Food for thought …

Lot has been said about the booming economy and particularly the boom in the organized retail sector in India. Malls have been mushrooming at every nook and corner of the smallest of cities in India. Malls are equated to a shopping experience where people not only go to shop but they are the new parks where families go on a weekend to spend time.

This Diwali, I did the opposite. Me and my mom went shopping on the Gujarati New Year’s day to a traditional market - the Natraj Market at Malad station.

The place is dominated by Gujarati traders selling cloth, readymade garments, stuff to decorate your garment and the works. We happened to be the first customers for everyone that day and I was amazed with the warmth that we were showered with in each shop that we visited.

Each shop had a bowl of sweets kept at the entrance. Whether you buy something or not, you are insisted to take some sweet alongwith you as a token of well being. I was pleasantly surprised that these people had kept this tradition alive of offering sweets to anyone who visits your house on the New Years Day, in this hectic and extremely materialistic world.

We ended up purchasing some dresses from a shop and the shopkeeper ended up making an invoice of an amount like Rs. 501. He said, that the one rupee was as a shagun. We readily gave the amount and imagine our surprise when he gives us a full box of sweets as we were his first clients for the New Year. I was particularly taken in by the warmth of this gesture.

I am sure we would not have ever been received with such affection at any mall. Nobody would have really cared if it were the New Year or if we were the first client for the New Year.

These are simple and very tiny gestures which make the fabric of India. It saddens me that we tend to forget the rich culture that we live in, the talents that we have, in blatantly copying the west in our race for becoming the next superpower.

I sincerely hope that somewhere we do not loose this identity which is India. Economy boom or not and it is this identity which makes us different from the rest of the world’s so-called successful economies.

Would be nice to know your opinions on this.

Technorati Tags: Retail, Economy, India, Gujarati New Year

Experience the Aeroplane!

In a stretch of Ghatkopar dotted with slums, very near to the controversial Mithi river, lies a strip which can tantalize any human mind with the sights it has to offer. The area is called Jari Mari. A very non-descript location. A place where one would not think of stopping when one is on his way. This crowded place is the nearest one can get to the runway of Mumbai Airport if one is in Mumbai. A frequent air traveller, I often am on the tarmac and boarding planes every month. But I was completely bowled over by what I saw here.

When you are at the airport to catch a flight, you are on the tarmac for a while and then in the aircraft, and when you land, you are either asleep or trying to fight the congestion in your ear. In such a situation, you do not realise the magnitude of the machine which you board or which is taking you from one destination to the other.

This place offers you the chance of witnessing take offs and landings of many a aircraft. Standing there peeping through the small crevices in the door which separated the road from the runway, I saw how absolutely magnificient and majestic a machine can be. I saw why pilots treat their aircrafts like their girlfriends and cannot stop praising her beauty.

Standing on the footpath, while a Boeing 737 soared over my head at a distance where I felt if I jumped and if I were bit more taller, I could have touched it. I trembled as the beauty glided away above me to land sending a cloud of dust behind it. The entire experience of witnessing this phenomenon which I am a part of very often otherwise was enthralling.

We witnessed many take offs and landings and each time I wanted to experience the aircraft flying overhead. We kept telling ourselves - just one more landing, just one more take off. We desparately waited for a jumbo to land. Unfortunately could not witness that one.

If at all anyone is coming to Mumbai, I recommend this place to be visited. Its an unusual place to visit but one should not miss it for the sheer excitement it provides.


Technorati Tags: JariMari, Ghatkopar, Mithi

TECHNOLOGY ????

It’s amazing how much technology has crept into our lives. It’s almost like a necessary evil. We cannot think about a life without a mobile phone or working without a computer these days. If we do not have the latest processor in our computer we feel as if we are living in the Stone Age. It amazes me more so because in a country like India, a mobile phone or a computer was very much a luxury less than a decade ago.

What got me thinking was this television show I watched on Europe’s richest people. They showcased this Indian gentleman called Ratan Chaddha who created the empire of Mexx clothing. In the show they were discussing how this man splurges his millions, and one of his splurges like all very rich people was art. Now art per say does not really interest me since I don’t understand most of it and do not quite understand the arty lot. But in this show, they showcased an art form, which I was completely unaware of. It was called interactive art. Whenever I think of art and art mainly in the form of painting, I can conjure up images of an old man with a dirty palate smeared all over with all possible colours, with clothes painted in all those colours as if he himself were a piece of art than the canvas on which he was trying to bring to life something that he had in his head. I could never ever in my wildest of imagination think of an image of a computer geek sitting in front of a computer screen and using his brains to come up with programs in order to make an image do certain things when touched.

I am not an IT geek like many of my friends but I do use substantial amount of technology in my daily life. I am also not scared of technology like many people I know at work but I always thought that no matter what, there would always be some streams of life wherein one will rely on the creativity of his hands to create something. Art being one of them.

Some smarty might come up with you do use your mind and hands when on a computer. I agree that on a computer you are using your hands on the keyboard but there are a fix set of keys that one uses. One cannot move ones fingers in whichever directions one wants because one will end up with a lot of gibberish then. But then I see things like interactive art and I am compelled to think: whatever happened to good old humans and their creativity? Today we call editing an image on adobe photoshop creativity. We call mixing music on high-end softwares creativity.

Whatever happened to the sounds of beautiful instruments played by hundreds of musicians? I wonder what happened to the joy of getting together the best instrumentalist in his own instrument and putting them all together to form one beautiful piece. I sincerely hope that we do not reach a point wherein such instances become extinct.

Technorati Tags: technology, nirali surati , mexx