deviousways

I love surfing the Net. I can troll the whole day and end up glassy-eyed, mooney-faced and headachy, but happy. So, my friends call me "Miss Google". Pretty apt, actually, for 'googling' is definitely the defining activity of my day. If I need to look up a prospective contact; find out who said what, when or where; get some background info on a company or more important, fill up on my daily dose of global gossip... I google. Which is why my friends and I have coined a new term for what I do -- we call it 'oogling'. Basically, it means I ogle on google. Come to think of it, 'oogling' is what most of us do. For me, oogling satisfies many hungers, among them my hunger for absolutely useless trivia. Take a moment to taste the word, run it through your head, roll it around, absorb it. "Oogling" is for the eternally inquisitive; it's about vicarious living, it's even, a little obsessive. I do it in real time, in my real life too -- every ti...

We live in an open world where everything's connected, everything's branded. Living in Bangalore, I get the best of the world's goodies: from Armani and MAC to Jimmy Choo and Zara. The world wants in, on my wallet. And I want the "status" that comes with toting those labels. The world's such an open market place, but we're more closed -- to each other. Everyone's on Facebook, to "make friendship". Everyone's LinkedIn. But do we need their physical presence, in our country, our state, our neighbourhoood? Nope, not really. Maharashtra wants only Marathi manoos . The UK , the US and Europe would rather not have you or me, unless we come with C++ or a specialised degree! Or better still, study in their universities, paying three-four times what their own citizens do. The world's such an open place. So, why do I feel it closing down on me?

Something happened over the past two days. Our next door neighbours, or rather one particular family (like all metrizens in this cramped city, we live within literally, touching distance of the others in our neighbourhood), have decided to demolish their home. Fine, so what, you ask. They see how valuable land now is. Who can blame them? But along with their home, they have also decided to kill off the two trees -- a mango tree and a coconut tree -- in their compound. I used to look at those trees from my kitchen window. The mango tree, in particular, was a welcome sight. Bunches of ripe green fruit used to hang heavily from it. Looking at it, I'd think of my home in Kerala -- of the time when I was a little girl in a white petticoat helping my father pluck mangoes as they slowly changed from parrot green to a golden reddish-yellow-orange shade. That was our annual summer ritual, you see. My father plucked mangoes using a long stick with a hook or a 'kokka' (in my collo...