‘Masti Bhara Hai Sama’ from Parvarish (1958) sung by Lata Mangeshkar
and Manna Dey. Stars: Raj Kapoor, Mala Sinha, Mehmood and Lalita Pawar. Music:
Datta Ram. Director: S. Banerji.
‘Aansu Bhari Hai’ from Parvarish (1958) sung by Mukesh. Stars: Raj
Kapoor, Mala Sinha, Mehmood and Lalita Pawar. Music: Datta Ram. Director: S.
Banerji.
As we deplaned at the international airport at Chennai – it was a domestic flight from Mumbai – and made our way to collect our baggage, on both sides of the long walk we were treated to some delightfully eye-catching high-quality art-works – panels in relief, paintings, icons carved in wood…all drawing upon the rich cultural motifs of Tamil Nadu.
And that’s when our good old Murphy’s Law kicked in. Even if the gentleman had not said anything on the subject, I’m sure you’ll know what I mean. Here was art decked out in all its splendor pining for attention and adulation, and for crying out loud, my camera-cum-cell-phone rides in my wife’s handbag, about fifty feet in the lead. Lumbering along with a particularly heavy piece of cabin baggage, I had to be content merely ogling at these art pieces, telling myself may be next time…
Finally, caught up with the lady waiting for me to join at the entrance to the baggage hall.
I set my load on the floor and told her by gestures there was a pressing matter to attend that cannot keep..
Inside the toilet, I finished the business and then by sheer chance looked up.
And saw this:
The poster art, a civic initiative, by itself made sense as the city is presently reeling under severe water shortage this year. But its juxtaposition…
May be it’s a brilliant move: Where/How else a message could get undivided attention for even up to a minute or more smack in the face of an audience helplessly glued to their station and at the same time in a relieved frame of mind 🙂
Retrieved my camera and took a shot of the art to ponder over the ways of those creative minds that worked on it – a perfect brain-food 🙂
And a small compensation for not ‘capturing’ those enchanting art pieces?
It is part of the routine morning walk – collecting flowers on the way, from plants jutting out over the peripheral fences/walls of apartment complexes lining the streets. No trespassing committed. And no one minds it’s only a few flowers.
The flowers are for offering at the temple and also for pooja at home, supplementing more
fragrant ones like roses, jasmine, tulsi,
sampangi, etc. bought from vendors.
Pinwheel flowers (Rajanigandha/Nishagandha) are the ones most commonly found at these places. In season, they follow a cycle of about 3 days of blossoming in profusion followed by another 3 days of the next succession of buds to mature. Surprisingly the cycle seems to occur fairly synchronously across plants growing in different apartment complexes!
This was the first day of the blossoming cycle with just a few flowers peeking out here and there on the bushes. Even those ones and twos could not be missed out on the days when the collection ran thin.
A heavy hand reached out to the thin stem of a solitary pinwheel flower appearing on one side of this bush. What followed…well, plucking was not to be!
The hand withdrew like it touched hot coals.
It wasn’t any muscle or machine power that caused the hand to
go empty, moving back to where it belonged. Nor any ready-to-strike insect
lurking around.
It was a mere butterfly…that flew in and settled on the lone flower,
folding and unfolding its wings, uncoiling and sinking in its proboscis quite
unmindful of the hand and its human.
What option then did the poor hand have but to get out of the
way?
Since then the collection process stood modified to leave as much behind on the bush as was being taken.
This is
based on a snippet that appeared years, rather decades, ago in Reader’s Digest:
Scene: In a
shopping aisle of a retail store
A cute old lady sighted a cheaper box of detergent, a brand sourced locally by the store and hence stocked on the top shelf – it was the industry practice. These local brands introduced at the initiative of the store managers usually do not have the budget for more favourable spots.
Not the lady in the anecdote though. See her in the clip below:-)
She went
right up and pressing herself against the shelf, taking care not to topple merchandise
off the lower shelves, and put out her hands. No luck, she was still many
inches short. Raising her heels a little also did not help.
She stepped
back in disappointment and stood there wondering what next.
Just then
another customer, a tall man, seeing her brief struggle, walked down the aisle
to her.
Looking at
where her gaze went, he easily reached and pulled out the box from its high
perch and handed it over. It was she needed just one.
