A casual walk this morning along Ernakulam's Marine Drive - taking care to not trip over random steel rods, broken concrete slabs and miscellaneous wares, we spied a couple of interesting tents down the road.
"Circus tents" went up the cry and upon investigation, proved true - few minutes later, I was six tickets poorer but looking forward to my first trip to the circus in over 3 decades.
We reached a half hour early, hoping to make sure we got the best ringside seats. That's when we realized there wasn't much competition for the seats (plastic chairs actually). The ring tent, which had about a 1000 chairs, was barely 100-150 full by the time the show started.
The overall impression was a very sad one - it was a little painful to see the artists perform some rather cool stuff to non-existing frontliners. Our batch of 2 adults and 4 children made it a point to clap each and every performer.
Apart from rather casual performances, the overall feeling was of a worn out experience. Most of the performers were wearing semi-casual clothes. Where - I wondered - were the glitzy, shiny costumes I expected?
Thanks to PETA and Menaka Gandhi, there are no lions, tigers or elephants in these circuses anymore. A couple of camels did a round with their bored caretaker and a beautiful horse ran around the ring with a guy standing.
There were some rather worn pomeranians walking on their forefeet and hind feet. The acts were some neat and some ok - fire eater was cool so were the ninja's who went around chopping cucumbers on people's heads and stomachs blindfolded.
And what circus is complete without a trapeze show, no matter that this one was rather jaded and poorly choreographed.
Who was to blame? Youtube? (Oh - what's so great about the trampoline artiste - I've seen so totally-awesome Chinese artist performances). The internet and the age of instant gratification? "Oh - I've seen animals on TV do so much more cool things - Yawn !!!!".
Where - I wondered - did my ability to appreciate the simpler things of life without constantly making comparisons disappear? Swallowed by the ever increasing bounds of instant answers and knowledge base (thank you Google) - supplemented by non-stop bombardment of images on cable TV and titillating videos on Google. Channels like Facebook@iPhone making sure that I am never more than a few seconds late to get the latest update.
