(Have my pie and Eat it too!)
Sweat, rain, icy slush and maybe, some fungus? My shoes smell wonderful. I was sitting in the library the oher day, across from a quiet Chinese kid pracitising his ESL tests, cursing why my olfactory lobes were being assaulted. God! Someone tell this kid to clean up!!
Nike Air Max 360. Rs 10000. I bought them, umm, I dont know sometime back. I was in the Nike store with my mom getting impatient over my now famous indecisive rambling. I had been through tthe whole inventory all the while knowing that it was either the black shox or these 360s I was going to buy. After about an hour of fooling around, my mom got my game. She asked the sales guy who was fed up with this whole stupid son and patient mother scene that I bet he was hoping my mom wasnt there so that he could just throw my dignified rear out on the street. Anyway, my mom declared that she would buy me one of the two, the shox(which were the round about 9000) and the 360s. Now what was she trying to do? The whole time i spent looking was to avoid having to choose. And now my mom asks me to do what i hate the most. Choose? Are you kidding? Both My Father and my father have been very kind to me. But not so much as to entertain my idioticities. So I flipped a coin, shox won. I bought the 360s. Come on they were more expensive. Brag-worthy!
Choosing. Something I am not terribly good at. Growing up at home included lectures in Introduction to Economics, The Art of Spending and Cost-Benefit Analyses. Free! So I listened and as it happens in these cases, thanks or no thanks, I learnt something. And I think I made him proud. I have this tendency to look around so much that i surprise myself sometimes. Trust me thats not easy! Early years at surveying meant walking door to door, picking up brochures, flyers, quotes and what have you, with friday siestas lost to the post-prandial sugar surge to my cortex. Those were the days. (Mind you, being a middle/high schooler meant your surveys were for fun and what you said barely counted towards anything.)
Enter Internet. And once again I can go on about the boon/bane discussion. The internet has taken my surveys from the realm of fun to compulsion. Previously i knew only as much as the shopkeeper told me. Now the tables turned. I know more than any sales guy about the product I am going to buy. I often know already what I want and why, but the sadist in me often decides to humour the poor guy to make his pitch, offer off the record advice and persuade me. Come on, he's there for that, no one should get paid for free. Sometimes I play the ignoramus to start with asking the obvious while i slowly titrated my questions to his info levels. If he go cocky like he knew so much, Boom!! I'd take him down, lead him down the path of sales hell, cluster bomb him with all my research. Its not all fun though. Sometimes the game backfires. If I dont pick my lamb accurately I get slaughtered. It has happened more than once and it is not fun.
Anyway, so now with this whole internet thing, like so many other surveys, I have started to look for my shoes online. Surprising thing was that there were very few online stores that delivered in Canada. That hasnt stopped me though from looking for my perfect solemates. I think I have almost made up my mind on buying Timberlands. And somewhere along the line I have picked up this new fixation for waterproof shoes, which funnily are fewer and harder to find. No water resistant mind you, waterproof. There is a distinc difference. The other day made I fell for these King's Bay chukkas, goretex, waterproof, airport friendly. But just as I was about to punch those little credit card monies into the website, I found a liking for the new Earthkeepers line Timberland has launched sometime back. Suddenly I feel inclined to shell out for that boot style. Maybe its just the eco-friendly branding that seems to have taken hold of the save-planet-earth parts of my brain.
And so the forces win again. I like two different things. Budget dictates that I can have only one. I have to choose!
Nov 8th , 2008
Watching Obama say these words gave me goose bumps. For the first time after a long time I actually cared about America and its people. I don’t know when I forgot them. Must have been sometime through those eight forgettable years that have just gone by.
The earliest memory of America, though I have never been there, was the fateful night when I sat huddled in front of a TV set with a bunch of other Indian kids while the grownups watched from over their couches and dinner plates. The Iraqis on the streets couldn’t do enough to deter a resilient Indian soiree. Bush Sr was talking about the goings-on in the middle-east, the invasion of Kuwait. I still remember his wrinkled, meditative words heavily pouring out. War it was.
I am a child of the Gulf War. Americans were our heroes. Play and chatter was abundant with the imagery of good-evil transferred to the America-Iraq scenario. America was the good guy. That was 1990.
Operation Desert Storm. Bosnia. Somalia. Kosovo. Operation Desert Fox. The ten years that followed were a series of conflicts relayed in a carefully reconstructed manner always readily identifying the bad guy. Of course we knew who the good guys were. Didn’t we? Growing up to these events brought on some questions. Yet one never doubted the intention. America meant no harm. They fought for the people, their rights and their good. Well there were other ways of doing it but no other would step up to the task so readily. That was America doing what it did best, playing the good guy.
Then came the new millennium and with it brought controversy, doubt and eventually, decay. Controversy over the how the man got into the office, doubt over his capability and judgment, and finally the decay of the American spirit and also the good will that America had fostered in minds like mine. George Walker Bush had done everything humanly possible to open the wrong doors, rub people the wrong way, all the while carrying a straight face of a man driven by vision and purpose.
9/11 forever changed the world we lived in. But Afghanistan and later Iraq were hasty responses to a blow on the very face of the American spirit. The need of the hour was determination, resilience and thoughtful intervention. What has come to be does not even qualify debate. Could it have been different? May be. Should it have been so bad? Definitely not. Four years ago, for reasons unknown, at least to many outside America, Bush was re-elected to the highest office in the most powerful country in the world. The second term of W is something I can’t wait to forget, and I am not alone. Bad policy is very different from ignorance. Persistent and worsening ignorance can only be judged as idiocy. God bless America became God save America.
As with all things, the Bush years have come to pass. Every American who voted Obama on the ballot represented the hopes of the entire world. People from every corner who directly or indirectly were beneficiaries or victims, as times have it, of American policy of recent years held their breath as America went to the polls. The world was glued to its TVs, radios and computers awaiting the outcomes of their suffering, the fruit of the hopes they had invested in the common citizen of the USA. And they weren’t let down.
The words of change the new president of America had on the eve of his victory were not for his people alone but for people world over. The man on stage in front of America today was not just a leader America voted for, he was chosen by all of us around the world who wanted to see the guiding light in new hands. Watching intently, I couldn’t help but smile to myself when I saw him speak with conviction and promise of restoring America to its lost glory.
Obama is not just a man or a leader or a president. He is an idea. An image of the power and will of the people, invested in one man. America has once again beat the odds and managed to make that leap of faith. Less than 50 years after Martin Luther King, they have elected as president a young, black man who has the tenacity to challenge, the will to persevere and courage to transform. He represents an opportunity for America to try something new, to show the world a new direction and to make possible tolerant and peaceful coexistence. It is a chance to abandon a rampant ruthless barbarism, both fundamental and state-sponsored, that is scarring the lives of millions of people and bring back an era of dialogue and non-violence. A man who does not carry the weight of years of electoral politics, who is not hardened by the unforgiving corridors of Washington and entrenched in the interests of the high and the mighty brings with him a sense of honesty to the table. This alone will give Obama what few other presidents have enjoyed, the respect and adulation of the peoples of the world and above all a chance, to break ice and foster brotherhood.
Economy. Trade. Healthcare. Foreign Policy. World Peace. Obama’s mandate, rather the legacy he stands to inherit, is unenviable to say the least. Yet even the longest journeys start with a small step. And with Obama, America has taken a giant leap. Four years on, I look forward to remembering these times as a period of great change when I stood witness as history unfolded and a new paradigm shift came to be in the way the people of America, the people of the world lived.
Mr. Barrack Hussein Obama, Yes we can.
