Neuman's Envy

Neuman was always envious of Black. Neuman was envious of everyone actually, everyone, who remotely possessed skills, materials, looks, attitude, style, sorrow which was better than his. He tuned jealous when Black met with an accident, and landed up on his arse in the mosquito laden hospital with fat nurses and balded , grumpy doctors and was finding it difficult to differentiate between a mosquito bite and the prick of the syringe. Half of Black's body had turned porous out of the incessant poking of mosquito stylet and disposable syringes. The other half was wrapped in bandages.

Neuman, visited him in the hospital and fell in love with the sight he saw. He had never met with such an accident in his life and missed the experience of resting in the hospital with mosquitoes. As he walked towards Black, who was conscious and savoring fruits with glee, it stuck Neuman that meeting with accidents did have its privileges. He fell in love with the accident once he heard from Black how exactly it had happened.

As per Black , it happened on a dark rainy night. Black was cruising in his car at a break neck speed with Robert plant and Jimmy Paige entertaining him. As 'Kashmir' reached its crescendo, a dark black object appeared out of nowhere and landed right in the middle of the road . It was too late for Black to avoid ramming into the object, but summoning all his driving skills Black did swivel the steering in the last minute when lo behold another mysterious object appeared and Black could not control his car which was cruising at top speed and already had turned 360 degrees. In a last ditch attempt when he tried avoiding the second black object, he saw a mysterious pedestrian standing at the end of the street with a torch pointed directly at Black's eye blinding him for a millisecond. As Black was blinded he rammed against the second mysterious object and lost consciousness!!

What a romantic accident , reflected Neuman ruing his life of never as romantic as Black's life. The way Black described the accident made Newman fall in love with the accident itself and turn green out of envy!Actually the Police report was more precise about what happened that night. It simply said ' Drunken driving on highway , Driver lost control and crashed against a lamp post after avoiding to hit the road side tree' .

Neuman was always amazed at Black's capability to romanticise such trivial incidents, a quality which Neuman was envy off. Had Neuman had met with this accident, he would have just mumbled apologetically that he got drunk. But No, that was not how Black saw it . For Black, such accidents were opportunity of Heroism and for Neuman to burn in envy.

Neuman started perfecting the art of envy . Neuman, was as envious of happily married couple as he was of the divorced ones. The beauty of being envious is that you could be almost envious of anything and everything. You could be envious of humans, animals and of course plants. He soon realised he cannot become a master of envy by looking at things he is envious of. He started looking for things which he cant be envy of.

And it dawned on him that the only thing you cant be envious about is your own life and there lies the answer. No matter how hard you try you cant be envious of your own life. Yes you could end up a narcissist, but u cant end up envying yourself.

Envy consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon, but Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed ( Not my quote)

Neuman realised soon that only way to rid envy was to focus on how to envy on thyself. In that quest, would Neuman succeed ?