Category: WhatsApp

The Walking Stick.

My readers know that I had been using a walking stick since the past four decades due to both hips having been replaced and revised. Since the past six months or so, I have had to move up to using elbow crutches with which I am more stable and confident of moving about.

I am not the man in the picture but I have inserted the image to show what elbow crutches are.

Many people who have known me for long however, do not know that I have upgraded to elbow crutches and must be under the impression that I still use a walking stick. This must be the only reason for me having been flooded since morning with this video clip in my WhatsApp application.

I have been responding with the following message.

“I admire you for your memory remembering me with a walking stick. I however assure you that I am not capable of the acrobatics shown in this video.”

You can imagine the responses that I have been getting for that comment.

What would your reaction be to my response?

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.

Flood Alert.

Monsoon should have withdrawn normally last week after our Anantha Chaturdasi.

My regular readers will remember my writing two years ago about our local river being in spate. You can re-read it here.. Due to my current health issues, I have not ventured out to see the river as I normally do every year but, have been receiving news about it being in spate from others.

Yesterday’s local newspapers came out with flood alerts in all the rivers running through Pune.

Today, I have been receiving videos of some parts of the city under flood water and here is one of them.


I will keep my readers posted of further developments.

Ageing, Humour And A New Expression.

My friend and ex colleague Balu, whom I have had the privilege of knowing for the past almost half a century, recently sent an interesting article on the brains of ageing persons in our WhatsApp group. For those interested, the article can be read here.

After reading that, I couldn’t resist a response – “Balu, it is all very well for people with brains. Totally useless for someone like me without a brain.”

Balu, being Balu and not one to leave matters hanging in the air, responded – “It is four much.”

That frankly stumped me for a while. Since I have already claimed that I don’t have a brain, and in reality, one that works like a tubelight, it dawned on me that it is a double superlative of “too much”. On further enquiry, I find that it is quite common but, something that came for the first time to me.

I doffed my topi to Balu and responded with this quote.


Can you?

Being Yourself / Average.

One aspect of WhatsApp is getting unsolicited motivational quotes from well wisher friends who think that sharing such messages would make the bonds stronger. I get more than enough of them to get frustrated at times. There are however times when synchronicity seems to come into play and today is one such day when I received two messages in succession. I reproduce them here without comment as they are both self explanatory.

Decision Making.


Yesterday I started reading a book which was gifted to me by a friend and a statement caught my eye. “A Professor in a School of Management who has written a book on Decision Making, was offered positions in four different organisations and consulted a friend on which one to choose. The friend smiled and said, “Why ask me? You have written a book on Decision Making.” The Professor responds, “But, this is real life!”.

As it happens so often in my life two things happened one after the other after having read that little vignette.

A class mate from Business School is visiting Pune and, my two classmates residing now in Pune and I met up with him over tea at my club last evening. During the conversations, we naturally talked about our two years at the school and some of the faculty members.

Some Alumni have collected funds for instituting an annual award and the visiting friend suggested to a local friend, an academic, that he should suggest a criteria to decide on awarding a gold medal to an alumnus. This led to some hilarious discussions on decision making and naturally no conclusion could be arrived at.

This morning I received a clip via WhatsApp which led me to an interview with Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame, which too talks about decision making which I am sure will amuse as well as rile some readers.