Category: Raves and Rants

Peeves!

This series of posts has been inspired by Nick who suggested that I list my peeves. He calls his, “Petty Peeves” but, I prefer to call mine just peeves. Since my peeves will need explanations unlike Nick’s one-liners, I will use more than one post to list them all.

Let me start with my morning peeves. The first things that upset me are these:
My morning pastime of sitting out in the veranda with my mug of tea, gets spoiled by various thoughtless people.
1. Talking loudly on cell phones just outside my garden sitting atop a two wheeler with its engine running ranks the topmost.
2. Impatient sounding of horn to get a traffic jam cleared because some idiots do not know how to part or are in the process of offloading passengers near a restaurant near my home.
3. Noisy vehicles of all kinds with deliberately made so or defective silencers.
4. Vehicles with extremely loud music being played leading me to wonder if the driver and passengers want to listen to music or want to show off to people outside.
5. Cars with barking dogs with their necks outside the windows leading other dogs being walked to bark too leading to total cacophony.

The next are once I am inside and see folded newspaper pages to highlight advertisements like the following.

Reading the half page as shown in the first image, turning it and then folding it to read the rest of the paper is very annoying.

The stretched out piece of one page to encourage the reader to go to the page to open it to read advertisements, at least in my case, has exactly the opposite effect. I swear to myself not ever to buy the product or patronise the institution advertised.

Full page advertisements of ugly looking politicians selling their candidacy or constitution for whatever reason is another no no for me. Here too, that politico will never get my vote.

Next peeves will be unsolicited phone calls either selling something or scammers who must think that I am a moron.

Closely followed by those are SMS messages and WhatsApp messages of commercial nature which annoy more than create interest.

More to follow.

Frustration!

A friend  sent me some goodies earlier today using a local delivery service.

First, she rang me up to warn me to expect the parcel and then I got a text message from the delivery partner as he is called over here, advising me that he would be reaching me within 22 minutes. I wondered how he could have calculated that timing since he wouldn’t know the traffic conditions when he started but, let it pass.

Thirty five minutes later, I got a call from him asking me for directions. He was just 200 Mts away from my home and I gave him directions and landmarks to follow.

It took another fifteen minutes and three more telephone calls for that smart fellow to finally reach me.

When I asked him why there was confusion, he pointed his smartphone to me and said that the google location kept showing him wrong directions.  The same app had given me the driving time at the time of starting his journey!

Like me, don’t you wonder, why these applications are called smart when all that was needed for that gent was to follow the directions that I, obviously smarter than the app, had given him?

No More Conversations.


Cellphones were invented to increase personal contacts between people and increase access to many services. What it has now done is to reduce conversations between people.

I must confess that I am guilty too. When motor mouth callers drone on, I interrupt to say that the reception is poor and that I am unable to hear properly and request for text messages. I prefer sending text messages rather than call up such characters too.

I however find that increasingly, people would rather text  than call each other up. If at all they do call each other, it is only for long conversations which will take time to text manually.

Apart from that smart phones have also made people increasingly tied to their phones in all kinds of situations and it would appear that it is assuming alarming levels of psychological problems. Here is an article talking about this problem in some detail.

On reflection I too seem to be afflicted with regular checking up of the handset for messages and twitter posts. I have decided to reduce this compulsive behaviour and hope that I succeed.

How about you? Are you addicted too?

The Weather.

For the first time since I started to live in Pune thirty two years ago, the summer season has forced me to instal an air conditioner in our drawing room.

Two factors are cited the foremost being global warming / climate change and the deforestation on the mountains that surround our city. The cool breeze that used to come down from there, has disappeared and now we are paying the price for that folly.  We get hot winds instead.

The past two weeks have been particularly bad as apart from the heat, in the high thirties low forties during the day, humidity has been high for our plateau climate and that has made it more uncomfortable for us. Dry heat is less debilitating whereas the humidity saps one of one’s energy.

As I write this, it has been over cast and the high has been 38 deg C and forecast to be 25 deg C during the night. Humidity at 51% is very high for us.

As my readers know that I am a Pluviophile and I am impatient for some heavy downpours. Our monsoon season that normally starts by early June seems an eternity off.

How is the climate where you live?

Patience.

I recently developed a severe tooth ache and luckily was able to get my dentist to see me on a Sunday to see what was wrong and to remove the discomfort.

She diagnosed it as a root canal problem and put me on medication to prepare me for the treatment and to manage the pain.

The next appointment was for Wednesday and during that visit I was told that there would have to be three more visits before the treatment would be over. I seriously considered getting rid of the tooth but she advised me to save it by the treatment. I agreed and am now under the regimen of medication and waiting for the next visit due on Monday.

Being the impatient fellow that I am, I simply cannot understand why such a long duration treatment is necessary but am assured by my GP and some friends who have undergone root canal treatment that this is SOP.

When I expressed this impatience to a friend, he suggested that I act my age and to buttress his advice sent me this image.

Doing The Wrong Things At The Right Time.

I am not a great fan of Tony Blair but, this quote from him resonates with me in our current pandemic situation.

India is in the midst of a rampant second wave of the pandemic and unfortunately this has coincided with state elections in some of our states as well as the Kumbh Mela.

Our politicians have been holding rallies in the states that went to the polls and attendance was simply mind-boggling. Likewise, the Kumbh Mela saw huge crowds of people taking the holy dip and this too was scary.

As I was writing this post, I also came to know that the Government of Kerala has regretted their inability to cancel this year’s Thrissur Pooram.

From these huge gatherings, people could become carriers of the pandemic and contribute to further aggravating the already severe conditions in our country. Hospital beds and oxygen are in short supply as well as shortage of vaccines.

I for one am appalled at the lack of civic sense shown by our leaders as well as common people who have allowed tradition to overrule common sense.

“Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain.”

~ Friedrich Schiller.

This is my take on this week’s Friday 4 On 1 blog posts where Conrad, Shackman and I write on the same topic. Today’s topic has been suggested by me. Please do go over to the other two blogs to see what they have to say on the same topic. Thank you.