April 2016 – Ramana's Musings

Does That Sleigh Have Brake Lights, Mr Claus?

Lin at her creative best again comes up with today’s LBC topic. It is mid summer here in India where I live and a sleigh, brake lights or no brake lights is far removed from our thoughts.

In any case, in India, Santa Claus travels by many vehicles and once, in Kerala, when I was much younger, I was persuaded to dress up like him and visit the children riding on an elephant. I can assure you that it was not an experience that I would like to undergo again and, no, the elephant did not have brake lights.

Even in our Himalayan regions where snow is available in plenty, Mr. Claus is not known to come in a sleigh and so, I am afraid that I have to stop this post with that little story about my experience.

I Think My Dancing School Diploma Just Expired.

I don’t think that Lin knows enough about me as otherwise, she may not have suggested this topic for the weekly LBC post that she, Shackman write every Friday and some others occasionally do.

I was still dancing gentle two steps etc and the occasional hop or swing to celebrate something or the other till the end of the last century.

End of year 2000 and beginning of year 2001 saw both my already replaced hip joints being revised. Since then I have had to be careful with them and so all funny business has stopped and now that one of them has been re-revised that is, revised the second time, I am doubly careful.

So, yes, my dancing school diploma expired a long time ago.

Aging.

I can’t remember what prompted me to suggest this topic for the weekly LBC post but having done it, I shall gamely try and write something meaningful about it.

Oddly enough, the last week’s post on The Old Days somehow leads naturally to this topic as after all it is the aged who want to talk or write about them.

Bar a few, my regular readers are all senior citizens and there is little that I can say that will be new to them as, like me, they too would be quite up to date on the subject due to personal experience.

The one thing that I notice often in my own experience of aging is the tendency to gloss over unpleasant things that have happened in the past and to re-live and exaggerate the good things that have happened. I wonder if this is normal but have always hesitated to ask anyone.

Then there is the question of what is in store for the future and whenever that thought occurs to me I go back to similar situations in the past and say, that like those things got sorted out, any new development in the future too will sort itself out.

Having seen some very unpleasant things happening to some people after their death, I prepared my will and got it properly attested by a Physician and witnessed by two independent witnesses. The people who need to know about it, know where it is so that after my departure there are no problems like those that I have seen others go through.

Other than these observations, I really cannot think of anything more to write on the subject. Can you? If you can, please do leave your comments which I will value.

The Old Days.

I bet Shackman who suggested this topic for the weekly LBC post will post about his motorcycling days!

I too could but I have a very big problem which I shall share with my readers which will explain why I am not sharing those particular motorcycling days.

My problem is simply this; What old days? I simply have too many of them in my life. Sequentially, my childhood, boyhood, adolescence, early employment/bachelor days, early married life, parenthood, and so on and so forth and in between so many different places where I / we lived, so many different sets of friends and experiences and so on and so forth again.

Now you see my problem?

I will just take one employer out of the few that I had worked for to explain.

The longest I worked for anyone was for a company with who I stayed for 23 years. I was posted on four different occasions in Mumbai with them each time, having to move into a new residence at a new locality. In the same company, I was also posted on two different occasions in Delhi with the same problems of different residences. Besides these six postings, we were posted once at Calcutta, once at Kerala and once and Bengaluru. In Bengaluru, we also had to shift residence on two occasions.

I can talk about each place of residence as being one of the old days!

Apart from those many moves, we set up home in Pune where we have stayed put for now over a quarter of a century and I can talk about the days when Pune was just an overgrown village, whereas now it is a big pulsing metropolis.

During the time we have lived in Pune, we also set up two temporary homes in Tamil Nadu where I had to attend to two important assignments which involved my staying there. Should I talk about those old days?

Do you see my problem?

For Your Amusement.

April Fool!

I just could not resist the temptation to suggest this topic for the weekly LBC post, as, it is a Friday which just coincidentally happens to be April Fools’ Day or All Fools’ Day as some would have it.

Lest the cartoon mislead you, in India, apart from the April Fools day, which is a hangover from our colonial past, we have other festivals where pranks are played, the most popular one being Holi. In fact it was played just last week over here.

I am sure that all my readers would have participated in playing pranks on this day or having been victims of pranks. The one prank that we used to play in school on this day is indelible in my mind for it having caused a lot of problems for my mother who had to repair the damage done. We used to carve the letters AF on sliced raw potatoes, as a kind of imitation rubber stamp and smear fountain pen ink; yes, those days before ballpoint pens, on it to tap friends with that so that the shirts would carry AF stamp on them. Naturally, I would also carry a few such stamps and to get rid of the stamps was quite a chore for my mother.

Of late, on this day, I have been quite wary of prank calls and visits and so, I have become a totally useless fellow for pranks. Since I do not have grand children and others to urge me to participate, it is by default that the first of April simply passes by like any other day. In my time, even as an adult, I have been both perpetrator and victim but it has been many years since I participated as age has finally caught up with me.

To sign off, let me share a piece of nostalgia from the sixties of the last century, two very popular Bollywood stars, Shammi Kapoor and Saira Banu in a typical Hindi film song and dance routine from a film aptly titled April Fool. Shackman should know that I am quite capable of producing something like this too!