Pujit Aggarwal Redivivus - Speed


    As a student, I often came across ads that marketed speed reading. Quite a few institutions offered short courses in this highly touted skill. They would support their claims and underpin the advantages by adducing the names of eminent celebrities who could speedread dozens of books in a couple of weeks.

   If you can read more books within the time at your disposal, you can garner more information and knowledge to upgrade your status as a student, a professional, or a paladin. The premise underlying the proposition, though untenable under clinical scrutiny, seems to be quite specious.
    
   Some of the front-bench classmates bragged about the number of books they had been speedreading over the weekends. There was no way of verifying what books those were or how much the speed-readers retained of what they claimed to have read.

   I was a backbencher beset with all sorts of self-doubt. I was a reader, as and when I chose to pick up a book, with an average speed. The speed would further slow-down when I came across a word or phrase I was unable to figure out.

   I would rise from the chair and pull out a dictionary to check the meaning. If it had more than one meaning, I would scan the whole entry to select the definition that fits in with the context of the book. Your immediate need fulfilled, you were about to return to the book when a word on the same page of the dictionary hooked your attention. It was ‘wait a bit’. It is ‘chiefly S. African... an acacia or other bush with hooked thorns that catch the clothing.’ Back to the book with the word meaning you sought, and the word who found you, without so much as a nominal search.

   When you share the experience with one of your ambitious and patronising front-bench speed readers, he melts with pity at your avoidable waste of resources. He unloads on you a gratuitous homily of advice:
"Cherish and conserve your energy, focus, and time. Don’t dawdle over a page or paragraph. Don’t bother about spelling, pronunciation, or meaning. Get the hang of the book by skimming, skipping, and skittering. Learn to read fast. Speed is of the essence, dude. Get a grip on the whole thing. The package includes the parts. Join a high-end speedreading course before your girlfriends blackball you."
 
   "I don’t have a single girlfriend," I chip in to stem the effusive flow of his well-meaning tirade. "I have been searching for one for over a year now."

   "You will never get one, bambino. Success zips along in the fast lane. Get your act together. Recast yourself. A handsome boy like you should be speed-dating. There is no dearth of bimbos on the campus."
I was unsuccessful in search of even a single girlfriend, whereas this whizz kid was urging me to speed-date six girls severally over a week. I found the primacy of speed in every walk of life unsettling: speed-breathing, speed-learning, speed-growing, speed-healing, speed-explaining, speed-understanding, speed-buying, and speed-selling. Speed, speed, speed….....speed!

     Two robust individuals, a man, and a woman, sit cross-legged opposite each other in the lotus pose, or sookh asan, fully dressed from top to toe, with their eyes closed. The moment the projecting knees of one touch the knees of the other, a jet of milk, honey, and glycerine shoots up from the ground between their tucked-in ankles, drenching their bodies with the frothy three-in-one emollient. Sex in nanoseconds.
 
    They have attained the acme without negotiating the foothills, the gradient, the crags, the overhang, or the blizzard.



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