Ignorance is bliss?

I could feel the buzz in my ear as the machine ran along the contours of my head massaging the oil into the pores on my head. It is a blissful feeling, all the more on a sunday morning. I felt myself heading towards the first stages of sleep when the barber interrupted. The machine continued to buzz. I looked at him enquiringly wondering if he mentioned anything.

"You work at an I.T company?", he asked again. Momentarily I wanted to ignore his question in denial of being the ubiquitous I.T worker, but the machine kind of forced a nod of my head. He smiled, almost sneering I felt. I feared the next question to be what my work would comprise of. I fear this question only because of the inevitable way it leads to my trying to defend that I need an engineering degree in Electrical & Electronics to sustain my current employment (pun intended, please!).

Thankfully, he did not press too much into the details. The next thought was whether my I.T existence would cause an inflated bill at the barber shop owing the severe misconception that I.T jobs are high paying jobs. In order to eliminate any chance of such an eventuality, I asked him (please recall that the machine is still buzzing over my head!) as to why he checked on my I.T status. He replied that he wanted to join a call center and to do so he has been taking lessons in spoken English. He went to speak in English ( relieving of my continued struggle to communicate, hitherto in Kannada & worse, Telugu!) and told me he still had problems in reading the longer words. The teachers at his classes are supposedly very supportive and have even promised a job at the end of 3 months.

"Will you be going to America?" he asked with a tinge of excitement written on his face. "No!!, surely, not now!", I responded with zilch response time ( It is important that I use terms such as "response time" only retain the faint declining traces of the engineer in me). He continued looking a bit surprised. I had a strange feeling that this guy had no idea of the chaos on Wall Street. I asked him if he knows what is happening in U.S markets and apparently ignorance in some form or the other is omnipresent in the fact that he didnt know and I expected him to know!

I went on a small speech explaining to him, the fall of Wall Street with as minimum details as possible and went on the mention the expected effects of the fall on the great Indian outsourcing industry which I had a sneaky feeling hadn't really reached the intended destination. Is it the buzz...may be...

I recall the story of a couple of frogs that had fallen into a well. A group of frogs watching the duos frantic efforts to get out well kept discouraging them. One of the frogs seemed to be affected by this and its efforts and jumps kept diminishing. The other frog meanwhile kept trying and eventually jumped out. It turned out that the frog that got out was deaf and therefore could not get bogged down by the onlookers...

Was this guy like the deaf frog? Although I had no intention of discouraging him, he seemed unperturbed by the facts. I realized that at times, ignorance is bliss. Sometimes, more than bliss, helps us focus on what is needed and just ignore the rest....

The eternal spirit

"Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this, ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth." - Albert Einstein

The spirit lives on forever...