DESI DEFINED

You are a Desi if you fulfill most of these-

• You unwrap gifts very carefully, so you can save and reuse the wrapping next year.
  You only buy Diwali cards after Diwali, when they are 50% off.
  You tape cards on the wall.
  You use the dishwasher as a dish rack.
  You eat all meals in the kitchen.
  You use grocery bags to hold garbage.
  You leave your shoes at the door.
  You have a collection of shampoo sachet.
  You never order stuff online.
  You own a rice cooker or a pressure cooker.
  You wash your rice 2-3 times before cooking it.
  You curse yourself for buying a ticket if nobody checks it.
  You reuse teabags.
  You have a drawer full of old pens, most of which don’t write anymore.
  Your parents never go to the movies.
  Your parents are never happy with your grades.
  You use coke cans/ refined oil containers/ paint or distemper boxes in toilets.
  You keep used batteries, and keep checking them time & again if they work.
  You keep most of your money in a savings account.
  You call an older person you never met before “uncle.”
  No one you’re related to is a music major.
  Your parents don’t realize phone connections to foreign countries have improved in the last two decades, and still scream at the top of their lungs.
  You cook in bulk.
  You never give a tip.
  Your can’t resist spitting on the sidewalk.
  You use Vicks/ Painjon/ Amrutanjan.
  You’ve been in a bus where half the people riding are outside the bus.
  Experiencing 20 power blackouts in a single day doesn’t faze you.
  You pronounce “wary” and “very” in the same way.
  You spew forth the virtues of India, but don’t want to live there.
  You can never dream of actually buying a software.
  You majored in engineering or medicine.

Note:This post has been copied straight off Pandu's blog(satyavrat.wordpress.com)

AUDIO - SLAVE!!

No, I am not going to talk about the band as most of u must have presumed. It is an excellent band and certainly deserves a lot of cheers...but we shall leave that for later. I discuss here the root cause and impact of audio as our generation knows it today.

The world is definitely shrinking. Or maybe,its getting too congested in turn giving us a vision of compression. Today is the age of miniaturization. Bigger is no longer better...atleast not always.We see smaller gadgets everywhere...cars,mobiles,laptops,watches,washing machines...what not...u name it and they have it. We are too crammed for space. This change brought about the age of music-on-the-move. The radio has made a come-back in a big way. Mobiles come with in-built mp3 players. iPods are a common gadget. And everyone,and i mean everyone, is Plugged-In.

Whether it be the executive on his way to the office, the child coming back from school on a bus or a by-stander at the crossroads everyone is listening to something. Not that this in itself is a bad thing. However,what is happening behind the scenes is that we are slowly but surely giving less importance to our other senses. We have stopped observing the people next to us on the road,we have stopped looking out of the car to marvel at the greens next to us. We are living in a parallel world instantaneously. And our attention is divided. If one was to pull down ones car window and listen to the sounds surrounding oneself one would realize that I am not lying. We are becoming Audio - Slaves. No,we already are there...just that we are in a spell and when the spell breaks we shall all be BLIND.

"all I have to do is just close my eyes
to see the sea gulls wheeling in the far distant skies
all I wanna to tell you all I wanna say
is count me in on the journey don't expect me to stay ."
Pink Floyd

Strangers

It is very seldom that one reflects upon the importance of strangers in their lives.However the reflections or their absence is not what we are talking about here.

Indian mothers are very wary of the concept of strangers(not without reason maybe).We were all taught not to speak to that man with those delctable sweets, to run from a smile, a hoarse voice and a pair of hazy eyes.

But then all of a sudden something happens which is
least expected by our parents. We grow up. We start exploring the wonders of the new found world which exists beyond the corners of ones own street.Each one of us remembers the first time we riked our cycles on to the main road. We flew on twin-wheels along with the cars,the bikes and those big trucks. I suspect some might have carried out hat venture on foot/any other means of transport but it did happen nonetheless. Then came the sweets shop, the 'paan' dukaan, the 'sabji' bazaar,the pani puri 'thela' and life flowed like a thick syrup along the streets and we were eager to turn one more corner to taste the air there.

However, it was the expansion of the physical world.We would still refuse the toffee/chocolate unless we paid for it ourselves. Somehow for some unknown reason money validated a lot of things. I for one took quite some time to grasp the idea of money, I understood the numbers printed on them but the whole concept avoided me for long.

And thus our life became confined to the people we met in schools, in tuituions, at our own homes, colony, locality and the places where our parents took us, added to the list validated by money(namely the 'pani puri wala's, the vegetable seller, the 'paan wala's etc because one paid them). If you were ever seen trying to operate the top('lattu') with a kid from the slum nearby or any other unknown kid for that matter in all propability you were scolded back to the safety of your house.

But the time came when one day we broke that cover too.It could have been that man at the bus stand and the cricket match India lost,it could have been the old man who goes for a morning walk and his toothless grin.We started interacting with starngers. A few would go on to become a part of our lives and most would be gone in a few hours but they all leave a lingering smell in the air.Their memories crop up at the starngest of times and they make good stories to tell.These fleeting relationships somehow transcend a lot of absrtactions like respect, trust, caste, creed, sex.They are, at times, the closest person to person interaction one can have.

Starngers walk away knowing more about you than some of your closest friends and leave behind their own secrets to guard forever.