Wisdom by Hindsight
You read about my misadventure with my slippers on Sunday at the concert.
These were the pair that I lost.
I went looking for exact replacements at two of Pune’s largest Bata shops and could not find one. I had to settle for a pair like this.
Not quite what would have satisfied me but comfortable enough.
I was invited by the Dakshina Dvaraka again to another concert presentation program yesterday and I had an absolutely marvelous time learning some things about Carnatic Music that I had not known before. You can learn something about the program from the PDF that I give as a link here.
I was well primed to expect the unusual by an article in the local press about the event and I was not disappointed. Among the most unexpected information that I gathered was the fact that the Thanjavur court used Telugu as official language despite the rulers being Marathas and the state being located in the heart of Tamil speaking area. It made sense as the State was originally ruled by the Nayaks who were Telugu speaking rulers, but such a blend of three languages in one state suddenly made sense with the explanations given by Dr. Sumathi Krishnan.
The enjoyment was however short lived as I was exposed to something that I had not experienced in decades. It is a custom that before one enters the particular concert hall where the program was held that the audience removes its footwear outside the main hall. I had known about this and worn a pair of slippers that I could easily get in and out of. On coming out of the hall to put them on again, I was shocked to see that they had been taken away by someone either accidentally or deliberately. A couple of well wishers helped me to search for them in three different locations without success and I walked out of the building on bare feet before I could into a vehicle to go home. A lesson learnt and if I have to go there again, I would remember to carry a bag in which I could carry the footwear inside and come out to wear them again! I would however try and persuade the management before hand to permit people to wear footwear inside! I shall keep my readers informed.
Holly has nominated me for the Creative Blogger Award and I am overwhelmed. Thank you Holly.
Naturally, there are rules to accepting the Creative Blogger Award:
I have decided to break the rule number 3, because I have done this before and I don’t want to trouble too many people. This time around, I will nominate people who may just enjoy being nominated.
Five facts about me.
1. I am an eggetarian. For the uninitiated, that means, I eat eggs but otherwise am a vegetarian.
2. I have recently been wondering why I have never come across any woman who wanted to seduce me.
3. I do not share my birthday on facebook but this year my son posted photograph of me cutting a birthday cake on his wall, which caused a whole lot of people to greet me and more importantly, two persons shared that they shared the same birthday with me!
4. I am a voracious reader with eclectic tastes. Right now, I am reading “While The Gods Play.”
5. I live in Pune, India.
I nominate the following five bloggers for the award.
1. Nick Here And Now. Nick defies description. He can be funny or serious and sometimes very provocative. He has got a very vociferous readership which makes his site quite an interesting one to visit.
2. My Observations. A fairly recent blogger who is a globetrotter with a weakness for movies. I enjoy the banter with her on her blog.
3. Dun-Na-Sead. Another recent addition to the blog world writes some amazingly creative blogs though she, by and large restricts her blogging to the weekly Loose Bloggers Consortium posts every Friday. My readers are familiar with the LBC and I am not elaborating here.
4. Montana Moments. A remarkable blogger who is actually a dog. A must visit for dog lovers who will understand what goes on in a dog’s life. Montana inspired our own Chutki to set up her own blog too, though the latter is lazier and does not blog as much as Montana does.
5. Business To The Buddha. This blogger is a young dynamic business executive who is sure to achieve great things in his life. He is trying to balance his material ambitions with a call to spiritualism and can be very thought provoking.
Happy blogging you five and thank you once again Holly.
Okay, I am taking a very serious article to make a flippant point, and I hope that my readers will forgive me my flippancy. The lady in this article deserves and gets all my sympathy but there is a side to the story that I need to address.
Why is it that if there are women like this, not one has ever seduced me or even tried to seduce me?
Okay, someone like one of my regular readers who I hesitate to name, is likely to turn around and ask me if I have seduced women like this woman has seduced men, and my answer is a categorical no. In making that statement, let me hasten to add that I go by the definition of the word seducing as “Attract someone to a belief or into a course of action that is inadvisable or foolhardy.” (OED)
So, the next question then will be following that definition, will I still be interested in being seduced? At my present stage of physical and mental development, the answer will have to be no, but perhaps say two or three decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding yes.
And about the little sticker on the top left, I leave you to decide whether I am a gentleman or not.
What about you dear reader?
Trust Maria the gaelikaa to come up with the most difficult topics to write on! This one had me scratching my bald pate for quite some time before I could gather some thoughts on what to write.
To start with, this is not something that I use regularly or have ever had to use regularly. The earliest memories I have of ‘back to back’ is reading about duelists with pistols first standing back to back with an umpire counting out paces for them to separate, turn around and fire on reaching the mandatory ten paces. Since most of these stories were over a woman, it was quite interesting for me as someone not very interested in them at that age, to wonder what all the fuss was about. Much older, and I hope wiser, I still cannot figure out what the fuss was all about? You win some and you lose some and to fight over romance sounds so silly even now. But the idea of those guns, how they would be tested, loaded and brought to the venue was something different!
Much later in life, I had to resort to back to back agreements tying up sales on the one hand and purchase on the other as middleman and this was something that was always exciting and very satisfying.
Then came playing or watching back to back matches, and also watching movies etc at a time when such things were possible and you were not condemned for being a slacker. These were no lifted eyebrows when you said that you had gone to a morning show and followed it immediately by a matinee show. And mind you, this was in the days of stand alone movie houses. One can so easily do this now in a multiplex that I wish that we had had these in those days. I would have been able to spend more time in theaters with my girl friends like I now see youngsters do in multiplexes watching back to back shows with only pop corn to sustain them.
There are however some usages that puzzle me. Like terraced houses being described by builders as back to back. The backs are usually gardens and the common walls dividing the houses are usually the drawing rooms/landings. Surely they should be called side to side? Back to back agreements are much touted about between governments which again, puzzle me. How can one agreement with say a neighbour in the North on sharing river waters, be described as a back to back agreement with an earlier one with another neigbouring country in the South on technical collaboration in higher education?
Whatever the matter, the usage seems to be on the increase and I only hope that the usage that I first remembered is not.
This topic was suggested by Maria the gaelikaa, for the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where currently nine of us write on the same topic every Friday. I hope that you enjoyed my contribution to that effort. The seven other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, Ashok, gaelikaa, Lin, Maxi, Padmum, Pravin, Shackman and The Old Fossil. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, or not at all this week, do give some allowance for that too!
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