What If

It’s 4 am, and I have been awake since the last two hours or so. And I am restless. I don’t feel like reading. Working in a publishing house takes a toll on your personal reading habits ‘coz every book looks and feels like work. I flicked through television for a while, nothing entertaining there either, so am online — surfing, reading, scrapping, etc. and wondering what all can I still do in a day’s time to make life a little more exciting.

Anyway, for the time being, let me teach you how to play “What If”. I don’t know whether this game actually exists or not, but it was taught to me on one cold January night quite a few years ago, and as you can see it was memorable enough for me to be teaching you this tonight.

“What If” is fundamentally for people with a sense of humor and fertile imagination. It was taught to me by Sakthy (pronounced Shakti), one of my most favorite people in College. The time I am talking about, we were discovering our life together as classmates and friends in our first year at Stephen’s. In January that year, our class went for an overnight trip to Rakhigarhi, a Harappan site in Haryana, since all of us were budding historians back then. Today, I cannot remember much of the shards and pots we saw and “excavated” but the trip was exciting in so many other ways, including the joys of learning and playing “what if”.

We had all been put up in the village school, and the boys were made to stay in one big classroom and the girls were made to stay in another. There we were packed like sardines, squashed in our respective sleeping bags, trying to sleep while the wind raged and howled outside and it rained cats and dogs and kittens and puppies. In our “room”, everyone around us went off to sleep one after another, except Sakthy and I. When I grumbled, “I hate sleeping bags,”, she responded, “Let’s play ‘What If’”.

The game works like this. You ask a question starting with “What If” and your partner answers it. It could be anything ranging from “what if the world was flat?” to “what if you were made your mother for a day?” to “what if you discovered you actually have the hots for so-and-so tomorrow morning?” so on and so forth. Needless to say, with every passing question, you are expected to go beyond accepted sanity levels. It’s a challenging and mentally stimulating game (it really is!), and the madder the answer the more are your chances of emerging the winner.

Sakthy and I played it all night, without catching a wink of sleep. Our only concern was how not to wake up the people around us, especially the teachers, because no matter how hard we tried to stifle our laughter in our sweaters and sleeping bags, chances of them hearing our continuous giggling was quite high. More than the giggles we were worried about anyone overhearing our questions. By the time it was dawn we had “what if”-ed every classmate, senior, friend, teacher, principal, entire DU! And none of the what-if-fing was…ahem…acceptable.

So here are my set of what-if questions for you. You can answer as many as you like…but answering at least one is mandatory. The best answer in each category wins a prize. Promise.

1. Hanuman Mandirs — no matter what their age — always seem to be called “Pracheen Hanuman Mandir”. What if they were renamed to “Adhunik Hanuman Mandir”?
2. What if you had just one more day to live?
3. What if Bush and Saddam discovered they were actually long lost brothers, each knowing how to sing one stanza each of the song they were taught as children by, say, a Ramu Kaka?
4. What if you could actually buy love?
5. What if there was no Altaf Raja? Alternately, you could answer…What if there was no Ekta Kapoor?

Disclaimer: The inspiration behind at least two of the questions is conversations I have had in the recent past with a couple of friends.