Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Search and ye shan't find
|
If we're killing off the planet's living species by the thousands, we're equally rapidly creating newer and newer species of material objects. And they refuse to be neatly slotted.
|
HERE IS a simple test. Your wallet is looking increasingly dog-eared and you think it's time you replaced it. You remember that your cousin had gifted you an expensive one three years ago. Where is it? Unh-unh, no time to think. It's like "Mastermind India". Answer me, this instant. If you can recall which drawer or shelf you consigned it to, you're a fictional character. In real life, here's what will happen. "I know I've kept it safe, somewhere," you'll say, scratching your head. "Just give me four hours to find it."
Life was so simple in the olden days. "A place for everything and everything in its place" worked fine because you had few possessions and ample space to store them in. You knew what went where. Sack of rice in the storeroom. Books and magazines in the "office room". Firewood in the kitchen loft, tools in the garage, junk in the attic. You didn't go searching for the rat-trap in the clothes cupboard, did you? But that's the sort of thing you find yourself doing today. Into 600 square feet of urban space you cram 600 objects that have potential value (you hope), and since you're not quite sure how to categorise them, you push and stack and squeeze them higgledy-piggledy into the unlikeliest of places. A haystack, if you had room for it, would be just the place you'd keep your needles in.
A place for everything — how soothing that was. The sewing machine drawer had spindles, needles, scissors, and spools of thread. The medicine shelf held no surprises, and you could tell from memory what lay in the top compartment of the chest of drawers. The cutlery and crockery breathed peacefully under a thin blanket of dust in the glass-paned meat-safe. It didn't require a leap of imagination to guess that along with the postal articles you would find the revenue stamps and the blank forms for telegrams and railway reservations. The railway timetable was, of course, kept along with other important books like the dictionary and the panchanga.
Now peep into your own dark corners. What's the sewing kit doing next to the pack of unused kitchen scrubbers? Why the cigarette-lighter in the brass pot? It's the problem of living in the modern world. If we're killing off the planet's living species by the thousands, we're equally rapidly creating newer and newer species of material objects. And they simply refused to be neatly slotted. Let's say you have a Walkman. Do you mentally file it under "Music" and therefore place it among the cassettes? By the same logic, the camera should rest atop the pile of photo albums, but instead you've lumped it together with the broken-down organiser, the spare watch, and the solar-powered calculator, since they're all "Technology Stuff". So that's where the Walkman should go. And the floppies, right? And the printer cartridge and the printer manual - hold on! Manuals are books, but they don't deserve a place on your bookshelves, so you take the manuals — for the printer, the Walkman, the computer, the music system, the organiser, the calculator — and dump the whole lot into "Technology Stuff". By now that compartment is filled to bursting point, so heaven knows what you'll do with the next gadget you buy, not to forget its manual.
Since you cannot spend half your life creating endless pigeonholes for endless acquisitions, you start stashing away anything that doesn't move into one large box. Or two. Or three. That's how the confusion begins. While you're searching for that new wallet we were talking about, you'll discover every object you madly hunted for in the past. Isn't that the missing kaleidoscope that your son threw an almighty tantrum about in 1987? Oh, and here's the set of passport photos you were looking for when you opened the bank account. (Since you couldn't find it then, you had to make a hurried trip to the studio.) A long-overdue Indira Vikas Patra peeps out from under a library book you never returned.
The living room showcase runneth over with odds and ends. There's a pack of playing cards, old magazines, red ballpoint refills (never the blue you need), photos from your nieces' birthday party that you meant to put into an album, an emergency lamp with a conked-out battery, flyers from various takeout joints, and a large pebble that you found during a family picnic to Hoganekkal.
If you can tell useful objects from junk, you've won half the battle. Just open one of your loft doors. Gently, now, or it'll all come tumbling out.
Must you save the cardboard box that came with your gas stove? Or those that contained the cooker, the oven, and the mixie? You think you'll use them when you move house, but you never do. You think you'll need the mixi carton when you take it for repairs, but each time you've done so you've popped it in a bag, which is far less unwieldy. A lot of the junk you accumulate spreads evenly throughout your house. Any desktop or tabletop displays, at any given moment, an LPG bill, a credit card company brochure, an ancient wedding invite (who on earth were Mrs and Mr T. Venkatachalapathy?), sundry visiting cards of people you don't recognise, and a receipt for a traffic fine you paid when you took a free left turn where there wasn't one.
Now, peek into the ceramic vase. You'll find the wallet nestling there, along with a red, beribboned, scented candle. Believe me.
C.K. MEENA
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
|
