Boredom

There is a sentence people say when they don’t feel like doing anything, ‘I am bored’.

What is boredom? When we feel like doing nothing at all. At such times we don’t feel like eating, watching, drinking, thinking or even lying down.

Best way to ‘kill’ boredom is to watch something moving. Yes, for example, if we have a trough with fish, we could ‘kill’ hours together just watching their movements.

It is one of the best methods to remove one’s boredom. The incessant movement of fish, their fight for food, survival.. all these would make us feel fascinated.

I have had a big cement tank full of guppy fish. The fish were caught in canal of dirty water near my house. I am talking about 1970’s when I was a teenager. The fish were very colorful. Especially the male ones. The top fin and the tail were in multicolours. Against the male, the female guppies were very plain. How did we find out which one was male and which one was the female?

Good question! The female fish would have their tummy swollen and they were laying eggs. So, it was easy to recognize them. We (I, my sisters, my cousin Venkatesh) used to remove the ‘pregnant’ fish from the tank and place it in a ‘Horlicks’ bottle. After the eggs hatched, we let the small baby fish into the big tank. We had to take a precaution though. We put back the mother and the baby fish during the night when the other fish were asleep. Otherwise the other big fish ate away the small baby fish ‘thinking’ that it was their food!

Food, yes! We were going for hunting of worms for the fish apart from the regular powdered fish food. We went back to the dirty water canal with a bottle and a few small sticks. The red coloured worms used to get stuck to some part of water and were wavering. we happily took those worms using a stick or two and dump them in our bottle.

Much to my mother’s annoyance we were doing this regularly! Her thinking was that the dirty water is unhygienic and could get us some incurable diseases!

But all the scoldings were put behind when we used to watch the fish jump against each other to catch hold of the worms (reddish orange in colour) when we lowered the worms into the big fish tank.

We were always at the fish tank watching the fish. Though we knew that the coloured fish are the male ones, we had named them Hema Malini, Rekha, Jyothilakshmi (a famous cabaret dancer of those days!).

Boredom could be removed by even sitting in a park and watching cute little children play. Try to follow one child’s antics in a park and you will agree with me that the boredom vanishes by watching cute children.