Addiction....

Additction. What do we understand by this word? The first thing that comes to mind is drugs and that is immediately followed, atleast for me, by numerous warning advertisements that i have come across shouting to me "SAY NO TO DRUGS", and till now i have managed to do just that. And i believe i will be able to say the same 20, 30 or even 50 years down the line. As it is, the first contact against such "addictive" substances is in this age only. The delicate age when we come across addictive substances and not in a position to know any better succumb to the "challenges" of our peers to "try" such stuff. This is the age that we need to be careful and later on when we become more intelligent we will ourselves know that whats good for us and whats not.

This is what i have been taught since my childhood. I guess it started with a scene in a movie in which a college student is literally pushed onto such stuff by calling him a scared cat and what not. I cant name the movie but i distinctly remember getting a lecture after the scene on how I shouldnt think twice about drugs and other addictive stuff. At that time i was wondering what did i do wrong? But i guess my parents were right in teaching me at that time cause i still havent forgotten. Very early in my life i had been taught that Addiction is something that is very bad! And thereby i have been always kind of scared of being addicted to anything throughout my life. Thankfully this fear has saved me and today I can say, proudly(if i may add), that i am not addicted to anything. And neither are most of my friends. Thats the truth.

Or is it?

In the past few years and especially in the last few weeks I have realised that I couldnt have been more wrong!
Till my entire school life, upto the time i went in college i held my naive opinion of being addiction free and strived hard to maintain it. Had read somewhere that Caffeine, the key ingredient of coffee and tea, is a very addictive substance. Didnt really understand how it could be so, especially since my parents used to drink tea rituosly twice a day, and so did most of the other elders that i knew. They couldnt possibly be drinking something addictive, could they?
Throughout my college life, during the countless night-outs numerous friends of mine thrived on tea just to gobble down that one additional morsel of course that might save the exam for them the next day. I religously stayed away from all that and somehow managed to endure all the night-outs, though i aint sure if i studied as much as the tea-drinkers were able to. But then there were some tea drinkers who seemed to gain so much energy after drinking tea that they realised the true meaning of the lives in the death of the night and proceeded to explore and conquer the world rather than try and conquer the exam the next day.

Then, I noticed it. For the first time i saw someone who was actually "addicted" to tea. He was a very close friend and inspite of my numerous taunts he couldnt lose his addiction(i seriously doubt that he even tried). He just couldnt do without it. Tongs, that was what i used to call him often, used to drink 10-15 mini cups(thats what we got in our college) or sometimes 10-15 double-mini-cups(equivalent to 1 regular cup) in a seemingly short span of 24 hours. Sometimes he used the "energy" he gained to study, sometimes to chase his other creative endeavours, sometimes just coz he needed to drink IT.

After my realisation that coffee and tea were indeed addictive I thought i would try and change the habits of my parents(even though i had failed miserably with tongs) before they also became addicted to it. My juvenile thinking failed to notice that 40 or more years of drinking tea would definitely have had them addicted if a mere 10 years were sufficient for tongs. It was then that i noticed the complains of headache that my mom had, the reason? She had her regular cup of evening tea because we were out shopping, or at watching some movie or just outside!
She was already addicted!

Saddened I was, but still I was thankful to her for having given me this priceless teaching of not to get addicted. Still I was proud of not having succumbed to the likes of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, tea, coffee, and the rest...
I was still addiction free.

Or was I?
In my second year of college, I had become enclosed in a very small and very close group of friends. We spent all our time together. We went to college together, we went to watch the movies together, the meals were all together and we even came back to the same apartment that we shared. And then as they say "disaster struck". Due to some reasons, there came drifts in the friendship and fault lines appeared out of nowhere in our seemingly unbreakable bonds. I was in the epicentre of it all and thereby suffered the most(in my opinion of course, I cant even imagine their PoV). Thus came another realisation. These 3-4 months of spending so much time and thought together had made me addicted to this group of people.
I spent almost an entire year trying to come out of the "addiction" and make a new circle of friends, again trying my best to be careful not to be too addicted to any of them.
After that initial ordeal, i was again happy and proud that i had managed to survive a minor tryst with addiction. After all I hadnt succumbed to the addiction of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, tea, coffee, people and the rest...
I was still addiction free.

Was i really?
Nopes, wrong again. Still learning, still jejune and yearning to mature i learnt that i was wrong.
This time my enlightment came from a powercut.
Delhi, as many of you might be knowing, is suffering from probably the worst power shortage that i have seen in my short lifetime. The people are outraged and what the rising prices of essential commodities like eatables and petrol; the seemingly autocratic attitude in pushing the reservation policy et al couldnt do, seemed to have been done by powercut. This is turning out to be the biggest threat to a successive next tenure for the Congress in Delhi(even the centre isnt all that safe).
The worst or probably the best part of the powercut is the fact that it cripples you(of course only when you dont have a genset or an inverter to save the day for you) so much so that you can do nothing. Nothing. Apart from sweating and sometimes also thinking, as was in my case.

It was a night when there were 11 powercuts, spread over 8 hours. Power returned for the duration of 5 minutes before to be taken again for durations like 45mins to 1 hour. All others had managed to sleep off while the room was still cool cause of the Airconditioner and I, being the late night sleeper that i am, got up from my computer seat only after my UPS gave way and i decided to call it a day. Expecting the power to return in an hour, as was the norm.
An hour passed and i was sweating profusely, and electricity came, albeit 15 minutes more than the usual and i heaved a sigh of relief. Thinking that now finally i will manage to sleep and go to office the next day. 5 minutes and a mayb one session of 40 winks later, there was a powercut again. This was also not really exceptional as there were 5 minutes of powercuts occasionally following the 1 hour loadsheddings. 5 minutes turned into 10 and my grumblings turned into full blown abuses for the BSES(the electricity provider for our area) and its employees.
After the initial anger had subsided, and i had again grown used to the sweat, I started reminscing the good-old days when such power outages were not really that uncommon. And we all(including the other dilliwallahs) had accepted it. At this time gensets and inverters became very common until the power situation improved. After which such equipment usually became obsolete and useless. Or so i thought until this night...
Tonight i was wanting more than ever that my inverter function properly.
Thats when it struck me.
Electricity.
I was addicted to it.
I just couldnt do without it. Try as I may, I just cant imagine how people survive in villages sans electricity. I just cant. And i shamefully confess that I, like most people around me, am also addicted to something.

Electricity i believe is too specific a term. We are all, with the exception of the sages residing in Himalayas and elsewhere, addicted to technology and maybe many more things.

Addiction in the end is unavoidable. But i guess the most dangerous and unavoidable type is the addiction to people. I have known for quite sometime that People can be addictive but inspite of that however much i try there have been people who have come close to me and forced me to become addicted to them. And there will always be people who will come close and then move away leaving you sometimes shattered. Thats just how it is meant to be.
Addiction is in our genes and we have either got to stay ignorant about it or accept it and come to terms with the fact of life.

It took me almost 23 years before this myth shattered. And I have still got so much to learn.
Many more myths and misconceptions will be broken. Maybe, just maybe, I will die a learned man...

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep...
And miles to go before i sleep,
miles to go, before i sleep
poem by Robert Frost

PS:This has turned out to be tooo much longer than i imagined. Congrats to those who endured this much amount of bland text in one go!