December 2014: Traditional Finery

 
The village belles dressed in traditional finery presented a picture of India that was Young, Beautiful and Traditional. An India seeped in culture. An India proud of her heritage. An India that I thought no longer existed.

How their lives will change once education and technology reach them, I thought. The thought excited me, but I was also apprehensive about how our collective heritage will be lost.
 
And then she whipped out her mobile phone, and checked her make up using the selfie mode. She was satisfied.
 
I was too. Technology and tradition do not have to be mutually exclusive.
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2014: The Year That Was

Those precious moments

Yesterday, while getting the kids home from school, the younger one dawdled. “Come on, we’ve got to go home. Mamma has work to do”, I told him, but he refused to listen. 

“Come on, Sweetheart, let’s go home.” I was rapidly losing my temper, but a tiny voice whispered. “Let him be. Do a couple of minutes really matter so much? What if something happens to either of you tomorrow, wouldn’t you regret not spending these moments with him?”

I joined him in looking under a car. A brown cat was feeding her kittens. I’ll always treasure that shared moment.

 “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Steve Jobs 
(February 24, 1955- October 5, 2011)
Requiescat in Pace



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A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

Spam in the middle of Nowhere

I was in the middle of nowhere, or so I thought. A hamlet high up on a hill. A place without water and electricity. A place where the only mode of transportation was two feet. A place without a primary health-care centre, or a store. A place not on the map. A place so beyond civilization, your mobile lost connectivity long before reaching there.
There, a beep was heard over the roar of the wind. My mobile managed to pull through a message. "Flat 15% off on all books till May 31", it read. Are we safe from spam anywhere?

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A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

On (Global) Villages

The Global Village, they call it. Where technology makes it possible to communicate with a person half-way around the world as easily as with the person living across the street. Where Geography is History, and relationships are built around what you have in common, and not broken by what divides you. Where distances are reduced to wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, and a <3 gives you almost as much comfort as a real hug. Where friends are a keyboard away.

Professionally and personally, I cannot dream of a life outside the Global Village. How did people manage before the Internet?

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A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

Last year, it was V for Variety

Jugad- Innovation at its best

It is not a baby she has in the pram,
but her shopping. Innovation!

The power went out, plunging the elevator into darkness. I'm not scared of of ghosts and goules, but the prospect of being trapped in a dark elevator with perfect strangers for an indefinite period was slightly disconcerting. I fumbled for my mobile-phone- the screen would provide a bit of light. But before I could fish it out, the person next to me switched on his flashlight, and the one next to him, and the one next to her..... Everyone had a flashlight, except me.

I looked closer. The flashlights were built into the mobile-phones!

Jugad*!!! Indian Innovation at its best!


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A drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.


* Jugad- Hindi word implying 'we will somehow find a way'.