Fifty Shades of Pain!

Folks this is not a typical fashionscandal post. My regular readers might find it boring. But bear with me as this subject is in my thoughts for some time and I have been itching to share it with my readers. The topic – ‘Pain’ is not something profound or something too serious because It is something that we all have experienced in our life. And believe you me, if you have the patience to read this post, you will find it typical ‘fashionscandal’ kinda piece.

I have no doubt that most of us have at various point in life discussed pain with friends and family. I remember that in my adolescence I had a heated debate with 4-5 school friends of mine on, which pain is most unbearable. I was adamant that nothing is worse than ear pain. I had my reasons…i went to a doctor (forced to do so by my mom) to clean ear-wax. The doc shot a jet of some kind of liquid into my ears and gawd that pain was agonising. The friends had their own choice of worst pain. Most believed ’tooth-ache’ is the worst kind of pain. They had their reasons because two of them were going through the phase of ‘wisdom tooth’ protruding out. The odd-guy-out amongst us was one who vehemently argued that nothing is more painful than ‘nose-pain’. He shoved a blackboard chalk into his nose (God only knows what made him do that!) and the mucous made the chalk swell and make his life miserable.

Those were the innocent adolescent days. As we grew, life treated us with more shades of pain. Post-puberty, when hormones were going berserk, a friend had a mishap with his extra-tight foreskin. Poor guy bled and to make things worse, he didn’t tell his parents anything but shared his pain with us folks whose knowledge about sex and sexual organs was based on cheap Hindi pornography penned by an author interestingly named, ‘Mastram’. I still get goosebumps recollecting that guy’s misery. Then came teenage and the age of crushes and first-love. Dude heartbreaks are too painful. It was the first shade of pain that was more emotional than physiological. It was our first brush with a shade of pain that is absolutely mind numbing and soul piercing. Heartbreak made life seem worthless, eating, studying, even smiling seemed like a crime. Lot of us went through heartbreaks and wrote suicide letters and grew beard when they were scantily sprouting. But we survived that too.

As we became wiser or shall I say, aged, shades of pain became darker and more complex. Women swore by Labor Pain and believe nothing can be more painful. Plenty of experiments proved that menfolk failed to carry a weight of a 3-months-old faux-foetus strapped on them beyond 24-hours that women nurtured inside them for another six months. Pain of a normal delivery of a baby is beyond a man’s wildest imagination. I have also heard about unbearable pain of a gay man’s first experience with anal penetration. They all swore their shade of pain is the worst. Then there are mind-f*c#king pain of rejection, loss of loved ones, failure, pain of incompetence in competitive world of education and career, pain of physical imcompetence like erectile dysfunction, inability to bear child, obesity, and something typical to India – like born with a darker complexion, not fluent in spoken English and many such insane classist, racist and elitist discrimination that plagues our society.

But PAIN has a silver lining and you may not instantly agree with me on this. Pain has a shade of Pleasure. Just recall how much pleasure you get when your toothache momentarily disappears when you apply a little clove oil or pop-in a painkiller or rub a pinch of cocaine on the gum around the aching tooth. Momentarily though, the disappearance of pain is so blissful. Cancer is spreading like flu and ask any patient the pain of Chemotherapy and he/she will turn pale. Ask any professional athlete about injury and pain and you can see the person re-living the pain in his/her thoughts. Ask a politician about losing an election, an IIT aspirant of not making it in the entrance exam, a to-be bride being rejected thrice by a prospective groom, a bright youth told on his face – ’Sorry the vacancy has been filled’, a journalist whose well-researched story being trashed as it wasn’t in sync with the management’s ideology, a talented designer not getting a slot in the fashion week as he/she is not so cool and is pathetic in licking a** ,  a man being backstabbed and framed by his trusted friend, and an undertrial lodged in jail denied of Bail just because justice has been compromised what pain is. The day they find a panacea to conquer their pain, they will experience pleasance.

The world is living a new HIGH fuelled by PAIN killers. Why? When pain subsides you get pleasure and then starts the vicious loop of PAIN and PLEASURE. Today prescription drugs, primarily Opiates – (Painkillers with Opium) are taking more lives than recreational narcotics like Heroine, LSD, Cocaine and zillion other laboratory made ‘Highs’. Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Heath Ledger and countless other global celebrities died because of lethal cocktail of painkillers, alcohol and recreational drugs. Pain is real, pain is a taboo, sharing your pain is impossible as nobody wants your pain. Pain is depressing and it is persistent that kills you like a slow poison. Pain is possibly permanent for many pained a**holes whom pain had alienated them from peers and has become their way of life. 50 Shades? Nah…Pain has many more shades and they are mostly in variations of Grey!

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