Jerome K Jerome, the author of Three Men in a Boat once said: ‘I like work. I like to look at it for hours…” Everybody thought then he was being funny. The truth is he was just being like everyone and everything else in this universe — bone idle. And that’s not funny. It is a basic scientific fact.
Remember one’s school science? Something travelling in a straight line will continue to do so forever if nothing stops it. Well, it’s a fundamental rule that applies to everything around us. If something is stationary or in a state of inertia, it will continue to remain so forever until pushed into action. Scientists call it the Law of Inertia. A smart French inventor called Rene Descartes (1596-1650) discovered it centuries ago. He made this momentous discovery that the natural state of everything everywhere in the universe is to hang around doing exactly what they’ve always done for eternity. In other words, we are born to be idle. Nothing moves until we give it a shove, and nothing stops until we force it to.
So now we can stop feeling guilty for not doing any work. And be more patient when things don’t seem to move. Look around us. Everyone seems to be following the Law of Inertia to the tee. Files don’t move, traffic doesn’t move, queues don’t budge and salaries seem to be stuck in a groove. On the other hand, things that do move show no signs of stopping. Your mother-in-law’s whining, your bank account’s depleting numbers and the insolence of teenage kids. It’s the same with growing corruption in public life, the morally bankrupt television soaps, the rising incomes of our cricketers, Navjot Singh Sidhu’s laugh, Ram Gopal Verma’s bad luck and Sanjay Dutt’s receding hairline. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s the blasted law at work. And the only way one can turn the tide is to give things a jolt.
Hence, roads and flyovers in our cities will forever be under construction until the municipal bodies are declared defunct and the great Indian Railways will continued to regret inconvenience caused to passengers for delayed trains. Wars will continue to be fought and innocent people killed until we realise that it’s better to beat each other in sports than blow each other up. Women will starve themselves to look like ridiculous stick insects until someone puts an end the idea that famishing oneself to remain thin and thus believe that it is beautiful is not vogue.
And for those of us who love our leisure, we all would never get out of bed to go to work unless we were scared of being thrown out. After all, Descartes worked mostly from his bed! There was no antidote to his inertia.