India catches up on boredom meter

NEW DELHI: Yawn, it''s time to get bored again. The Americans have finished celebrating July as Anti-Boredom Month - an annual event for 16 years - and gone back to yawning their way through the presidential elections, Olympic golds, reality horror shows, Saddam Hussein''s trial.... When in India, do as Americans do.
So what if we missed the celebrations: how do we perform on the boredom meter? We could beat them hands down here.
We''ve already elected a new government that''s snailing along, won no Olympic golds, lost cricket and hockey matches to Pakistan, and every evening sit through family serials that, like Jassi, refuse to get a makeover.
Doesn''t match up? Just the reason, say psychologists, why ''we'' may not be as bored as ''them''. Americans "...are bored despite living in remarkable times," said an annual survey by a market research concern, Yankelovich Partners.
Seventy-one per cent of 2,500 respondents yearned for more novelty in their lives, up from 67 per cent just a year earlier. Reason: "Just as a drug user develops a tolerance and needs larger doses to achieve the same effect, so too have we developed a tolerance to amazing events."
Are we, in urban India, close to this restless boredom? Yes we are, says Jitendra Nagpal, psychologist, Vimhans Delhi.
"Earlier, only highflying, , early-achieving corporate executives would face this problem. It''s now filtering down to the young. They get the best - in terms of commodities, information, , even entertainment - without having to make any real effort. The thrill of personal achievement is missing. Boredom because of excess is a real downer. It could lead to depressions, addictions, suicides, , a life in the fast lane... that can end in disaster."
A hallmark of the Internet Age is not individual loneliness, but mass boredom. In Overload and Boredom, sociologist Orrin E Klapp says that "a society could become boring in spite - indeed because - of huge loads of information."
He adds: "In our high-input society we try not to waste a minute in consuming commodities and communicating with as many people as possible. But in a Babel of signals, we must listen to a great deal of chatter to hear one bit of information we really want. We discover that information can become noise-like when it is irrelevant or interferes with desired signals, so tending to defeat meaning.... And so we get bored."
The boredom boomers hit the US in the ''90s. There was an increase in cases of depression and suicides, greater school drop-outs, rise in crime rates, more sexual promiscuity and loss of productivity.
Many institutes, sites, blogs were created to fight the malaise. A decade later, the advice coming out is conventional wisdom: boredom is nothing new. And not all of it is bad. If you have time on your hands as a child, you learn to be creative with it.
Bored? That''s fine. Indulge in it. Like Dunbar in Catch-22 who cultivates it to increase his lifespan -on the grounds that when you''re bored time passes slower. So if you could achieve a state of total and absolute boredom you would be, for all intents, eternal.