When the remote becomes remote….

Over the past few weeks, I have been coming to terms with a very frightening fact, namely, in the world of HBO there is no place for a remote control.

The shock wasn’t so much that I had to keep my hands off the remote as much as that I couldn’t do it. The last time I had to watch TV without commercials was a decade and a half ago. As a fifth grader with an attention span of 4500 hours and with desi doordarshan the only thing on TV, it didn’t pose much of a problem. Plus there was always someone around to hand me the bag of chips.

Didn’t the people at HBO study the human psyche at all? Didn’t they think about insatiable human obsessions ---chocolate, Pepsi, Bill O’Reilly, the telephone and the internet that sometimes --- just sometimes--- rank a tad higher than the show you’re watching?

The task(?) of watching TV is inherently designed so as not to expend too much energy. At any given time there is only one ideal configuration to sit in and watch the idiot box. This is decided by several parameters---your eyesight, hearing, the angle of your couch towards the TV, the distance of your couch from the TV and the glare from the window. And once you have settled in, there is very little reason to move a muscle---well, other than the ones you use to laugh while watching Friends or frown while tuned to Fox news. And the less your options, the less the permutations and combinations for changing your position (physically of course, not in the Fox news kind of way). Considering I have one chair, a TV that sits on a weather-beaten suitcase, a fan that only seems to dispense air in one direction and a processor that serves as the other piece of furniture in the room, I have even less reason to move than most.

And while your body is enjoying this state of sedentary bliss (whoever said we are constantly moving towards inertia certainly knew what he was talking about), the remote control is trying its dandiest best to counter it.
And your treacherous index finger gladly obliges, surfing channels and playing with the volume control, in the process, pandering to your low attention span (or the incompetence of TV shows as the case may be)..
And for those of you who think my worries are frivolous, here are a few things you take for granted with commercial breaks:

Run into the kitchen to grab a bag of chips, thus doing eternal justice to the term “couch potato”.

Be courteous enough to take a call from a friend and tell him/her that you’ll call right back (which usually means ‘at the top of the hour’).

Call your best friend and shriek, “I am soooooo in love with Bill Maher” only to hang up and go back to Bill.

Google ‘McCarthysm’ before the History channel program threatens to go way over your head.

Answer nature’s call because you have an over active bladder, what with the Pepsi and all…

Flip to Fox News to hear that ridiculously stupid viewpoint that only Sean Hannity can provide.

Tucker Carlson moves his show to the 11 pm slot pushing the three programs you watch religiously (you watch the rest non-religiously) to one half hour of divine television. Though watching snippets of Stewart and Tucker and Chandler all in half an hour doesn’t appeal to my digestive system, I would certainly like to have the choice….