Remember?

What do I write? I ask myself yet again! There simply seems nothing to be written in specific when you want to pen something! Ah! Like always, ideas come up to me when I least expect them to!!! The power-cut happened yet again!
 Well no, I am not  cribbing  about the power-cut but the apparent lack of concern about it! Most of us enjoying the gifts of modern technology have an inverter in place to make life so much easier for us. 
  No power the city moans! We have no care we say, we got inverter in place. While this is certainly a wonderful thing, specially when it comes to not spending the night in the humid/hot weather or tolerating those pesky blood sucking mosquitoes that somehow manage to sneak inside the house no matter what time of the evening you close the doors and windows and have all the mosquito repellant in place!
 But amidst all this I miss those days when inverters where unheard of! No, I was not born in the early 20th century, thank you so much. Inverters were practically unheard of in so recently as late 1990s. The only thing that saved you in terrible summers during a power cut were the generators! And those while on the bright side, did brighten up your home, surely gave a headache to the rest of the neighborhood with it deafening noise!
  While not all of us had the luxury of even owning a generator, we made do with what we could! Bring out those long thin candles and light them up, and if you were in the mood, start the shadow play! One pair of hands turns into a shadowy croc while the other enacts a dog and yet another a bird in flight! And to beat the heat, our faithful newspapers always doubled up as hand held fans! When was the last time any of us got to do that? I cannot really recall except for last week when our inverter conked out!
 This really was a time of the evening when the family got the real family time! No TVs, no radios, no noise, just chatter! And if you were lucky and the whole city was in a blackout you could just glimpse that wondrous night sky, in all it's glory, of course if the full moon was on a monthly vacation. And as we sat gazing, you could hear distant sounds of a hand held radio/transistor tuned to the local aakashwani station, playing those songs that you did not even know existed and made your parents/grandparents reminiscence fondly! And you always wondered, man...just how old are these guys! They listen to such deadbeat music! Of course those would not happen to be our exact words/thoughts, but then you get the idea.
 Are those days lost forever? Or are they just lying in wait for us to just sit up and take notice? That it's just a matter of knowing where to look for and just how simple it can be. Turn those lights off and start the bonfire..oops sorry I mean candle light. Wow for someone who just a few minutes ago did not know what to write, I have written an awful lot!!! No wonder it's the same when I get started about not having much to talk and end up talking more than those guys who actually have some stuff to say! Typical ME! :)

What is it with these guys?

Funny how I am writing this on International Women’s Day. I happened to be talking to a friend and invariably moved onto the topic of his latest passion. No, it’s not a girl, but photography. More aptly it would be his camera. He owns an absolutely Wow SLR camera (for all I know it could be just a regular camera for all those photography enthusiasts, but for one as uneducated as me in those matters, it sure seemed WOW) and seems to have been in love with it since first sight.
That intrigued me and I was reminded of having read in a Clive Cussler novel about how men have this uncanny ability to love inanimate things and how women can never understand that. And the woman in the conversation said something that somehow made sense. She says “We women can never really understand how men can love inanimate objects. Women can never really love things that don’t love them back”.
That line really made me think. Men and women certainly belong to the same genus-species but the similarity ends there. I have seen or heard about enthusiasts or collectors and needless to say a majority of that crowd is somehow male. So what is it with men and their gadget love? I mean it could be a musical instrument or car or gadget and yeah, let’s not forget bikes! These guys would willingly give up human company to spend time with their so called ‘Love’!
I have rarely seen a woman obsess this way unless of course it comes to shopping (and a hundred and one things that figure in our shopping list). But this is certainly not the kind of obsessive love that men display. A woman can only truly love only that which can express its love back. Selfish you say? I don’t really think so. She just loves being loved and appreciated. So maybe, even pets top her list but not always an object.
This seems to be quite an opposite behavior with men, who seem to have this amazing ability to be able to love things, that can’t love them back. A guy will chase his interest with a great fervor and as time passes, the obsession instead of waning, only grows by leaps and bounds.
Or is it like the new Honda BRIO ad claims, ‘Love your BRIO, it loves you back’? Men just love their toys and somehow feel loved but not bound to them by having to talk to them/ praise their good looks/ appreciate them. This probably must be the reason why they are more comfortable around the inanimate objects! Those objects simply don’t keep talking for no reason and never even stop or give them a chance to make their point! And it’s just the same reason that women can’t be in love with objects, that can’t talk back to them. Looks like we are all wired differently when it comes to these things, each person having his/her own quirks. It’s probably why, this world ceases to be monotonous and gives that much needed spice to the many aspects of everyone’s life.