Aaa-aaa-aaat-chooooooo

Today morning I woke up and immediately understood that something was not right. The feeling was familiar. An important, but generally unobtrusive organ had made its presence felt. Now breathing is something that comes naturally to us, and our nose is something that is just there, protruding outwards in all its glory or lack of it, but generally not needing any attention, at least from one's own self. But when you can experience the act of breathing without trying to, and can acknowledge the presence of your nose without prying into the mirror, you know you have a problem at hand, or at your nose to be precise. It is running away as fast as it can, and you have to spend your day making a futile effort to catch up.

But if you think the rest of this entry would be a tearful, rather a phlegmful tale of the miseries of a running nose, you are sadly mistaken. A brilliant flash of brilliance (I know it is bad writing style, but could not find a better word) gave me the idea to find out some of the ways in which a running nose can be useful, and it is these cheerful discoveries, that I am going to bore you with for the next few minutes, if you care to continue reading, that is.

The Aura: I realised in the crowded bus on my way to office, that a running nose radiates a sort of aura around you. My usual experience on the busy bus route is, you have to locate an area which seems empty-ish, push a few people around to reach there, get a toehold on the floor and a finger hold on the rod, and then let others help you keep your balance. Things went the usual way up to this point, but after that I felt a tingling sensation in my nasal tract. As is always the case, the handkerchief was just out of reach in times such as these, and I sneezed before I could wipe up, then sneezed again, and again, and when the realisation dawned that this could go on for a while, blew my nose into the handkerchief with a flourish. Now what happened in between I hardly know, as it is difficult to keep track of mundane matters while sneezing, but when I finally decided that it is time to tuck the handkerchief away into my pocket, I looked around and realised that the toehold had become a foothold, the finger-hold had become a hand hold, and I could flex my elbows a little bit. Just to experiment, I blew my nose at regular intervals for the rest of the journey, and believe me, the aura seemed to hold. I almost felt like singing a la Dylan,

How many times does a man need to sneeze,
Before he can stand in the bus?
The answer my friend, is flowing in your nose,
The answer is flowing in your nose.

Being Hygienic: It was the sneeze-wipe-blow-wipe cycle without much to cheer for till about 1:00 pm, when I decided to go for lunch. Now I am not much of a cleanliness freak, and too much of a food freak, hence in the lunchroom I try to finish off formalities of acquiring the coupon and the food as early as possible and make a beeline towards an empty table to start eating. But today, just as I was about to take in my first mouthful, I though about the sneeze-wipe-blow-wipe cycle and decided to wash my hands for a change. This itself is a commendable by product of a running nose, but more was to follow. After washing, I wiped my hands into the handkerchief out of habit, and was again reminded of the sneeze-wipe-blow-wipe cycle, and could not help but wash it again.

Appreciating the Tastes of Life: I was to make the next cheerful discovery just a few minutes later. Almost as soon as we started eating (I lunch with a few friends), my friends started discussing the deficiencies of our subsidised canteen fare. Now this is such a regular occurrence, that I had not noticed any irregularity for a good few minutes, when I suddenly realised that I had not chipped in with my regular two pence in the discussion. And it dawned on me that the food was not tasting bad. It was not tasting anything at all to be precise, but when you are on a positive note, trying to discover goodness in an attack of common cold, you tend to disregard these minor irritating details. And I immediately decided, that for a person not good at cooking, a running nose is the perfect tool with which to cut through his mental block, prepare his own food, and eat it without realising how bad it tastes, or rather, how bad it might have tasted.

Captain Planet: After lunch I went back to my seat, and started talking to the people around me about how cold it was. However, it seemed that they were not appreciating the coldness of a warm Calcutta summer afternoon. As weird as it might have normally sounded, I was by now accustomed, and I could immediately point out my running nose as the reason behind this anomaly. And while I sat there ruing my decision not bring a jacket to office, and wishing the AC to stop running for any reason that might stop it, I realised that for every household with an AC catching cold in the summer, there would be some amount of reduction in power consumption, which would result in households both AC and non AC experiencing less hours of power cut. I guess if everyone were to be infected with common cold throughout the year, the big cities would probably experience no power cuts at all, and candle sales, although not affected as much in small towns and villages, would still come down substantially. This of course would result in less CFC and carbon monoxide emission, and in turn help the sneezing captain planets to save the earth.

This Post: And of course, this post would not have been, but for the harmless affliction. How disastrous that would have been for mankind, I would not waste my time in explaining.