IT WAS BROKEN WHEN YOU BOUGHT IT

“Ashu, your new walkman, its broken from the side, you just bought it yesterday” cried my uncle, who had borrowed my cousin’s walkman to listen to a song, as we drove down to Nepal. “No Dad, it was broken when we bought it”, said Ashu. My cousin, Ashu, at seventeen, had done what most people his age usually do, put the blame on someone else. I call it the ‘I didn’t do it syndrome’, and frankly I don’t think its age related. Most people suffer from it at some point of time in their lives.

If I was to transport you to my childhood, back in the tea gardens, when my mother’s expensive crockery went missing, she usually created havoc in the house, and hours later the servants came out with a chipped cup or saucer or quarter plate. “Who has done this?” That was a regular question, my mother asked. The standard reply was “Memsaab, it was broken when you bought it”. Did shopkeepers sell broken pieces? Were customers naïve enough to buy broken pieces? Or were the servants smart?

I often wondered if our servants believed in the Zen philosophy, which says you can either be obsessively careful with expensive crockery, and live in fear that you’ll drop it, or someone will chip it, or an earthquake will come and it will fall out of the cabinet, and burden yourself, or you can imagine that it is already broken because it is going to break someday. Then, every time you drink from the cup will be a pleasure.

So definitely the cup was already broken when i bought it? So also was the rest of the bone china in the house!

The law they say can be applied to personal relationships, job, success and money. If you give up feeling that you need things, you can appreciate them more fully.

This is a total contradiction to the “laws of attraction”, which says if you think of something positive and want it with all your heart, the universe conspires to give it to you. Negative thoughts send your gifts farther away from you. So by thinking that the teacup is already broken are you actually speeding up its breakage?

If what they made was to be considered broken by everyone at large, would Versace, Lenox, Faberege, Baccarat or some of our other brands make crockery at all, I wonder. Would our retailers sell crockery under the label of ‘damaged/ broken’ in place of ‘breakable/ handle with care’?

Going by this philosophy, Obama’s message in place of ‘Yes We Can’ should have been, ‘we have already lost, and no we cant, lets see what we can enjoy henceforth’. In place of ‘Audacity of Hope’, we would have a book on ‘Caution of Despair’.

What about relationships? Would people get married thinking they are already divorced. What would happen to the holy vows of matrimony? Maybe they would read, ‘we are already separated, so lets see what we can gain from each other and how long we can enjoy the company.’

How about the bones in our body? Are all 206 of them broken from the time we are born? Maybe then, all of us should come with labels that say ‘manufacturing defect’.

While most people all over the world fret over broken crockery, lets also think about the man who made a masterpiece with it, a man called Nekchand, and his masterpiece, the Rock Garden in Chandigarh.

Why do we resort to “it was broken when you bought it”? Is it merely because it is easier to put the blame on someone else? Or is it because we feel that taking onus for our reactions will leave us in a compromised state, or have us face consequences? Or is it merely because the line sounds like music to the ears, “It was broken when you bought it!”