It was one of those evenings last weekend when Swami arrived at our café table looking as though he’d wrestled with a tiger. Except the tiger was invisible, and possibly digital.
“I wasted an entire hour last night,” he began, even before ordering his coffee.
Jigneshbhai did not take Swami’s exhaustion seriously. I thought Raichand had given Swami some deadline again. So, I raised my eyebrows. “On what?” I asked.
“On Netflix,” Swami said, shaking his head. “Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. So many shows. So many movies. So many options. And you know what I watched in the end?”
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing! So many choices. I kept checking reviews, trailers, and ratings. I was so tired of choosing that finally I went to bed.”
Jigneshbhai stirred his coffee calmly. “That sounds like quite an episode in itself,” he said, with his usual knowing smile.
“It’s not funny,” Swami snapped. “We’re paying for subscriptions — Netflix, Prime, Hotstar. And recently Meera also added a couple more, I don’t remember which ones.”
His face had the expression of a driver who just realised that his car’s brakes had stopped working. “And with all these choices, I can’t even pick one show to watch. Choice is supposed to be a good thing, right? Then why does it feel like torture?”
Jigneshbhai stopped stirring his coffee this time. I knew that something was going to come up.
“Because you want the perfect choice,” Jigneshbhai said. “And perfection is the biggest villain of peace.” I felt like our wise friend was right but couldn’t decide for sure.
Meanwhile, Swami frowned. “What do you mean?”
“When you come to the café, the menu has fifty choices. But you don’t take time to decide. Why?” Jigneshbhai started. Swami and I weren’t exactly expected to answer that question. “That’s because you know what you want, and you have no fear of missing out.”
Swami looked unconvinced. “So, I should know what I want to watch before scrolling?”
“Not really, but you don’t come here just to look at the menu, isn’t it?” he smiled. “But that’s what you end up doing on these streaming channels.”
Something seemed to have lit up in Swami’s head. And even I felt I was getting somewhere.
But before we could say anything, the waiter came by. “The usual to eat, sir?” he asked Jigneshbhai, notepad poised. “Yes,” Jigneshbhai said, smiling. “The usual.”
I caught Swami staring at him, as though the waiter had just revealed a deep truth. Jigneshbhai’s default choice of double chocolate muffin seemed to enlighten him.
Jigneshbhai took a sip of his coffee. “That’s why some people come here and order the same thing every time. They’ve freed themselves from choice.”
Swami sighed. “But I can’t watch the same thing every time.”
“No one said that you have to,” Jigneshbhai said. “The problem is when you search for the best option in a menu of unending choices. In that menu, there is no best.”
Swami paused. “I wanted to watch cricket highlights.”
Jigneshbhai smiled. “You knew what you wanted.”
He took a sip of his coffee. “You just went looking for something better.”
***
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