Come again?

It caught my eye one Saturday morning near Crawford Market where I had gone shopping with Ujwal. Called Bokoma, it has a stylish plastic handle out of which sprout a dozen curved springy wire “fingers” of varying lengths ending in tear-drop finials −a kinky kitchen tool or claw look-alike. It must have something to do with acupressure, I thought. It seemed to me that it would make a cool art deco doodad/thingamabob/gizmo http://digbig.com/5baekg were it to be stuck in a bottle. The boy hawker was asking Rs.80/- for it. I haggled him down to Rs.30/-. Its smart-looking tapering carton printed in German with the unbelievably exorbitant price of €19. 50 (= Rs.1355/-) marked on it and the underscored legend “Das Original” in red intrigued me. My first reaction was someone was pulling a fast one. Maybe, it was a locally made product passing off as an imported one. This impression was further reinforced when I heard that Bo was being hawked for Rs.20/- near Sicca Nagar, close to where I live. Then I stumbled on to this:http://digbig.com/5baekh and this: http://digbig.com/5baekk. Pay Rs.100/- or Rs.125/- for Bo plus shipping charges. Hold your excitement in check for seven days till you get delivery. Instead, why not zimply come to me and I will take you to where you can lay our hands on it instantaneously at a mere fraction of what the shopping site is selling it for. By the way, they http://digbig.com/5baekj are claiming Bo can do you a lot of good: “Originally developed by the to obtain a complete body relaxation, today it still serves that purpose and is a strong and positive source of new energy to you.” P.S.: Times Shopping mentions Pick N Sell as the seller of Bokoma and the only Pick N Sell that I found was a wholesale super market in Bangalore:http://digbig.com/5baekm. I couldn’t trace the Bokoma seller at Rediff Shopping (e-bizwizard). Bokoma’s cousins are congregated here: http://digbig.com/5baekn. Bokoma is also a place situated at 0° 22' 19" South, 17° 8' 23" East in Congo Republic (Africa). http://digbig.com/5baeks. What’s more, Semi Document: Bokoma Kegasu is a Japanese romance-porno movie. http://digbig.com/5badws.

Monkey business.

I’m afraid there’s been in the Harbhajan-Symonds imbroglio a serious “category mistake". Doreen, Henry Root’s daughter http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/rooting-for-henry-well-done-mate.html would have most probably described it so. The reason, I daresay, is either ignorance or sheer sloth. The parties concerned know neither their Darwin nor their Australian history. What's worse, they have not taken the trouble to find out. Darwin’s view needs no elaboration. Australian history does. Owing to the British law’s proclivity in the 18th century to view the newly discovered Australian continent as the ideal dumping ground for the scum of the earth, a penal colony was born with just one woman for every four convicts as it turned out. http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/australianhistory/. I’m surprised neither ICC, ACB nor BCCI have bothered to consult non-cricketing experts on the facts. No lawyers or journalists seem to have caught on to the glaring discrepancy fairly staring them in their face. If only they would take a deep breath, stop thinking like boys playing galli cricket and take a wider world view of the incidence!

The Crossing.

You don’t come across many of them anymore in Mumbai, I guess. Railway crossings, I mean. When I was a child, I used to be taken in the Mankar family car to Antop Hill, Wadala, for Ganapati darshan. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/08/family-car.html. That was in the late forties and early fifties. We had to wait at two railway crossings to reach the Hill. Mostly, it was for a local train to pass. Sometimes, a lot of shunting used to go on because of goods trains proceeding to or from the BPT warehouses abutting the Mumbai Docks. My cousin, Nalini, married into the Jayakar family lived on the Hill (the rest of the Jayakars still continue to live there) in a sprawling house. The last time I went there as an adult was in the early nineties to attend my cousin’s funeral. By then, the railway crossings were long gone, replaced by a flyover. There was no waiting, no delay. The reason for the nostalgia for the railway crossing is because of a 1990 Australian movie I saw yesterday on the Pix channel. Hugely underrated, unpretentious (it doesn’t even pretend it isn’t a movie) and slow-moving, it somehow managed to grab my attention and interest. It has a very young Russell Crowe as Johnny, the best friend of the arty Sam. Johnny ends up with Meg, the girl whom Sam had deserted. Meg agrees to marry Johnny the very night Sam returns to the village of his birth after an absence of a year and a half. Set in the fifties or sixties (I reckon), it has small-town parades and car races on freeways for spectacle as well as the heartbreak of young love. To save the girl and her betrothed, Sam sacrifices his own life at the crossing. No hamming, no melodrama. Just the irony of random happenstance. Excellent. A serendipitous discovery for me. I thought the use of the long shot as an alienating device was brilliant. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099323/plotsummary. By the way, the movie taglines are: “A time for dreams... A time for choices... A time that would never come again.” And: “Where destiny meets desire.” A bit too over the top for the way the movie happens to be, if you ask me. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099323/taglines. P.S.: One railway crossing in Mumbai that, I know, is still alive and kicking is the one near Andheri Station at Amboli close to which in the Vikas Towers I own a flat.