Category: People

Crazy!


I will start this post with a bit of humour and end it on a very serious note. Both to drive home the thrust of this post.

I am a member of a number of WhatsApp groups and one of the problems of being so is the repetitions that one has to face every day. Some posts go viral so fast that I not only get to see them on various groups but, also through individual messages from contacts.

One such recent video is about a Super Senior gent who is past ninety and still going strong with daily physical exercises, marathon running, proper diet etc, etc, etc. In the clip he is asked about his longevity and he  advices on how to be fit irrespective of one’s age.

Good for him but, my funny bones decided to have a bit of humour with this post as, the gent shares the same surname, xxxxxx as mine. So, on many such posts I commented : “xxxxxxs are crazy. I am one.”

The responses to my comment amazed me. 43% wrote that they totally agreed, or indicated their agreement via thumbs-up emojis or simply by a grinning image.

33% responded with frowning emojis. Need I also add that bar just a few, all shared the surname xxxxxx.  I suppose that these indicated that all xxxxxxs are not crazy.

The balance 23% simply enjoyed the quip and indicated it via smile or grin emojis.

Innumerable contacts decided that discretion is the better part of valour and simply kept quiet.

I have concluded that most people in the world that I occupy consider me as crazy. So be it.

Now coming to the serious part of this post; Please visit Webwisewoman’s blog post I Was Never Old Before.

I hope that you will understand my response in the comments to that post – “No matter what one learns from others about ageing, one has to face up to realities of one’s own situation. In my case, my health issues prevent me from leading the kind of lives that many of my friends and relatives of about my age live. I have accepted this and have modelled mine to give me a contented life. And yes, blogging has been a great outlet for the creative part of me to operate.”

And just as I started to write this post, I received another message from a very dear friend who too is an xxxxxx and like me, a couch potato.

Nastik in Sanskrit means a Non Believer.

Now, you tell me whether I am crazy or not. Thank you.

Lottery And Regrets.

I was quietly sitting on my recliner and reading a book last evening. My DIL was lounging on the sofa and catching up with her messages on her phone.

She must have read about this lottery winner which has been doing the rounds in all our media here the last couple of days.

She suddenly asked me “What will you do if you won a lottery like the auto driver did?”

I reflected for a while and said, “I will put the money in the bank and spend some of it in sprucing up our home and leave the rest for the two of you.”

DIL – “No going to see all the grand children in the family and of friends all over the world, no vacationing in exotic places?”

I – “No dear. My travelling days are over as you well know. I have seen my share of exotic places and modern mass media enables me to be in touch with everyone all over the world. I am now in my comfort zone and am quite content.

I don’t think that she expected that answer and the chat ended there.

This little chat however reminded me of a book that I had read some time ago. While reading the book I could well relate to the dying regrets that the author writes about and even at that time I had placed myself in their position and wondered whether I would have the same regrets and had come to the conclusion that I would not.

The five regrets are:

1.”I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

I believe that I did.

“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”

I never had to work hard anyway! And I am not being facetious. Things were different during my working years.

“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”

While I did not, till about my late teens, I changed when I started regular salaried employment and performance linked incentives, and was able to express my feelings without being afraid of the outcome or the reaction of others.

“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

I have, and continue to do so. The longest lasting friendship that I have is with my Primary-School-mate who lives now in Mumbai and many others from my high school and business school days as well as others who came into my life due to my career, travelling and blogging.

“I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

I have been very fortunate that apart from the sorrow of the death of family, friends and pets, I have not had many occasions to be unhappy. I have been and continue to be quite happy, perhaps even to the bemusement to some others.

How would you rate yourself on these five parameters dear reader?

Extension Personality.

We had a lovely young lady visiting us at home earlier today. She had driven some fifteen kms from her home to a Beauty Salon near our home which she claimed was the best in Pune.

While she and my DIL were chatting about things that ladies chat about, I overheard a bit that puzzled me. The young lady said, and I quote her, “I am not the extension personality”.

I was puzzled as during my younger days, an “extension personality” was someone in an office, who, due to the nature of his/her work was given an extension phone without a dial which could only receive calls or make outside calls through the central telephone exchange board. It was considered to be a status symbol to be given such an instrument.

I decided to investigate what it meant in today’s context and discovered that the lady was talking about finger nail extensions.

I had to google for finger nail extensions to find what exactly the term meant! I wonder if such an extension would not cause problems for the wearer as well as others nearby!

Did you know about this beauty enhancement device?

Six Degrees Of Separation.

All of us know about the famous Six Degrees Of Separation. This idea was proved to me by a series of coincidences.

I received a phone call from a gentleman, let us call him HP from my community. He spoke to me in our common language and syntax to establish his credentials and introduced himself as the cousin of a cousin twice removed from me called TM. HP said that TM had given excellent reference about me to him and that I was sure to be of help to him. I have not heard from TM in decades but was vaguely aware of his existence in Mumbai. HP came straight to the point and asked if he could depend on me to find out some details about a young man from Pune where I live too.

The enquiry was to establish the suitability of the young man as a prospective groom for HP’s daughter. This is not something uncommon in India where arranged marriages are the rule rather than the exception still. I said that I would try my best to find out about the young man given some time and then the discussion took on a different character.

HP wanted to know about my background and when he heard that I had spent most of my working life for a particular company, he was shocked and informed me that he was the cousin of a gent called TR who I had known too, and he wondered how someone like me could have worked in that company. He informed me that TR had been unfairly dismissed from service by the company following which he had died within a few years. I had not known about this as I was not in Mumbai where all this had happened and had already left the company to pursue other interests.

I was however intrigued and called up some old colleagues to get the story and was given the correct story about the dismissal.

The intriguing part of this tale is the degrees of connections that came up in the form of relatives, albeit distant and ex colleagues.

Remarkable isn’t it?

Nostalgia And Reality.

While going through some old photographs, the widow of an ex colleague came across a photograph of mine and some other colleagues with her late husband in a conference in 1988. She promptly sent a copy of it across to me on WhatsApp reminding me of the “good old times.”

While she and her family are still in touch with me, they are not with the others in the photograph and so, I in turn sent the image to two others in the photograph via WhatsApp.

One of the recipients in turn sent me a photograph of a lunch party a couple of days ago, where some old colleagues along with their wives had met for a post covid reunion. I had known all of them thirty years ago, and it was a strange feeling recognising the faces after such a long time. The sender was curious and asked me if I recognised all of them and was in turn zapped when I confirmed that I had indeed.

The second exchange occupied my thoughts for quite some time as all the men in the latter photograph had stayed with the same employer till retirement whereas, I had gone my separate way. A series of “What If” thoughts kept me occupied for quite some time till my other activities changed my mood.

I wonder if this is normal for others too. Has something like this happened to any of my readers?