A whole set of new excuses

One of the biggest casualties of the stay-at-home era was the flood of excuses that we made to get away from people, situations, et al. My uncle used to say that if you have an excuse, it had better be a good one. A good excuse was like the fall guy who would save our skin in all ticklish situations. ‘Saheb bathroom mein hain’ was a common explanation that made things easier for saheb. But after the lockdown, how long could he supposedly be in the bathroom?

Without getting into the intelligence quotient of these justifications, even the lame ones did a pretty good job. How often had we heard another shirk line, ‘Saheb phone ghar par bhool gaye hain.’ Even if you were not gullible enough to believe that a house help had access to his master’s phone, he still got away with it.

With the drastic turn of events, we literally had no place to hide, and all the excuses to avoid someone flew out of the window, because home was where we were supposed to be. All the bluff masters had their bluff called, and were made to do some concrete work. Work-from-home blues had struck my glib colleague, who would often fib about a sick family member, and take frequent leave. But now, he could not complain as he could attend to his family and also be in office simultaneously.

The children, too, could no longer make a puppy face and tell their mothers that they were not hungry while eyeing a goodie from outside. And all the excuses of the little souls for not going to school had vanished into thin air. They could not escape the online classes, even when they had a real stomach ache, for the virtual world had invaded the comfort of their bedrooms too.

Gone are the days when we as college students would bat our eyelids and come up with ingenious excuses to melt our teacher’s heart, and earn that attendance, without attending her class. Bunking was always preceded by a solid excuse, and it often saved us from next day’s embarrassment. The sports girls were usually the object of our envy, as they would merrily roam around the campus, on the pretext of sports practice.

So, while we were struggling to keep pace with the new normal, we were looking for new reasons that would bail us out in the altered work situations, without much ado. Old habits die hard and the fresh crop of excuses was quickly taking shape. They were equally interesting as the earlier ones.

‘Network is not working’, ‘server is down’, ‘called you many times but could not connect’, ‘don’t have a laptop’. And yet again, somebody comes up with a masterpiece saying, ‘My wife sat on the mobile, that’s why I couldn’t hear your call.’