PUNE, June 7: Being a lazy man I love to sleep late in the mornings. It's a habit of a lifetime. But there seems to be a whole broad-based conspiracy to spoil the peace of my mornings and break my slumber.The little birds on the trees are the first to get into the act. The little things wake up at some unearthly hour and having failed to catch their early worms, chirp away their disappointment. Only stuffed minds of poets can find beauty and poetry in the racket the birds can make!Then our neighbours' sons go for private classes, hockey practice and what have you, on their mobikes that seem to have been specially built for them without silencers. They don't seem capable of leaving their homes without revving up to very high decibel levels.By then our dear sun decides to play his game. The man, evidently a very early riser, gets on his seven-horse chariot and races right into my life at a very critical moment, when I am trying my best to curse the little birds and at the same time catch some sleep. ``Thick curtains do not stop a determined sun ray,'' is a truism. I had the honour and privilege of discovering. That I was not given the Nobel Prize for such an earthshaking discovery only shows the skewed values that are prevailing in today's scientific world. And the blessed ray unerringly enters my eyes, penetrating the firmly-closed eye lids with the ease of a red hot knife going through lukewarm butter.Ha ha, the poor sun. I have found a neat trick to outwit the mighty bright sun. I turn on my stomach and sleep with my forearm over my eyes, with the back of my skull facing him and his deadly rays. I am so thick-headed, not even sun's rays can penetrate my head.Trrrrrrrng. goes the door bell. It is the idiot of a newspaper delivery boy slipping the paper into the door handle. He seems to be fired with a strong desire to make sure that I do not lose even a minute in reading the screaming headlines our newspapers put out for such insipid events like - `Three donkeys block Sangam bridge'.Every second or third day our dear MSEB switches off the power early in the morning, only to switch it back on, a minute or so later. But during that minute the fan stops and the mosquitoes that have been kept away by its blast hover back on to me to suck my blood. Apart from that favour, the `Royal Indian Mosquito Symphony Orchestra' also gets into action in my ears.When the power does start flowing again in the lines and the fan picks up speed to blow the mosquitoes and their music away, can I go back to sleep?No sir, my answering machine gets into the act of rewinding itself after a power failure. Its whirring noise and the tiny beeps shatter the last hopes of my attempts to continue to sleep. Unable to stand any disturbance any further I get up pulling my hair in desperation and screaming murder at all the conspirators that have ganged up to stop me getting my full quota of sleep.The lady of the house is happy that I had at last got out of bed and ensures that I will not fall back to sleep again by pumping a hot cup of invigorating and tongue-scalding tea down my hatch.Don't you worry. I let my wife give me breakfast and after I am sure she has nothing more up her sleeve to keep me awake I fall off for my post breakfast nap.
