Brown Motion

It is time for America to get into a garment to be used only once in a lifetime and beg for candy.  Aka Halloween.  Said garment is identified as a costume and can be time consuming to procure and wear depending on the level of enthusiasm of the beggar.  Usually children; some adults who still milk this tradition hiding behind a mask. This time as before I have oft wondered about the idea of costumes.  I get when you are on stage in a play or a movie that costumes are integral to the framing of the story. You need Stallone to have lot of ketchup marking the spots he is bleeding and the shirt needs to be ripped enough to show his ripped rib cage else we cannot believe he just fought like a badass. But today when I read about the Pope appointing a first ever black American as Cardinal I was struck by the same question.  Especially as I read the story with some graphics and photos of the two. The Catholic religion as any other preaches the virtue of being human.  Above all be kind, be emp

 So said a recent complaint on a local community board.  Someone was peeved.  Apparently the poster was of Indian origin and having now invested in a property in an upscale neighborhood of the Bay Area was expressing his disenchantment with the setup. He was driving at dusk.  Some dude came walking down the road in a bike lane.  Walker was wearing dark clothing making himself almost invisible.  End result could have been  a crash as the poster was turning his vehicle into a side lane and crossing the bike lane. Why do folks not use sidewalks so well kept for walking?  The poster was mad.  Then I got to thinking about his predicament.  Turns out my neighborhood does have folks doing all manners of things that are not meant to be.  Riding bicycles on sidewalks.  Walking against traffic in the middle of the road and randomly crossing said road when no crosswalk is present.  Vehicles exceeding posted speed limits.  Vehicles parked at no parking signs.  And on and on. The offending parties

  Well not quite literally.  I am no poet and I do not think anyone thinks of me as one. So rather than an ode it is more a ramble.  Which I am quite proficient in I might add. But I got to thinking of Covid and its impact on society on a recent phone call with my mother half a planet away.  She is computer illiterate having grown up in a generation devoid of too much electronics.  That is to say she is not surfing the WWW or sending status updates on her gum lines to make believe friends and followers. Even electrical appliances were a luxury during her formative years and only recently did she send her first whatsapp message and still did not know what had happened. So back to this Covid and its implications.  Boredom comes to mind right away.  I mean to find the world forced into stasis in a domino effect of rules and regs that cascaded from federal or central governments of the land to the local; people suddenly found themselves in varying forms of imprisonment. So in tal

 Oh what does a covidised homebody to do?  Esp mua that does not partake in the omnipresent social activity of FB or IG or its ilk. Read or research or watch the telly of course.   In doing the aforementioned research on random things in the whole wide world using what else but the www I stumbled on a documentary produced by the BBC.   That docu series happened to be scratching me where it itches.  A passion of mine - perhaps inculcated in me by my late father who was a train buff and loved timetables - train travel. Thanks to a silicon valley invention called Youtube I can now board a whole bunch of train journeys without leaving my bed. They are broadcast under the larger brand titled ' Great Railway Journeys'  but are localized versions based on which part of the world the protagonist on the show is traveling. I have so far watched a few called -  BBC's Great Canadian Railway Journey Great British Railway Journeys  Great Continental Railway Journeys Great Indian Railway

 English has adopted some strange expressions which make no sense today.  I mean even when Trump takes experimental pills that are in design stage to demonstrate he is head and shoulder above Evel Knievel his doctors think he is not out of the woods yet. When was he in the woods I ask?  He was at Walter Reed Hospital, named for a Army Surgeon from early 1900s.  It is best in class care - I mean there were only 20 or so white coats at the press conference when he left the White House.  How many more were there at Walter Reed? Clearly nowhere near the woods. America is deemed to be in the woods at this time due to lack of transparency from its President.  I think that makes it tricky.  Millions of us in the woods.  Someone shoots something, anyone could get hit.  Hard to tell in the woods. I guess the cities we inhabit are the metaphorical woods.  After all lot of people are shooting at something and that something happens to be other people. So how does one get out of these proverbial w

There was and is no McKinsey or Harvard study out on how children in the mid seventies in 20th century Mumbai, erstwhile Bombay dealt with lack of space and resource to develop a wholesome life in the future. Yet we did it.  By that I mean as a sibling growing up in a four person household with less than 500 sq ft of space among us and sporadic electricity to aid our lifestyle we ended up alright. Many in my generation went through that experience.  Incomprehensible to me too now that I look back.  Take for example the idea that we did not understand the notion of 24 hour running water.  Forget hot water.  Bathing was an activity involving boiling couple of gallons on a stove top and then mixing that wok full of super heated water with a cold bucket in the bathroom.  From that point on you proceeded to use a coffee mug shaped vessel to pour the now semi hot water over your anatomy. Scrubbing the critical zones that required soaping (mind you that oppressive humid heat index outside was

 Let's face it.  Americans among all other living species on earth love to change things up a little.  Whether it is dumping a spouse of two years or returning a leased vehicle, change is always in the air. Many also afford to uproot and move. Physically.  It comes with appetite to explore anew.  Some less and some more.  From down the road to across the country.  Sell your old abode and move into a new one. Well if you think about it for 100's of years American presidents have been vacating their abode and handing the keys to the new one.  Said abode goes by the name of 'White House'.  It is like a Marriott extended stay (min four years unless you pop off or something). Now that Trump has the virus the whole house has to be hosed down.  Even though its White.  Cannot let a covid cause issues with the long term rentability of this mansion now can we? Maybe we can.  Who's to say that the next President might take offense at this old charmer on Pennsylvania and seek o