There has been a new wind that’s been blowing at home. And the wind is about losing flab. In fact, cutting flab dramatically !
Before you say, ‘oh no, not again’, stay with this post. The flab fighting on the body isn’t headed anywhere close to a photo finish. Its a lost cause. A non-starter. Lets move on. The quicker the better.
This post is about the house. The house, you see, has accumulated flab. Over the years. Possessions galore. ‘Possessions galore’ can seem to be a pompous boast of a vain man.
Only here, the possessions that are being talked about are not exactly ones that a wealth manager smile. So.
What would this wealth manager say, if he was shown cupboards of books, files, magazines, folders, paper clippings. etc.
Some dating twenty years. From the days of Narasimha Rao and Ronald Reagan. Old magazines. India Today. Time Magazine. Business Today and the like.
Artifacts picked along the way. Like, the odd stationary bill from a store that’s since been gulped down by a mall that intimidates by the sheer size of its parking lot !
A menu card from a fancy hotel. Flicked to rekindle in an unforeseeable future, the memories of a special evening with special people !
Overhead projector sheets from the first corporate presentation made, which seem today to be almost the time when the dinosaurs hatched their 11the egg.
Discussion notes from organisations organisations who helped pay the bills in an earlier time. Copies of mails. Approvals and such else. Heaps of study material. ‘Extra reading’ printouts . Notes from training programs that have long been forgotten.
Wedding invitations of friends who have now progressed to attend Parent-Teacher meetings and now organise dinners based on the tuition teacher’s calendar !
Bus tickets. Train tickets back home. Travel pamphlets from Bangkok to Bombay. Shimla to Sivakasi ! And beyond !
Books & small artifacts. Some picked specifically as memorabilia. Others accumulated in intense lazy stupour. Of course, each pregnant with a story of its time and place. As the hand ran a cloth to drive the dust away, a million memories got dusted too.
Four racks in the cupboard were emptied with the ferocity of Bruce Lee felling opponents in ‘Enter the Dragon’ ! Strange noises et al ! The remnants of the tearing, throwing and mowing remained on the floor for sometime.
Not very later, gunny bags of the ‘old newspaper’ chap held them. With grimace and glee ! Twenty odd years of accumulation. Carefully clipped newspaper cuttings. Innocently flicked menu cards. Carelessly kept old bills. Study material from a different age. Reviews. Publications. Occupying four racks of the cupboard. Moving along the many houses. City to city.
All gone. It required two trips on a bicycle like this. In a four hour span. They were gone.
We live an age were Google is a verb. Space is a perpetual constraint. Dust beats the Gods in omnipresence. And of course, the daily day offers new possibilities for life and living, much unlike any time before. Perhaps, the nimble mind, without baggage will soak it all up well. So is the case with homes ! That logic beat nostalgia’s seductive presence !
Net result : All gone. You would have expected the missus to have jumped with joy. Happy she was. But, she was a tad upset too.
For all of this yielded her a mega sum of Rs. 129/- ! The care with which these were preserved and the 20 year time stamp on some, seems to have had her imagining something like an inheritance from Bill Gates or someone !
‘Rs.129. Huh’. Was all that was heard.
So much for flab !