At 23 my son, Sonoo, passed M Sc from IIT KGP, and joined a Software Firm in Hyderabad as a Trainee Developer.
Within a month I got a phone call from a Professor at KGP early one morning:
Prof: We want to visit your Qrs; are you free now?
Me: What is the matter?
Prof: About your son's match
Me: My son stopped playing Badminton for his Patel Hall last year itself
Prof: No, not Badminton;...Match.... Match....
Me: He is no good at any other game
Prof: No, no...not games... Marriage....my brother's daughter is also a Software Developer Trainee at Hyderabad..
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That was truly an eye-opener. Till then I never looked at my son with this third eye as a prospective bridegroom..he was just a kid as far as I was concerned (I married at 36).
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Me: He is just beginning his career...and his pay is just about enough to feed himself...
Prof: My brother will take care of EVERYTHING
Me: He is just 23
Prof: Just the right age for marriage
Me: .........My wife says not yet...sorry
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The first picture I get whenever Match is mentioned is the one that goes with: Game, Set and Match....
The next is of course the stick that I used to light my cigarettes with. Folks still use it now. They tried gas-filled, liquid-filled, wick-based, electronic and friction-things; but none caught on...it is still the age-old safety-match that prevails, at least in Hyderabad. During my heydays of smoking in my youth, I was dreaming of those cow-boy things which light up when you stylishly flick them on the back of your boot. I tried the safety ones...the success rate was one in a hundred; really safe!
Then of course I had the heck of a time when my wife gave me one of her green saris and asked me to fetch her a Matching Blouse from Gole Bazaar. I thought it was a breeze....but I found it impossible to get a perfect match of two independently produced colors. The visible spectrum VIBGYOR is a tiny bit of the entire thing...but what a headache it is...I gave up and declined to do the job....forever....When she looks nowadays for a matching blouse in the shop, that means an hour of Woolgathering for me;....but the manufacturers of saris caught on and produce nowadays saris-with-blouse...phew!
Next we come to Patch.
In our childhood, our khaki half pants were no Match for our rowdy play. They always used to get torn during the pushes, pulls, claws, and such....and you know where they give...right at the bottom of the bottom... and since buying a new knicker (till the next festive day) was out of budget, I had to run to Jaan Saab, my Tailor-Friend to get a Patch with a newly cut khaki thing....the result was for all to see...an inviting Non-Matching Patch at a crucial part of anatomy ideally suited for giggling girls...
I watched dents on scooters removed and cheaply repainted...same story...Non-Matching-Patches...
There are two Patches; one a Great Survivor and the other as dead as the Dodo:
The Survivor Patch is for the punctured rubber tube of the Great Survivor Push Bike (competing with the Sewing Machine, both of whose designs reached an optimum 60 years ago and remained triumphantly there). The same wayside cycle-repair-boy pulling the tube out by main force, inflating it by mouth, dipping it into his muddy water tub, looking for bubbles, pushing in a Match or two, cutting an old tube into a Designer Patch, quickly opening the same old Solution and closing it, applying it with his finger to the Patch, doing phoo-phoo-phoo with his mouth, sticking it on the hole, pressing it mightily, testing it and pushing the tube back, collecting the same old one-anna equivalent, and feeling sure that you will return sooner than he thought...
The Dead Patch is on utensils by the itinerant Tinker..shouting on the road for utensils with holes made by that miracle liquid called water. 60 years ago we didn't have Stainless Steel or Aluminum. All cooking and keeping was done in Brass, Copper, Bronze and Tin-coated Lead vessels. And water was drawn from wells and stored in Iron buckets. All these containers (for the contained) are playthings to water: salty, sweet, hard, soft, river, well, except perhaps distilled..I don't know..; and it made gaping ever-widening holes from time to time. Cotton-wicks were inserted for the nonce, till the Tinker with his bellows and coal-fire who was such a common fixture in the good old days; now vanished without trace, arrived and went to work. His Patches with metal (mostly lead-tin alloy solder) were as long-lasting as the cycle-walla's...generating continuous productive work for all...
Next I learned while trying to quit smoking was that there are Nicotine Patches. These are, I suppose, like the thing you wear on your shoulder while the doc takes BP the old-fashioned way....I declined and stuck to the good old devil-may-care attitude...I hope you know that Nicotine Addiction is the worst of all as far as quitting goes (because it is socially approved, despite everything)...after 30 years I still dream...
The latest Patch is what I daily hear my son talking on phone to his colleagues: "Patch 5 has been released and it costs 2 Man-Days....$ 200..". That is, as Webster says: "a minor correction or modification in a computer program"...
Minor, my Foot!
match-patch-match-patch-abol-tabol-abol-tabol......
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