First times.

There is pride attached to certain 'first times'(first-timers too!), shame to others and indifference to rest.

Ease.

And my commode-phobic Amma always constipated when she made early morning efforts on the raised toilet seat. Not surprisingly, she thought she suffered from Diarrohea whenever she used the Indian counterpart!

How many lives have you saved/taken?

I have enough unread mails in my mailbox to take part in some contest for the same. Part of it is indolence. The other part, is the fear of facing a mail which requires you to forward it to a certain number of people, if i wanted, for example:

1. A bright love life or

2. Lot of money within the next 24 Hrs (sum usually mentioned)

or if i wanted to avoid,

1. Extreme bad-luck for ages or

2. the death of someone which is almost certain unless i forward the mail to all those on my address list to contribute in the mail-chain-money-pool-in drive.

The first three rather being pleasantly and futuristically speculative (money and true love) or hypothetically intagible (Bad luck), its the forwards under the fourth heading which botehr me the most. I have certain issues with this.

Some say its spam, some say even if it is, are u heartless enough to give in to someone's death just cause you are reluctant to click a few times? I don't know. I feel tormented when i see babies with feeding tubes in their oral and nasal opening. Really. But i still am not inclined to forward them. Almost never. Why but? I do not know. May be too fake to be true. Just to think how many times one recieves mails saying that a certain person has been saved owing to the money raised by yahoo/gmail forwards! Something strangely fishy and sympathetically-unevoking is there about such mails, but nevertheless, as soon as i click on 'delete mail' or 'return to inbox', a little something in me dies thinking of a white ghost whispering 'i died because you never forwarded that mail to your friends.'

Spatial Courtrooms.

Yesterday when i had a choice of letting someone sit on my coveted and cleverly acquired metro seat long before my stop came, i looked at people as they got on different stations, and i put my conscience to work:

"The tall guy in shades and jeans definitely does not deserve this seat, the lady in suit might just, she looks weak, but so am i after a days work! The gentleman in kurta looks aged but he definitely is not a senior citizen ...ah yes then i find my source of gratitude, a woman with a few months old baby with her. She is the ONE i would leave my seat for."

I stood up and ensured i guarded the seat till she walked up till there seeing it having got empty and then realizing i had voluntarily emptied it long before my stop was even near, she shared a look of acknowledgment! Its funny how in everyday life inadvertently we assume role of judges, that too mostly in our own contextual causes. Be it giving money to a beggar, or buying something at the traffic signal becuase you feel the person genuinely, and thats genuinely to us, needs money. This judgmentalism, i don't say is objectionable. But how fair are we being when we assume the position of such moral judges will sheep-earlike wigs over our heads. Its just a thought, needs watering, manures and pruning. But then they all start as saplings...