The Toilet Philosopher
I was sitting on the toilet, trapped in deep thought about how incredibly hard it is to live alone in this world.
I just wanted to start off my introduction as a man sitting on the toilet—that's all—but a realization struck me. If you don't bring your mobile phone with you into the bathroom, it's a modern tragedy. You are left alone with nothing but the tiles and your own brilliant, terrifying mind.
From the moment I was a fetus until now, after nineteen years on this planet, I have finally realized that this world is crazier than anything I could have ever imagined.
I've heard about childhood friends who stayed together for more than twenty years, yet after marriage, the woman kept a pure-hearted college boy as her secret lover while the husband silently counted down his terminal illness.
I've seen a beautiful influencer who had been in a seven-year relationship cheat on her boyfriend with her boss. After she was dumped while pregnant, her original boyfriend still gladly stepped in to take responsibility, wagging his tail.
I've seen a miserable man discover that his daughter wasn't biologically his. Yet, because the woman ran away, he still devoted himself wholeheartedly to raising the child.
After witnessing so many fake-hearted human incidents like these, I have become absolutely certain of one thing: the world we are living in is actually a gigantic female-protagonist romance universe. And the men? They are just tragic, disposable stepping stones.
And on another note, I've realized that being alone in the toilet is a profound metaphor. It's a reminder that you will always be completely alone when shit happens in your life.
So, that's it for today's philosophy class. By Professor Anirudha from Toilet University.
I came out of the bathroom, having given the invisible audience a piece of my mind, and started getting ready for college. Today is the first day at my new college. I wonder if I can make friends?
Like I care about that...
I plugged in my 49-rupee wired headphones—a cheap masterpiece I bought at a bus stop—and started playing my favorite music. Uppi songs. The perfect cynical, chaotic soundtrack for my life.
As I was walking down the street, the bass vibrating against my eardrums, I saw a guy following a girl like a little lost dog. I paused my music and watched them closely.
The guy was clearly head-over-heels in love with her, and the girl was pretending to be some noble, untouchable maiden. She was trying so hard to play hard-to-get, acting like she was the main heroine of this novel. What she didn't know was that she was a background character whose name wouldn't even make it to the credits.
I watched them as they walked slightly ahead of me. Pathetic, I said to myself, eyeing the guy. He was doing everything from walking on the traffic side of the road to perfectly matching her walking pace, but she didn't even acknowledge his effort. It's a universal law: the more beautiful the girl is, the less she demands. The more average the girl is, the more arrogant she becomes.
The girl walking next to that guy was solidly below average. The guy, however, was objectively good-looking with a cheerful, golden-retriever personality.
"What's the use of a face card when you are a total simp?" I mumbled.
They stopped at the bus stop, and I stopped right behind the guy. He was still desperately trying to convince her to go to a cafe after college, but the girl showed zero interest, barely giving him a side-eye.
As the heavy city bus appeared in the distance, roaring down the wet street, I slipped silently closer to him. Just when the bus was about to pull into the stop, I raised my hand and shoved the guy hard toward the road.
He lost his balance instantly, pitching forward. For a split second, he hung suspended over the asphalt, the massive grille of the bus rushing toward him. He must have seen his whole life flash in front of his eyes—from his birth to his lick-dog middle school days, to his pathetic junior college life. A life utterly devoid of a proper goal or ambition.
At that exact millisecond, I grabbed the collar of his jacket from behind and yanked him backward with all my might.
He stumbled into my chest, gasping for air. The expression on his face had turned ice-cold. Beads of sweat instantly materialized on his forehead, his pupils dilated in sheer terror.
"It's fine. The bus would have stopped anyway," I whispered directly into his ear, my voice devoid of emotion. "You wouldn't have even gotten a scratch from falling on the road. Live long, pathetic loser."
The girl hadn't even noticed what happened. She was too busy looking at her phone. I stepped around the trembling guy, got closer to the girl, and looked directly into her eyes for a few seconds. She froze, completely forgetting to climb onto the bus that had just opened its doors.
I just looked at her, and she looked at me. I softly opened my mouth, breaking the spell, and asked her for the road leading to the railway station.
She pointed to the left, a look of profound disappointment washing over her face as she realized I wasn't going to hit on her. I quietly walked away from them both, heading toward the train station.
His life will never be the same after the near-death experience he just had. It is what I call a "Forceful Awakening." From today onwards, he will ask himself a question that every human should ask themselves: Why am I even doing this? For me, it's just fun. I can relax my mind by making others suffer and confused. Take that girl, for example. She will be confused for weeks now, thinking about whether she really loves the 'second option' guy or not after making eye contact with me. And the guy? He'll be questioning every life choice that led him to almost die for a girl who didn't even notice him fall.
The most romantic movie according to women is Titanic, where a girl cheats on her wealthy fiancé with a homeless artist she met on a boat. That's the fairytale for girls. For boys, the ultimate romance is Star Wars, where a guy literally starts a galactic war and burns the universe down just for his woman... who ends up dying anyway.
Even Joseph Stalin, the man who murdered millions of people, broke down at his first wife's funeral. He said, "This creature softened my stone heart. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity." He wasn't lying. The man who spoke those words went on to become one of the coldest killers in human history, all because he believed she was the last thing keeping him human.
Love is a dangerous, pathetic disease. And I? I'm just the doctor handing out the forceful awakenings.
Though, if I'm being entirely honest, I don't actually care if the patient survives the cure. I just enjoy watching the exact moment the delusion shatters in their eyes—the beautiful, agonizing birth of self-awareness.
I adjusted the volume on my 49-rupee headphones as the train station finally came into view, letting a twisted grin stretch across my face. A new college meant a fresh batch of infected, pathetic souls.
The doctor is officially in.