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Sandipan Deb on why you need to give in to the itch to be different
This number seven doesn’t travel light. In fact, it carries more steamer trunks than a dowager on a round-the-world cruise. The rainbow has seven colours, seven is the number of periods, or horizontal rows of elements, in the periodic table, and the external holes in the human head: two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth, two ears. It is the number of chakras, and the sum of any two opposite sides on a standard six-sided dice; also the number on the back of Harry Potter’s Quidditch robe. There are seven virtues and seven deadly sins, seven rishis who form a constellation in our sky, seven nations God told the Israelites they would displace when they entered the land of Israel, seven heavens in Islamic tradition, as also seven fires of hell, seven swaras in Indian music and seven journeys round the fire in Hindu weddings. There are seven logic gates—NOT, AND, OR, NAND, XOR, NOR, XNOR—which are the basis of all digital electronics, and seven inches was the diameter of the 45 rpm gramophone record. In Christian tradition, God rested on and sanctified the seventh day.

Can you think of James Bond as 004?
And then of course, there’s the seven-year itch: what we understand as the inclination to become unfaithful after seven years of marriage. This current meaning of the term comes to us from a successful Broadway play and the subsequent highly popular film, in which the relationship between the draught from a subway grating and Marilyn Monroe’s skirt gave us one of the most wanton moments in cinematic history. But the original seven-year itch was an irritating bacterial skin disease prevalent in early 19th century America, which was supposed to last seven years once you caught it.
The 1955 film lent a totally new meaning to the term. And today, it refers not only to marriage, but to the urge to change—and to change things in any sphere of our lives—after seven years of sameness.

My generation was born to parents whose adult lives remained generally unchanged, insulated from sudden gusts and cloudbursts, from random desires and arbitrary desirables. Most of them plodded through life, quite happily, never changing jobs, progressing steadily in step with the calendar years, not questioning the cards dealt to them by life, never ever considering growing a ponytail or painting on weekends. They had no secret life, nor the knowledge that they could have one. Their worlds were stable; quests and surprises had no part to play. When our fathers went to work, they went to do “duty”. Life itself was “duty”, a yoke to be borne with steadfast equanimity.

Today’s India is so different. The work I do for a living has nothing (on the face of it, at least) to do with what my educational qualifications are. When I left a corporate career in Calcutta to come to an unknown city to be a lowly-paid journalist, I remember my father distraught and my mother weeping. Years later, when a friend of mine quit journalism overnight and went off to try his luck at “struggling” in the Bombay film industry, I thought he was mad. Today when I see a friend’s daughter doing poorly in studies but excelling in horse-riding, I tell her parents not to worry. There is space now, in India, for all of us, all our aspirations. Above all, there is more than enough elbowroom for us to take a detour from the highway. And that space whispers in our ears when we are alone, whispers that we can take a chance, and be someone different. Be what we are, what we haven’t been.

Psychologists’ studies reveal that seven is the largest number of numbers or words that an average person can remember in sequence. That perhaps gives us a clue to the sources of the seven-year itch. The human mind seeks excitement, seeks fulfillment, seeks alternatives. And seven years is a long enough time to be one person. And every person, whether he articulates it to himself or not, defines himself by his own parameters. By their work, by their lifestyles, by their past glories, and some by their biceps and six-pack abs. Yet these are but trappings; we are all defined by our minds, and our minds are something we can never know fully. Our minds are us, and our minds will always remain mysterious and unpredictable. And every once in a while, perhaps every seven years, if that’s the cliché, our minds can ambush us when we least expect it and hold up before our eyes a possibility we have not considered before. Do we pursue that possibility? How bad is your itch?

But, seriously, why be slotted for life, be known and defined precisely by everyone around you? What is (ITALS) it about a comfort zone? Why on earth should someone be satisfied knowing what he would be doing or being till the end of his life? Exciting lives are about hoodwinking our destinies, and bowling googlies to the gods. Seven years is a good acceptable long enough period to have stayed on course. Now begins the eighth year. Which should be a great time to grow a Zapata moustache, buy that short skirt you have been eying in the shop window for months, start training for the annual climb of Mount Kilimanjaro, learn origami, write down the first sentence of that novel that has been interrupting your dreams, go up to your boss and tell him his zipper is undone, take a year off and live in Bastar, get fiercely into day trading and lose all your savings, adopt a baby. Why not? Paradigms have no purpose to exist other than to be shifted. So shift the bloody p-s. You can always blame it on the unlucky number seven.

I hope it’s not going to pain too much, the tattoo that I am going to get myself. I am actually planning quite an elaborate one.
(The writer , former editor of The Financial Express and, heads the planned magazines venture of the RPG group)

editor@expressindia.com

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