Thursday, July 28, 2005

The City was divided...

... into two kinds of people, last Tuesday. The stuck & the non-stuck. A majority of people who had ventured out last Tuesday never realized that thier hour commute back home would be stretched to a horror ordeal of upto 36 hours. It was a scene out of last summer's blockbuster "The Day After Tommorow". Bombay was flooded for more than its normal six hours. People stood still in traffic for 24 hours. They turned off engines and slept in cars. They climbed on top of bus roofs and witnessed the slowly consumed bus. There was no disaster management plan on cards for the state. People suffered. A lot. My sister returned the day after she left for her first day of work. She roughed it out in her new office. She swapped stories and watercooler gossip which would have taken atleast a few months to propogate. But lights out, and bosses airlifted by choppers, the employees had a great day.

I was in the category of the un-stuck. Saved by Shri Mataji quite literally. The meditation meetings are on Tuesdays so I decided to meetup with local relatives. As a result, I had to super the ordeal of waiting in the dark for the stuck people. Cell phones were down, and the weakness of technology was exposed. But Bombay has been washed clean it seems now, as the hands burn a little less than before.

People we meet

When going around relatives houses. The most funny are the obstinate, over the hill, disease inflicted grandmas. They are bags of complaints with the usual diabeties and BP problems. They proudly display the range of medication they are on and how many times they have gone under the surgeon's knife. They give thier complete chronology of disease, unsolicited. But they have to be borne until the real entertainer steps in: the housewife.

She will tell tales of how she is bringing up kids. Or if kids are grown up, the adventures of finding them matches for marriages. They hardly realize, once they marry off their children they have a while before they go into the first category. But afflictionless, they are happy, funny and tolerant. The food they serve is not an option to eat. They reserve the bullying rights to make guest eat up whatever is served. Their happiness lies wholly in seeing people eat.

The really nourishing members of the household retuirn to break the eating spell: the children. If in school, they entertain you with their artistic works, which are really nourishing. But if grown up and working, they are replicas of their moms and dads, depending on their gender. But this is the only department where nourishment for the soul can be expected.

The least likely person I stumbled across was da man of da house. Nervous smile hiding a dam of oppression at work and suppression at home from the first two departments. His nourishment is also the third category. That is if he choses them to be and does not hammer them at every little mistake. Some of these prefer to have a death like silence over the bulbbly brrok of children noises.