“Projects keep coming up and I can’t just make out which ones to take up and which ones to give up,” Swami was exasperated the other day while munching into his muffin.
Jigneshbhai sipped his coffee in peace.
“Raichand says take it and I feel it’s so uninteresting. And then he gives me sermons on how something is a waste of time, and I find it interesting,” Swami continued his rambling.
Jigneshbhai continued sipping his coffee through Swami’s ramble. I identified a lot with Swami. It can be tough to decide. After a while, our wise friend spoke.
“Anything can be interesting, and anything can be uninteresting,” he declared, speaking in riddles as always.
“Well that doesn’t make things easier for me,” Swami remarked.
Indeed it didn’t. Swami was looking for solutions, but it wasn’t clear what the problem was. This wasn’t a new situation though.
“Like this muffin? Or this coffee? ” Jigneshbhai asked, lifting them alternately. “Aren’t they interesting?”
“How did this coffee and muffin appear in my talk of projects?” Swami quizzed. Even I looked at Jigneshbhai with a quizzical question mark on my forehead.
“Who would have thought that a cup of coffee and a double chocolate muffin could be so interesting that we keep having it for years?” Jigneshbhai remarked.
“Uhh?” Swami asked.
“How many of these have we had?” Jigneshbhai asked lifting his coffee cup and pointing at his muffin.
“I don’t keep count of them,” Swami said.
“Exactly, that’s the point,” Jigneshbhai exclaimed, as if he had reached some eureka moment.
But Swami and I drew a blank.
“What’s the point, exactly?” Swami asked.
“Well, that even a coffee and a muffin can be interesting. But you don’t go for any of Raichand’s five-star dinners. The food there is better, isn’t it?” Jigneshbhai enquired. Swami nodded.
“Why is that uninteresting to you?” Jigneshbhai asked.
That question left me and Swami pondering.
Raichand had this penchant for unannounced dinners at exotic places that Swami used to tell us about. But he had stopped attending them for a few years. The purported reason he gave to Raichand were his non-existent high sugar and homocysteine levels. But Jigneshbhai and I knew the real reason.
“The company is boring. And what’s the point? No purpose in wasting time listening to his useless jokes,” Swami confessed.
“Exactly, that’s the point,” Jigneshbhai said again, like that funny character in some movie that keeps saying exactly all the time when nothing really happens.
“What’s the point, exactly?” Swami asked again.
“No point. No Purpose. That’s what you said. You see no point, no purpose in attending it, that’s why it’s uninteresting. If you see purpose, it gets interesting. Like this muffin,” Jigneshbhai said, again lifting the muffin. “Though I must say it’s interesting without any purpose too,” he added taking another bite.
Swami and I pondered over what Jigneshbhai had said.
Whether you find something interesting doesn’t depend on the thing, it depends on your purpose. You then say Yes to it. Else you find it uninteresting and say No. Logical. He had a point.
It was then that I saw that the wealthy old man walked across from the adjoining table towards us.
He perhaps helped Swami decide what projects to say take up and which ones to give up, when he said, “What you say No to depends on what you have said Yes to.” I saw Jigneshbhai smile with no purpose. Maybe that was the whole point.
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