A couch tomato in the making...

I thought ‘couch potato’ falls short of explaining the whole nice and ugly phenomenon and hence rejuvenated it and made it ‘couch tomato’. A tomato, bulky, lively, juicy and semi-solid as it is, better explains what I, in the current form, am destined to become.

3 years back, I feared about living a life sitting in front of a stupid and so-called intelligent device trying to make it do things, instead of being in the field somewhere – anywhere – where the action is. I feared that a ‘sitting duck’ or what-I-call the ‘couch tomato’ kind of work would make me fixate my body in a single place yearning and crying for mercy. I feared that it would bloat me horizontally and I would burst in the end. My worst fears came true when I went to work as the software engineer. All I did was eat and sit before the computer churning out lines of code, apart from numerous human actions that don’t deserve a mention. Next was the lucky break in the form of IIMI. Although we were forced to sit in the classrooms, it wasn’t that bad a tomato thing. And, there were other really bloating-in-the-process tomatoes that gave a sort of a sadistic satisfaction coz I figured that I wouldn’t be the first among the lot to burst out.

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A lot of my friends dream and carry it onto their everyday lives. They explain stories about roaming white ghosts, witches, legless children etc. They ask if I dream. I neither get the pleasure of seeing the ghosts nor get to dream about them, but the only dream I ever remember is that one fine day I bloat horizontally and burst out. As you’d expect, that scares the hell out of me. With a BMI well within 25, I’m anything but fat right now, but then, you know, there is no logic behind nightmares. They simply come and bulldoze you through and you can’t do anything about it. What a wicked and unjust world!

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So, here I am in Delhi, and the worst nightmare has come true again. With a vintage couch-tomato work to boot, I’m feeling haunted again. I have this other problem of a loss of self-conscience when getting into the eating fast-food mode. There I was, eating chocolate flakes and Black forests yesterday without an inkling of the remorse. So all I want to do right now is to get into a field work or go home – go home and pray that I’m relieved out of my nightmares.