Boring!

A bore is a person who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it. Henry Ford.

It is widely accepted that while being overly aggressive, offensive or too clever by half is not a personality trait to be admired, there can be no bigger pain in the posterior region than that of being a bore. Therein lies the rub. Bores can otherwise be pleasant to engage with, they may even be gifted in many ways. A handful of them have gone on to achieve great things in life. Scientists, sportspersons, musicians, novelists, politicians, toppers all in their respective fields but there is no guarantee that some of them, and they are the exceptions, if you have had the misfortune to be buttonholed at the club bar or somewhere else, won’t turn out to be crashing bores. Particularly if their best days are behind them.

The thing about being ensnared by a bore is that, oftentimes you are never sure what is coming. The conversation, or rather the monologue, starts harmlessly enough. After five or six minutes, it dawns on you that you are trapped with no escape route. You have not been able to get a word in edgeways and your mind is beginning to wander. Your eyes mist over with a glazed look and you keep looking frequently and ostentatiously at your watch, which the bore ignores with impunity. For the most part, you respond with a mechanical ‘Oh,’ ‘Ah,’ or ‘I see,’ not having the faintest what the bore is yakking on about. The modern-day trend is to feign a yawn and say, ‘Boring’ and walk away. Alas, we were brought up to be civil. Some bores will bore you over the phone but, at least you can interject with a ‘Sorry, that’s the doorbell, will catch up later,’ and disconnect.

If someone tells you he has never been boring, he is being more than economical with the truth. That goes for yours truly as well. Simply because I am writing a column having fun at the expense of bores, does not mean I cannot be guilty of that unwritten commandment, ‘Thou shall not bore another human being to death.’ The warning signal to watch out for, when you are in convivial company, is when your wife or a dear friend (both can be the same person) gently admonishes you with an ‘I think they have heard that yarn about your hattrick in school many times before, dear. You’ve downed one too many. Time to make tracks.’ At least, that is the gist of it. I am not much of an imbiber, but I do not require alcoholic stimulants to get people around me fidgety, once I am on a roll. Having blithely included myself in the list of probables as it were, I am now free to guiltlessly dive into the deep end on my current subject of choice. With a little help from some acclaimed published sources.

We all know that a confirmed hypochondriac holds pride of place when it comes to boring the pants off his companions. ‘I will give small eats a wide berth, if you don’t mind. Tummy trouble. Now if it were just a normal stomach upset, that would be one thing, but I keep getting these shooting pains at the pit of my stomach and I fear it could be something more serious. My GP simply brushed the whole thing off as a figment of my imagination. Take two antacid pills twice a day after meals and you will be right as rain. I was not convinced. I decided to get a scan done and you know what…’ And on and on he drones, while his friends are beginning to disappear having received ‘urgent calls’ on their mobiles. Puts me in mind of one of the Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, ‘I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got.’

Beware of the man who starts a sentence with, ‘I shan’t detain you long,’ or ‘Did I tell you the one about…?’ I can state with absolute certainty that he has told you the one about. Yes, my friend, you have. More than once, and that is an understatement. But here’s the thing about bores. They don’t listen to what the other chap is saying. They bash on regardless. ‘In that case, I had better start at the beginning. Waiter, another fresh lime soda sweet for my friend here please.’ And the long evening wears on. Here I would like to cite an interesting example from one of P.G. Wodehouse’s early gems. No, it’s not from another Jeeves-Wooster, the Golfing tales or Blandings Castle caper. This the Master wrote in 1903 for the celebrated but now defunct Punch magazine. Anonymously. That it was, indeed, Wodehouse came to light much later.

In a two-part short story titled, Dudley Jones, Bore-Hunter, the object of Wodehouse’s satire is none other than Sherlock Holmes. Holmes’ stand-in is introduced to the reader as follows. ‘Dudley Jones was a man who devoted his best energy to the extinction of bores. With a clear-sightedness which few modern philanthropists possess, he recognised that, though Society had many enemies, none was so deadly as the bore. Burglars, indeed, Jones regarded with disapproval, and I have known him to be positively rude to a man who confessed in the course of conversation to being a forger. But his real foes were the bores, and all that one man can do to eliminate that noxious tribe, that did Dudley Jones do with all his might.’

Musicians are, by and large, a noble lot. As long as they perform on stage or in a recording studio. Singers or instrumentalists, they may have their good and bad days, but the audience generally takes kindly to them as there are not too many around who have the requisite skills to hold their fans in thrall for long periods of time. Parts of a concert can be boring to some, but the fans wait for the good bits to wake them up. Most musicians are reluctant to engage in long, drawn-out conversations or speechifying as they believe that is not their forte. Many of them do speak well, but prefer to keep their opinions to themselves. That said, I have known some Carnatic musicians who love to convert their concerts into lecture demonstrations. They talk more than they sing and that can be trying. And boring. ‘This is the first song my guru taught me. He made me practice it more than 50 times before he allowed me to perform it on stage.’ Wild applause. That is all very well except that he has narrated this particular tale to us more than 50 times. And why does he keep looking at his laptop if he has practiced this song so many times?

It is instructive to examine the issue of boredom in music from a western perspective. Here is Jude Kelly, artistic director of London’s Southbank Centre on the subject. ‘An audience must have the confidence to admit that there are structural inadequacies in the great works. We’ve all had moments when we’ve dozed off. But there is also a sense that the best art is like life. Some of it is a bit dull, but you need the boring parts to appreciate the climaxes. Reaching the end of a Wagner opera is like climbing a mountain: part of the achievement is in the struggle to get there.’

Finally, a word on teachers. During our impressionable years in school, the quality of our teachers was central to our ability to absorb and enjoy our lessons, irrespective of the subject being taught. The teacher who held our attention was the one who did not treat his class as a flock of sheep. He would interject his lessons with the odd light-hearted quip. ‘Boys, do not copy your neighbour’s mistakes’ was a gentle admonition that made us laugh and taught us a lesson in thinking for ourselves. On another occasion, our Moral Science teacher was explaining to his class the importance of prayer and how it helps the students to assimilate the values of life and trust to a higher power. ‘Does anyone have another opinion?’ A back bencher piped up with, ‘I don’t pray because I don’t want to bore God.’ ‘Who said that? Vikram, was that you? Stand up and explain yourself, boy.’ Vikram stood up and said, ‘Actually Sir, it was the actor Orson Welles.’ The class was convulsed with laughter and the teacher saw the funny side of it and joined in the mirth.

In sum, I agree with the late George Harrison who said that ‘The Beatles saved the world from boredom.’

Published with permission from Mr. Suresh Subrahmanyan. He blogs at –https://sureshsubrahmanyan.blog/