During my time here 'sticker' has been a revolutionary invention right there with 'chip' ( both potato and silicon).
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Right from my days of innocence till now, South Indian ladies (especially the married lot with spouses intact) compulsorily wear a 'bindi' on their forehead.
My mom had a set of two pill-boxes, one for powdered kumkum (vermilion) and the other for wax. After bath and before Puja she used to gingerly apply a bit of wax first as a base on which a pinch of kumkum was evenly spread delicately till it takes a lovely circular shape of the required size.
When I got married, my wife used to ask me to buy a tiny bottle of liquid bindi with a brush tucked into the cap of the bottle.
Kumkum Powder gone with the wind in my household.
Very soon however 'sticker bindis' took over and have been ruling the roost till date.
What a great convenience among nuisances! (or the other way round as someone said of hooked left kets...'they are in the way'... much like bushy mustaches)
Ishani (now 1.5 years) is a fanatic 'dot buster'...she peels off the sticker bindi from her Grannie's face and applies it cockily to hers and saunters to the standing mirror.
http://images03.olx.com/ui/1/38/23/1353523_1.jpg
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Sometime around late 1980s rich ruffians from downtown KGP used to drive down merrily in their jalopies to the IIT Campus and on their drunken drive tease our comely occupants of SN & IG and zoom away merrily.
IIT authorities then issued 'IIT KGP Stickers' with our twin towers printed on them to all genuine residents asking us to stick them on the windshields of our cars and faces of our scooters so that those vehicles not sporting these holy stickers could be denied entry and turned away at the Security Gate.
Good strategy... but you know what happens when you suddenly block wholesale what has been a thoroughfare for donkey's years...resentment mounts.
Every good thing has its flip side...as Gerome said when they came down heavily for funeral expenses of his M-i-L.
Simply put, the Campus was never a sealed unit since everyone had to go downtown for Puja Purchases, and our 'stickers' were an easy giveaway for the pent-up fury of the disgruntled.
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The other day when my Driver-Friend was shipping me by his side in his Tata Indigo with a Nellore number plate, I warned him that sooner than later the renowned Traffic Police of our megalopolis would stop and ask us to step aside into the kerb; which they duly did at Punjagutta for sporting a 'fancy' stylized number plate.
Since we were in a hurry and so were they, a wee grease let us go.
But I was wondering if another needy bobby would do the same at Dilsukhnagar and another at L B Nagar and so on till we get out of our blessed Hyd...we didn't have a receipt....
This morning I read a news item that a wise bobby and his coterie were caught issuing 'fancy stylized stickers' which can be attached to the affected windshield and which would act as 'open sesame' for 24 hours...just enough to slip away from our Charm(inar)ed City.
How decent of the Traffic Department and how very convenient!
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Hyderabad is a youthful city. And colorful too.
Every Counter in every Private Merchant Outlet here is 'manned' by a cute girl in her teens... a visual delight for dispassionate old folks like me...I do hope they pay them well.
A couple of hours back I was sent to our delightful AC Supermarket to fetch a 2 Kg packet of Toor Dal costing about Rs 200 .
And I landed a heavy transparent plastic Toor Dal bag (even I could recognize the contents).
But the packet had a sticker with its fancy barcode and stuff saying 'Jeera' 100 grams @ Rs 20.
I kept quiet till the cute cash maiden sullenly pushed it under her scanner and said: "Rs 20 please"; which I paid and said:
"Thank you for the heavy discount!"
And she was all of a doodah trying to rectify the computer error so that she didn't have to suffer for the goof-up of some other kid-girl.
Sticky wickets, 'stickers' could be.
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Legalese
I thought all my life that 'demise' meant 'death', period.
The other day when my son signed the lease agreement for our newly rented apartment, I found 'demise' all over the document and thought it must be a spelling mistake for 'devise'.
But, no! Webster says it means: 'lease'.
One lives and learns even at 68.
Again, today I learned that someone was wrongly confined for 'consuming' pornography which apparently is not a crime unlike 'producing' or 'distributing' it.
How dearly I would love to 'consume' it right to the bone like a ripe Alphonso Mango!
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