Looking & Seeing

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Her mom lectures 4-year old Sudha on Table Manners when she found her slurping her sambar making lip-smacking sounds.

And is pleasantly surprised that her daughter is listening with rapt attention to her eloquent speech and asks: "Well?"

And Sudha replies: "I could count only 28 but you stopped abruptly, so I don't know if you have all 32".

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I am just back from our nukkad DTDC outlet depositing an envelope to be delivered to Prof S H Rao (ex-IIT Prof of GG, senior to me by a decade) in Himayatnagar. This morning we spoke on phone after 3 years and exchanged mutual nostalgia.

SHR is a born book-lover and has the vastest collection of well-thumbed books, all of them carried from KGP to HYD after his retirement. He has recently undergone surgery for cataract in both eyes and says he is again a boy raring to read more books.

What I posted to him were clippings of my 3 Articles in the Now & Again column of The Statesman, Calcutta a year ago.

Well, books happen to be the second love of SHR...his first love remains Crossword Puzzles. As soon as he wakes up, he downloads those Times & Guardian things and solves them in 10 minutes; and then goes for his ablutions.

Not the straight & simple ones like I used to do once in a while in The Telegraph; but those with cryptic clues like:

"Girl between her parents...what a swell view!"

with the answer: "Panorama", that I dare not even attempt.

As it tuned out, I noticed that the topmost clipping of the Articles I sent had a NY Times or some such Crossword Puzzle beside my Article.

And I am sure SHR will solve it first before looking at my: "In Praise of Laziness".

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Two decades ago Prof & Mrs N had to travel all the way to Gole Bazaar after 10 PM and pay @ Rs 100 per minute to speak to their son in Georgia.

One evening a marketing guy dragged N up the roof of the ECE Building to demonstrate the latest satellite telephone, opened an umbrella-like antenna, and asked N to speak to his son.

And his son got irritated and asked why the devil he was being woken up at the dead of the night; but N, being a gizmo-lover was lured by the quality of sound which was like that in a Philharmonic Orchestra, and was tempted to buy it.

Returning home, N rushed into the kitchen and gloated that he had just now had a talk with their son in Georgia dead cheap with an equipment that has just to be installed on their own roof.

Mrs N halted her cooking and queried: "Is that so? How is he? What did he say? Did he have his dinner? When are his Qualifiers? Did he ask about me?......"

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When a Wedding card arrives, my wife just looks at the names of the bride, groom, date, time and venue.

My son would look at the quality, weight, and texture of the Card and estimate its cost.

My D-i-L looks at the stamps and peels them for her Ishani Stamp Album.

And I look for bloomers in language and printing.

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So wide is the gulf between 'looking & seeing' or 'agreeing & allowing' or 'Foreword & Aftword':

http://gpsastry.blogspot.com/2010/04/foreword-aftword.html

Good Night & Good Day!

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