Just My Musings

Yes, you read that right. Vowels are now  They-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named . Or so I am given to understand, by most of the text messages I receive. No matter what age group the sender belongs to, nobody seems to be using vowels anymore.  I can understand why people who are totally preoccupied with their online identity do this. They simply have got no time to waste on typing vowels. They have at least ten social media accounts to maintain simultaneously. Posts of their own to edit and upload, that of others to check, follow, like and 'heart'; several selfies to edit, 'filter', touch up and enhance to an extent that would shock somebody who meets them in person for the first time as they would look nothing like their picture; many comments to write and numerous things to scrutinize and find politically incorrect.  If they start focusing on proper spelling, they might not be left with any time to spare on other trivia like sleep, a disciplined routine or, God forbid, a few mom...

Social media seems to be flooded with upma memes. I just came across one showing the troubled face of a husband who, after being asked by The Wife to pass his verdict on the taste of the upma ominously lurking on his plate, has almost forgotten to chew and swallow his mouthful in the shock of the worst dilemma of his life - if he were to say it is tasty, she'll heap two more karandi s of it for him to struggle through; on the other hand, if he were to admit the absolute truth and declare his lifelong enmity with it , the aforementioned karandi will end up as a weapon against him! Although I thoroughly enjoyed the creativity of all the upma denouncing memes, their sheer number has made me afraid of telling people that I actually like upma , and being at the receiving end of their dismayed, scornful looks. But now that I have confessed, the security of the sluice gates in my mind has been compromised. I might as well go ahead and let slip another such unspeakable truth, and then...

..when 'keeping in touch' meant picking up the landline telephone to actually have a real conversation; when you tried to understand a person's character by getting to know them over time, rather than forming an impetuous first impression after a cursory glance at their social media handles..   ..when school classes didn't have Whatsapp groups; when, if you had been absent from school, procuring the missed 'notes' meant visiting a classmate's home to copy it, or hurriedly gobbling up your lunch to make time for copying from the borrowed notebook of your bench-mate..  ..when having nothing to do for a while would have led to sitting and gazing over whatever was happening outside the window, rather than tinkering with Windows..  ..when the opportunity to look at someone's photo came only when they showed you the glossy print of the tangible physical copy (while you tried not to smudge it too much with your fingerprints); when there was no notion of a '...

The other day, in a bookshop, I saw a kid browsing eagerly through the comic and fantasy fiction sections, after which he picked a few of the books, when his mother came upto him and replaced them in the rack saying he should read "real books". She tried to draw his attention to the non-fiction section, chose an autobiography and read something off the dust jacket, with the kid all the while gazing at it with as much distaste as if it were a jug of bitter gourd juice.  This instantly reminded me of the time during my pre-teen years when one of the adult guests at our house read the back-cover blurb of a Robin Cook thriller I had borrowed from the library, and advised me not to read "such books".  It also brought forward several other such trivial memories to my mind, including the time when my son was six, when he had found an old book of mine on black holes. He became very curious to know what it was all about, had flipped through it and read some of the beautifull...