“oh god! she’s crazy”
“That’s some crazy shit going on between them”
Crazy is a word that we throw around a bit too casually now. What do you define as crazy? The more we conform to the norm, the more everything appears to be from the realm of the wacky. Hence, what might be crazy to you, might be part of my morning breakfast. But that’s not the point. The trouble starts when you call yourself crazy.
Calling yourself crazy has more to it than enhancing your Tinder bio. Or portraying yourself as someone off-limits to commoners. It is a commitment to the threads of insanity and impulsiveness that dwell in the deepest but truest corners of your mind. In fact, if you look at it properly – nothing’s crazy.
To the aunties in your society, smoking and a bare female midriff is crazy.
To a himalayan adventurer, life in your society would be crazy.
To a girl somewhere under Sharia law, voting rights would be crazy.
To an entitled person, having to fight for their food is crazy.
And so on.
It should actually be the opposite. What you do, should never be crazy to you. Not to blow my own bugle, but when I decided to change my profession from a well-paying comfortable IT job to a low-paying stressful journalism job in a much more expensive city, I got my fair share of ‘are you crazy’ questions. And even a significant part of those who did not say that to my face might have thought so to themselves. But, for me to actually get it done, at any point I could not believe anything other than the fact that what I was doing was perfectly normal to achieve one’s dream. Who knows – if I might have dwelt too much upon the craziness of the decision, I might have ended up not making it at all – as people around me would tell you, I am not the kind of guy you usually associate the word ‘crazy’ with.
You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven.
– Jimi Hendrix
So if you want to do something crazy, stop dwelling on its craziness to begin with. Accept it, make it the only possible way to get things done. Absorb this paradox into yourself. And trust me, when you finally do get it done, you’ll have enough time to look back at it all and say “That was some crazy shit back there”.
Arnab Mukherjee 