Shop(hop)ping

People who fail to plan, plan to fail is the saying but I have seen plans for shopping always fail in our family. I think after talking /chatting /discussing /arguing (hope u get the point), shopping is the second most spontaneous thing we do. So off we went to buy some essentials for my brother, for him to take home.

Me and my mother didn't want to go to the one stop mall so we both went to do our own small errands. I had left my debit card at home (not on purpose!) and we only had so much money with ourselves. And totally forgetting to ask my father for more, we started off . For each and everything we bought that day we had to think whether we had money for it and bought stuff that we really needed. Of course more money was just a phone call or a few steps away. Meanwhile, further window shopping resulted in my liking a saree hanging in a shop and we paid for it with hundred's and even our ten's and five's. The shopkeeper gave us a look that could have meant ,"Haven't u both heard about debit/credit cards?" We were both laughing at what we did as it had been a long time that we had shopped thus.

This really reminded me of those good old days when every dress or every item was bought after giving a careful thought to its utility and worth and therefore they were always priced possessions and used till they could be used. Our shopping spree always ended with a pride of accomplishment or sometimes with disappointment soothed away with my favourite chocobar at the end of the day and a promise, 'that next time you get what you ask for'. Not that we didn't have money, but we were always reminded that we should value it coz it was hard earned, and the usual cliche' of money not growing on trees was sometimes used too.

After the advent of plastic money, shopping has never been the same. All of us, I think all those of us who have these cards nowadays buy whatever we like, anything and everything that catches our fancy and after sometime, don't even try to find a use for it. There is nothing that is dear to us, there is nothing that we buy after evaluation or after selecting the best of the lot. We take a cart and pull off whatever we see, dump all of it at the back of our car/bike, bring it home and use only half of it.

So shopping is not that much fun anymore (to me at least!). I do understand the convenience of debit/credit cards but still I would sure like to revisit those good old days at least on some occasions like the one above.

Smile a mile

The bell rang twice. Cursing the person who invented it (Joseph Henry – I think), I went and looked outside. Two women, one of them quite tall (coz, I could see her head above our gate) asked for two minutes of my time. Usually I have tons to give away but yesterday I wanted to finish off the assignment so was studying pretty hard (sometimes i do that too). Seeing them I could guess that they were there either for donations or to sell something.

A habit of seeing them, as a disturbance and nuisance combined, changed a little only when I started working. Boarding two buses et al, I still think I had it easy after seeing the marketing guys and gals walking in the hot sun trying to sell their products to disinterested customers who shooed them away. (Can’t even blame them, what with thugs and thieves roaming around nowadays!).

So as all this gyan was moving about my head like a big crown! :-), I missed out on what the ladies standing outside were telling me when suddenly I heard a question. “What should we do so that all the wrongs happening in this world stops? Who is it that we should turn to for peace”? Apart from what Peter Drucker said in Business Communication, nothing else had the strength to penetrate my head at that particular moment. So when she saw all question marks and exclamations on my face she herself gave the answer, “Lord!” she said, “who in the bible is known as “Jehovah”. We strongly believe in this and wanted to share this with you. Thank you for your time”.

That was all? She called me outside to tell me this? I really didn’t know what to feel or think. Was it anger? Or relief that this was all. Then amidst this confusion of emotions, I saw it. A Smile, which radiated her face. As if it came from the bottom of her heart. She was really happy because she was doing something that she totally believed in and that showed. She then went and rang the doorbell of our neighbour to say it all over again with the smile never leaving her face.

All anger or relief or whatever gave way to wonder and the thought that ‘No matter what other‘s think about you, do what u want to do and that’s all there’s to it’ and yeah ‘Smile’ coz that will take you a mile. So smiling I got back to do what I wanted to do. Went straight to the kitchen to have a kachori (long time no eat, that’s why!!!) With half of it stuffed into my mouth I turned and found my mother staring at me. I did the only thing which came to my mind, I smiled. Took a while for my mother to reciprocate, but she did.