...Of Slight Surreality

 The Race Course jogging track here in Pindi is right next to the Army Graveyard, and right next to them is a huge bare piece of ground where at least 50 different groups of kids are playing cricket from sunrise to sunset. I usually jog there for half an hour every evening in a futile effort to lose some flab. The jogging track has at least twenty odd speakers hung on trees, all piping out meant-to-be-soothing Muzak that I'm blissfully unaware of thanks to my iPod.

 I don't think I need to tell anyone that The Big Lebowski is one of the best films ever made, and whoever put out the entire audio track of the movie out as a series of mp3 clips is a friggin' genius. I usually listen to the film as I jog. Today as I was coming out of the jogging track, with the last few minutes of the film playing in my ears, one of my favorite bits of dialogue came on ;



“Well I guess that’s how the whole darned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands of time"

 At that I took off my earbuds and saw a scene that might have come straight out of Lebowski. The jogging track speakers were blaring Muzak at full volume as a funeral was going on in the Graveyard. Just then one of the many batsmen at the cricket ground hit the ball high into the air, falling right onto the earthly remains of the deceased, lying on a charpaai in front of the congregation. 


.....Well, I guess that’s how the whole darned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands of time.