The lady
thanked him gratefully. Feeling compelled to do more, she turned to him:
Cuyahoga County loses copier case; spent $55,000 in
tax dollars on losing effort
Updated Feb 29,
2012; Posted Feb 29, 2012
CLEVELAND, Ohio
— Cuyahoga County violated state law for two years by trying to charge more
than $200,000 for CDs loaded with copies of property records, the Ohio Supreme
Court ruled Wednesday.
The
dispute dates to November 2010, when two title information companies sued
then-county Recorder Lillian Greene over her policy of charging $2 a page
for property records contained on a CD.
The companies
argued the county must provide copies of master CDs — which the county makes
each day to backup digital images of documents recorded — at cost, as required
the state’s public records law.
Greene and her
staff based their charges on a state law that requires a $2-per-page fee to
photocopy or fax documents. Based on that law, they argued that CDs containing
copies of 104,000 pages of records should cost $208,000.
“A copy is
a copy is a copy,” attorney David Movius, whom the county hired to fight
the suit, said last year.
The
high court said in a 7-0 decision that the county must provide CDs of
recorded deeds and mortgages for $1, ending a dispute that cost county
taxpayers as much as $55,000 in legal fees and garnered international attention
because of a county employee’s verbal acrobatics in defining the word
“photocopier” during a deposition.
Greene was
removed from office by a charter voters approved in 2009. But when county
Executive Ed FitzGerald took office in January 2011, he continued to defend
Greene’s position.
On Wednesday,
county Law Director Majeed Makhlouf defended the decision to continue fighting
the lawsuit, arguing that state law governing records is confusing.
“You needed
clarity on the law,” Makhlouf said. “The county had already spent so
much money. We thought, let’s get it clarified once and for all.”
But the seven
Supreme Court justices found no confusion.
“There is
no conflict, much less an irreconcilable one,” the court wrote in its
opinion. “In cases in which photocopying physical pages of recorded
documents is requested, a county recorder shall charge $2 per page… In cases
in which CDs containing electronically recorded documents are requested, the
county recorder shall charge the actual cost of the copies.”
The ruling says
the county’s argument “lacks merit.”
The definition
of photocopy was a highlight of the case.
Lawrence
Patterson, then the acting head of information technology for the recorder’s
division of the county fiscal office, testified that he could not say if
photocopiers had ever been used in the office.
“When you
say ‘photocopying machine,’ what do you mean?” asked Patterson, when
questioned by Marburger.
Patterson still
works for the county, making $65,000 a year.
Marburger said
he was not exasperated in the least unlike his counterpart in the clip: “I
actually wanted [Patterson] to keep up what I perceived as a charade. Once he
chose the path that he took, I didn’t want a straight answer; I wanted him to
keep it going. That was why I kept pushing over the course of 10 pages of transcript.
To me, the testimony became too good to be true. It was perfect.”
He also said
that Patterson wasn’t the slightest bit intimidated in real life. Marburger
used the absurd testimony to win the case, and the court unanimously agreed
that they only charge $1 per CD moving forward.
Now, for the deposition:
The video clip
included below is a dramatization of the deposition verbatim!
Warped #####: An
argument so absurd it could have only happened in real life.
####### S-6: Wow! That was one of the longest Xerox commercials I’ve ever seen! If advertising was as good as this, it wouldn’t be so irritating! (Too bad it really wasn’t an Ad)
Cr####: This
witness is perfect. Every defense attorney could only dream. What an
apparatchik….dude understands the law better than the prosecutor.
######212000: Don’t
worry guys. The lawyers weren’t really that upset. They charge over 500 dollars
an hour…
#### Mission: And that’s why I murdered the witness, your honor!
Brik ####: pho·to·cop·i·er – Dictionary result for photocopier /ˈfōdōˌkäpēər/ noun a machine for making photocopies.
Naji###: This is also how my IT job feels like from time to time.
MR1#####: gas
powered photocopier?
**
Here’s a
deposition of a different kind for you to enjoy:
If the clip does not appear, see it here. She speaks (gibberish) like she understood what her dad is telling her!
Something interesting here, I thought, though not the kind to set Ganges on fire.
This is a picture taken by B, an ex-colleague. a friend, a nature lover, an ace shooter…with his camera, a cook who loves to experiment, a reviewer of eateries, etc. etc.
Location: Chembur.
