it right away when you open your eyes. This sign will serve as your reminder. Use these seconds before you get out of bed to take hold of your breath. Inhale and exhale three breaths gently while maintaining the half smile. Follow your breaths. Anywhere you find yourself sitting or standing, half-smile. … Maintain the half smile and consider the spot of your attention as your own treasure” (p.79). Hanh sure knows for sure that the modern generation needs to be taught how to smile.

Let us get back to the Killer, and what was so funny that we laughed as the innocent victims were punished, and the wicked were blasted beyond recognition? Should we always expect something funny to laugh and smile? I was told that often theatre actors and actresses stood in front of the dressing mirrors and practiced laughing and crying, the two most predominant emotions that theatre personnel were at their best. If we fail to laugh, then is there something wrong with us, or that laughter has become out of fashion with our generation? We need to look at small children, preferably those who are below the age of three to understand and learn what makes their tender sides tickle? Look at the world with new eyes and mind, and there would be a million things which would tickle our sensibilities. Maybe our eyes are too used to the reality around and we fail to notice the color and beauty, and even incongruity in them, and therefore we are ever more serious.

Are you drowned in perpetual melancholy and find it hard to get out of the sickening tendency to keep a stern face all through the day? Get hold of a hardcore comedy video or film DVD or CD, and put it inside a DVD/CD player, close all the windows and doors of the room, and put the volume of the television at blasting, and forward the DVD/CD till the movie has finished all the titles, and you are ready to rock… don’t control your laughter, but let it blast and don’t worry even if the ceiling were to come down… roll down the floor and laugh, or if you prefer kick and punch the sofa you are sitting on, jump off your seat, leap from one seat to another, and let it continue for the next ten minutes. If you find any particular scene, especially funny for you, rewind the DVD/CD and watch it again and again till you have extracted all the juice out of the scene, and when the time is up, shut down the television, open the windows and doors , and lie down on the bed and relax. Go back in your mind some of the scenes, which had ticked your funny bones and smile and laugh to yourself… I can now guarantee you are ready for a cool and enjoyable day ahead!

Life's Bitter Joke

Humor is of several kinds; I won’t be able to enumerate all of them, but I know for sure there is genuine humor which help widen our face-lines, and there is wry humor which would only arouse uneasy feelings in the listeners/audience, and there is yet another kind of humor which is cruel. There are similarly jokes, which instead of make us laugh, may only prompt us to shed tears, bitter tears. This is what can be termed as life’s bitter jokes, and today I am going to share about one such bitter joke one of my friends narrated to me. It is immaterial who had narrated to me, but the fact is that it happened today to people known to me. And believe me, jokes have no color or creed or nationality, and can apply to all people in all situations.

People do make mistakes, but if we fail to look at the people who make mistakes, and only blow the mistakes out of proportions, we are bound to lose the touch of humanness, and that may be dangerous. This senior lady, who had lost her husband some three decades ago, had brought all her children up single-handedly, courageously, crossing several barriers, hills and valleys. She worked hard to make a living, and even as she nears her seventies, she stitches religious habits for a group of nuns, and that keeps her going. She is assisted by her eldest daughter, mother of six children, and wife of a drunkard, who is the sole bread-winner of the family. The mother and daughter duo had received an order to make a religious habit for a nun, and today was the deadline.

The senior lady had not eaten during the day, struggling to keep the deadline, and rushed to hand it over to the nun, who on seeing the outfit, shouted at the lady at the top of her voice. There had been a lack of communication, but that was not the reason for her to lose her temper and shout at the lady, who had made this outfit with great care and love. Her daughter younger daughter, who stood close-by was stunned to see how her mother was being humiliated, and was deeply hurt by the rude and rough behavior of the nun. The senior lady and her daughter depended on the nuns to make a living, and they valued the orders of the nuns greatly, but they could not believe their eyes when the nuns began to pour out all their anger on the lady.

The mother and her younger daughter were both greatly hurt, but they are helpless; the ruthless and cruel way the nun had treated them was more than they could bear. If the duo was well off, they could just say goodbye to the nuns, but they cannot afford to do that. They have to repair the habit, by replacing it with another set, and the senior lady was ready to travel for three hours to purchase cloth to replace the one they had made with wrong measurements. When I think of this situation, I feel sad, and at one moment there were a couple of tears at the corner of my eyes. How could life be so cruel to the have-nots? Is not there a way out for them to live with the honor and dignity they were created with? Should they continue to live on the mercy of the people who could hire and fire them at will?

The one image which comes to my mind when I think of the bitter jokes of life, is that of clowns of ancient day plays; these were men from the lowest strata of society, who struggled to make both ends meet, and opted to make a living by making people laugh on stage. While they laughed and made others laugh on stage, the reality at back-stage and at home was just the opposite. They laughed while their hearts cried bitterly, and such is the laughter the mother and daughter would have been indulging in today, and when I heard this incident narrated to me, I was helpless as to how I could console the daughter, leave alone her aging mother. It is one thing to listen to others narrating to us as it happened to them, and it is another thing to experience it for ourselves.