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Anger management: It’s a smash hit!

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Anger. You could say it’s a rage these days. No pun intended. Consider this: You’re already getting late for office and lined up at the toll booth drumming your fingers anxiously on the steering wheel when this pesky driver butts in from the right lane. Doesn’t a fuse just F-ing blow off and you wish you could shatter his windowpane?

Scene 2: You have an important meeting with the top bosses today and you ask your spouse to chip in with the school-drop duty, just this once. Your equally-busy spouse casually goes: “Let the kids bunk today, no sweat!” Don’t you feel like smashing that plate, along with the bread-anda?

We’ve all been there, but have we done that? Like actually smashed plates or shattered car windows? Not really. However, with “rage rooms” becoming a smash hit you now have an outlet for all that pent-up frustration.

It’s a scene straight out of 1999 hit Office Space, where you get to pummel the printer with the weapon of your choice: golf club, baseball bat or the classic sledgehammer. No more just punching your fluffy pillow or slamming the lame door, now you have the real deal. Comes at a cost though, but as the seasoned pounders would quip “what’s $50 for 10 minutes of therapeutic thrashing or Rs 800 to reduce a large TV to smithereens?” Indeed! That’s one simply smashing business idea there that already has big takers in North Carolina, Toronto, Dallas, Serbia, Japan, Budapest, Russia, Singapore, Australia, Britain and right here in India.

Inspired by the mall mauling in The Blue Brothers, an Arizona-based rage release room offers dishes, glasses, printers, computers, TVs and car windshields on its smash menu. Other Screaming Shacks let you battle-sport the s$#@ out of a dummy – could be your bully boss or an annoying co-worker or a rogue Tinder date. A few Tantrum Rooms go a step further and have the “BYO” (Bring Your Own) option to smash – a favourite coffee mug, that smiling face in the photo frame, the peeing lawn genome or the porcelain Cupid your ex gave you last Valentine!

Way back in 2008, when Donna Alexander from Dallas “invited co-workers as an experiment to her garage to pulverize items she had collected from the curbs for just $5,” she had no clue the idea would soon spread across the globe.

Inspired by the Dallas rage room, Akshat Goel and Sanwari Gupta also experimented with the Break Room concept. “The physical release leads to an adrenaline rush and a temporary feeling of happiness,” points out Sanwari, quoting Dr Ramandeep, a psychiatrist at AIIMS Delhi.

As for cleaning up the mess after, Sanwari clarifies that “we do not create more trash on this planet as we use old junk and then send it to e-waste recycling units, besides following strict safety guidelines.” The venting places also make sure people wear protective gloves, glasses and a helmet before they go on that cathartic smashing spree; and people under 18, expectant mothers, those suffering from severe to moderate health conditions or with mental health history, those who are a danger to themselves or others are NOT permitted to participate in such Break Rooms.

Some meditate, some mediate, some mangle! “You just don’t want to think at that moment when you are blindly hitting things to release tension,” reveals analyst Rishab Kumar (35), who has had two “wonderful” rage room experiences.

Psychologists, however, debate this “short-term” channelization of inner aggression and instead suggest a more holistic psycho-therapeutic program for anger management.

Ultimtely though, anger is anger, as Jim Butcher quips in White Night, it isn’t good. It isn’t bad. It just is. What you do with it is what matters. It’s like anything else. You can use it to build or to destroy. You just have to make the choice!

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