I am losing my sense of humour

It is the day after Anant Chaturdashi. 

The final Ganpati Visarjan processions wended their way to the seaside all of last night and any attempt at a sustained period of sleep was thwarted by the incessant fireworks. When I start the car, I am able to sense the residual fatigue but duty- daughter’s school trip, calls.

Drive out of the compound, straight into the tonnes of detritus left behind by the celebrating hordes overnight. Litter at a scale which isn’t necessarily hard to imagine in our filthy city but on a truly breathtaking scale. Plastic, paper and food residue left behind by a million callous people tiles the road, without a visible gap to see the cruel joke of macadamised surface beneath.

All to the tune of, “Main karoon to sala, character dheela hai” pumping out of the car’s music system thanks to one of the several, identity-less, puerile FM channels our city is lucky to boast of.

At this point, I could get into a long rant about the pathetic combination of stupidity and arrogance that informs the average driver out on the road all around me – god knows I do it often enough, but that isn’t the point. I actually get upset because my daughter won’t let me change the music to a CD already in the deck. This is new, in a scary and undesirable way. We have always ribbed one-another during these school trips about what she calls, ‘Bad Music Day’, i.e. a day on which we must listen to awful filmy prurience during the trip but today is perhaps the first time that I actually turn it into a serious conversation about musical taste and aesthetic sensibilities.

Surely the child must be permitted her light-hearted fun at my expense? Surely I have been fully up to it all of these years? What is going on?

I must be getting old.