To me, it is interesting to see this winged fellow picking twigs for the nest, all of uniform girth, neither too thick and stiff or too thin and breakable as if there exists some engineering specification!
A cyclone hit a Kansas farmhouse just before dawn one morning.
It tore off the roof, and picked up the beds on which the farmer
and his wife slept were sleeping. By some miracle, the cyclone set them
down unharmed the next county over.
The wife was sobbing uncontrollably. “Don’t be scared,
Mary,” her husband said. “We’re not hurt.”
Mary continued to cry. “I’m not scared,” she said between sobs. “I’m happy… this is the first time in 14 years we’ve been out together.”
**
**
Wife leaves a note on the fridge: “I have made all attempts. It’s not working. I can’t take it anymore. I am going to stay at my Mom’s place!! 😡 😥
Husband opens the fridge, checks the beer bottle. Feels it is cold. He takes a few big gulps from the bottle. Feels it is chilled.
Then says to himself, “What the hell is she talking about??? Fridge is working fine!!”
It was goshti time after receiving theertham (sacred water) and sadari.
[Goshti is when at the end of morning
rituals, prasadam, usually thayir sadam (curd rice) is distributed
to the assembled on plates or small bowls (dhonnai’s)
fashioned out of leaves stitched together]
Many sat
down and some of us with stiff joints stood to one side.
One of the staff (kiankaryaparars) distributed the dhonnai’s to all in the assembly to receive prasadam (a small part of the food offered to the god is returned to the devotees with blessings).
The cook in his traditional attire followed him from the kitchen carrying on his hip an anda (a big brass vessel) containing thayir sadam. With practiced efficiency, starting at one end of the small arc, he took a handful of sadam, dropped it into the first dhonnai held out, quickly moving on to the next man and to the next…
When he
came to G – I see him once in a while at the temple – standing next to me, I
noticed him slowing down with a deference, not par for a goshti, and a hint of a smile on his face. And the recipient acknowledging
it by gesture and nod.
As the cook
moved on to where ladies were, I asked in hushed voice: ‘What gives?’
G whispered
back: ‘Only yesterday…he wanted some monetary help for his daughter’s college
fees studying back in the South. I gave him’
‘Oh,’ so
that was it.
Distribution
over, the goshti was dismissed.
As we did
the customary pradakshinam (circumambulating
the sanctum) together, completing the last round, G went up to ring the kitchen
bell!
When the
cook came out, he asked if there would be some extra thayir sadam available.
A little strange, it was. This man many a times walked away without waiting for the goshti and the prasadam. And when he did stand in, he would specially request for a small portion. And today, he took it in full in the goshti and now was asking for more!
What was the matter? Perhaps he’s taking it for some guests visiting him?
He saw my
nonplussed look and made a gesture for me to hold.
The cook, a
bit surprised likewise, appeared too happy to oblige him.
A short while later he returned with a neatly wrapped and tied parcel.
As he handed it over, I noticed – the cook appeared pleased with himself and his demeanor going back to the formal, what it was always, without the deference, even if only a wee bit, displayed visibly earlier in the goshti! Not that he was rude, at any time.
Something nagged me nevertheless. Was gratitude so evanescent?
As we
exited the temple, G turned to me: ‘I see you noticed it. Upset?’
Wasn’t he upset? And, here he’s asking me if I were.
Didn’t feel
up to responding.
‘You see,
my friend, I certainly did a favour to him, he too did one to me, whatever was
within his capacity. Now the ledger is balanced, his self-respect has
re-asserted itself.’
Weird! Interesting!
Is that how it works? No student of human psychology and behaviour, could not agree
or differ with G’s insight and intelligence in this matter.
Now outside
the temple we were ready to part.
‘Here, take this, I’ve no use for it. Am single,’ he thrust the parcel into my hands and took off leaving me standing.
When he was a few steps gone, he turned to me: ‘Don’t lose your peace over it, my friend. That’s precisely why I asked for it!’
May be,
before I meet him next, I will have sorted this out in my head.
Thanks for visiting. Please, take your time to read and feel free to comment. Hope you find something of interest to you. If you like what's here, you may subscribe by clicking on Email Subscription or by clicking on the 'Follow' button below or using the RSS.
And your comments are most welcome!
Kaleidoscope 
Recent Comments