Pot-Pourri

Charity Begins at home.

I am writing this on the last few days of my stay in a foreign land, on a business visit.
A charity sale was going on in our office. It was a cookie-candy-pizza sale as a fund raiser for the Alzheimer’s disease research.

Colleague: what is going on? Why are there so many cookies and Pizzas?
Me: It’s for charity.
Colleague: Charity? Is it free?
Me: No! It’s a fund raiser. Charity for the needy
Colleague: Oh.. Then India needs lots of charity.. Ask these people to give us the money..
Me: Why? To end up in the politician’s pocket?
Colleague: so what? We will fill up the politician’s pocket so much that some of it will at least overflow to the public.
Me: Our politicians will enlarge their pockets, if something like that happens.
Colleague: Then we would fill them up even more, so that something surely overflows.
Me: Or…. Better still… We could puncture the politician’s pocket…
Colleague: suddenly becomes mature, looks away and shrugs
Me: Come-on, what was wrong with THAT !!!????

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Those wonder years in the wonder land..


There is this friendly cheerful lady in office. A single mom living with her parents, and her 4 year old daughter. Over lunch, I asked her about her daughter. Among other interesting anecdotes, she told me that her daughter freaks out her grandma with an imaginary friend of hers. The little girl used to say with a straight face, “Nana, I am not talking to myself. Can’t you see this girl sitting on the toilet seat? She is waiting for her momma and papa to come and pick her up...”

Kids imagine all sorts of things. I had imagined so many things. I always wanted a houseful of siblings. I had imagined an elder sister and a younger brother. So strong was my hallucination, that I went around telling children at school what my sister did to my hair and how my kid bro broke my toys. It wasn’t until a couple of standards later, that one of the girls from school came to my house and asked my parents for my akka and thambi. My mom had to bail me out, by saying they were cousins.

Then there was this game that I used to play with myself. I used to imagine a parallel universe where things happened opposite to the world as I knew it. When I cried, I imagined that my counterpart in the parallel world laughed. When I stood, she sat. When I slept, she was awake. When I said yes, she said no. There was no rhyme or reason to this little game. But I kept playing it. And it did amuse me a lot. I don’t remember when I stopped playing this game, and it is surprising that I still can recollect it.

Childhood is when reality is imagination and imagination becomes reality. Things didn’t have to exist to be true. As long as they kept you happy and amused. As long as you believed in them.

Then all of a sudden you grow up. Imagination becomes difficult. Or Art.
Beliefs become naiveté. Or do they? Some may linger on. I, for one, could use a parallel universe every now and then.