Change, change, change.

The more I think about it, the more amazing I find it. I must have been born under a forward-looking star that ordained that I would see so much change and so much history in the making in a single lifetime. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/04/pain-and-suffering.html. For instance, as a child, I saw MK Gandhi at fairly close quarters at one of his prayer meetings in Mahabaleshwar. I wrote about it in my still unpublished novel http://www.addgandhi.com/original/ on Gandhi and Hollywood, The Last Gandhi Movie. A few years later, I listened to Nehru’s famous eulogy at his funeral (“the light has gone out of our lives”) on our 5-valvr Bush radio. http://www.eulogywriters.com/ghandi.htm. So even if I rank among the lesser mortals who do not make history, I have been a mute witness to history in the making. Some of the late 20th landmarks I watched at more than six degrees of separation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation were Nehru’s death, the infamous Emergency interlude, Operation Bluestar and its aftermath, to mention the most noteworthy. I witnessed India’s progression from a colony to a state capitalist economy to a free economy. I saw at least one hack Victoria driver being butchered from my third floor terrace at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html in the 1946-47 riots as well as Muslim houses behind as well from across my present residence in old Thakurdwar being put to flame in the 1992-93 massacre following Babri Masjid’s demolition. Apart from these, I saw my own family graduate from the coal choolah and the kerosene stove to bottled cooking gas and from the coal-fired water heater to electric heater. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/heat-of-days-long-past.html. I saw the valve radio making way for the transistor powered one. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/03/clueless-in-mumbai.html. I saw my portable typewriter making way for the PC in a span of forty years. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/my-portable-typewriter-tale.html. And, I also saw myself graduating from the milk in a bottle and later in a plastic bag that needs boiling every morning http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/neo-luddite-relents-sheepishly-shame.html to the milk in a carton that needs no boiling at all. The Internet, e-mail, IM. SMS, Wen 2.0, cellular phones, CDs, DVDs, the likelihood of the end of the civilisation as we know it and of the institution of marriage … good grief, Charlie Brown, where are we headed?