Amazing! This is one word that says all it ever needs to say without needing even an exclamation mark. You see we are living in times when from dawn to dusk everything is amazing to someone or the other. Not that I have any objection to everything being amazing… but I sometimes get this distinct feeling that we are all over-using the word.

Yes, we’re over-using the word ‘amazing’ because even an ordinary dress bought from the footpath on Janpath is… amazing! A smile that is nervous and unsure because the teeth were not brushed properly that morning is… amazing! A tweet even if says the obvious, is… amazing! A car, any car, owned by a girl is… amazing! Some picture of someone eating a flaccid burger in McDonald’s is… amazing! On the social media everything becomes amazing. So much so that all that is really amazing gets lost in this parade of the mundane and ordinary.

Now, I’m not against staying amazed. A drop of perspiration is as amazing as is the toothless smile of a new-born. A landscape can be as amazing as a new way of expressing a mundane feeling… and one can find amazement even in as unlikely a place as a sentence with the commas misplaced, as in this one written by Dark Jar Tin Zoo: ‘Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.’ This kind of word play amazes me.

I believe that overuse and misuse have a similar genetic coding and can lead to depletion in one way or the other. ‘Amazing’ overused just might lead us all to a phase where nothing may seem amazing to us. Wouldn’t that be a sad day? The day we stop staring in wonderment at small things will make living such a chore, wouldn’t it? Even G K Chesterton wrote years back that ‘We are perishing for lack of wonder, not for lack of wonders.’ The wonders shall be there but we would have already tired our minds by calling everything ‘amazing’. The impact of amazement is immense and it is this one thing that carries the entire weight of creative fervour… so let us be careful and not throw it away cheaply.

I know there are those who think that staying amazed all the time is healthy… but hey! Don’t you think even health supplements can harm if there is an overdose? Let me add here that our habit of calling every book, travel, visit, friend, dress, shoe, or gadget something out-of-the-world and ‘amazing!’ is actually disastrous and the social media platforms only encourage it. I think it is a great idea to let boredom too enter life and stay on because excitement can get more intense when compared to a boring time. Even words like ‘usual’, ‘monotonous’, and ‘disenchanted’ and others from a similar line of thought help making us realise the need for wonder. Come on, don’t be afraid to say that a book or a novel or a poem or a poet or even a friend is horrible and needs some kind of an overhaul. Don’t just utter or write a zombie-like ‘amazing!’ and think you’ve done a favour to anyone. You are, in fact, harming your own faculties of judgement and your own intrinsic power to remain enchanted and in a state of wonderment. I mean, you cannot go on calling everything wonderful or amazing even if it isn’t. You do it and you just might enter a phase when you will be shunned by the word itself and that might render you incapable of remaining amazed. That is the sad day that I am referring to in this post.

The truth is that if we ceased to stay amazed forever, life would perish. Therefore, we really need to control our urge to remain amazed all the time, every time, without a break for the wrong reasons.

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What if... we ceased to stay amazed

What if… we ceased to stay amazed

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This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.

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Arvind Passey
18 February 2016