A look at the mysterious insides of our cupboards and drawers.
WITH reality shows getting more and more bizarre, here's one more idea (and if any TV producer is reading this now, quick, grab the idea it's free)..It's about Living In Transit. And before anyone leaps up and says "Ha! But that idea has already been done in a hit Hollywood movie called `Terminal'" where Tom Hanks lives for weeks and months under the watchful eye of a camera in an airport transit lounge, feeling homeless, here I'm talking about a Living In Transit situation in each of our homes. In our cupboards, in our drawers, in our shelves...
Unanswerable questions
The reality is: we all have some strange Homeless Objects everywhere. Just sitting there. And if a candid camera went deep into our shelves, our desks, even our handbags, we'd see them all in real focus. And perhaps ask such searching questions: Why has this Calcium Sandoz box, shaped like a dog, with nothing inside, been sitting in the shelf below our telephone, doing nothing for months, may be years? Why is a small packet of negatives of somebody's passport pictures taken in 1993 sitting in between this row of pickle bottles on top of the fridge? Why, oh, why is this corpse of an old emergency torch that succumbed to its own emergency and died in the 1980s still peering at us every time we open the drawer where socks are kept? (Perhaps it's there because in the TV cabinet's extreme corner, there are five assorted batteries, either dead or alive it's impossible to tell whose place of rest hasn't been disturbed for three years, and these could possibly give the old dead torch a new life... but who has the time to try this life-giving experiment?)
You never know
I read somewhere that junk is something that you keep for over 20 years, and throw away two days before you need it. That's why I'm still safely keeping the left ear handle of a pair of sunglasses I owned when Mrs. Gandhi won the elections (Indira, not Sonia). What if the rest of the glasses pop up suddenly one day? So back goes the broken left ear handle inside our kitchen draw (now don't ask me why the kitchen draw it's always been there, that's all).It is this gift of foresight that anticipates possibilities in the future that encourages us to hold on to old, yellow Bank Of India challans of money deposited in 1978-79. What if we want to suddenly check whether or not we deposited a cheque for Rs. 375 received from UTI in September 1979? The challan book is right here inside this (zipless) GRT jewellery pouch, where we have also kept a handy kit of a foldable toothbrush and toothpaste given by Lufthansa, a brass knob of a cupboard that once fell off from our house in Kilpauk where we lived 14 years ago, a watch that has stopped exactly at 3.10 in an unspecified year, a paint brush stiff with rigour mortis with green paint that has died in its bristles, a plastic pouch with a picture of Lord Venkateshwara, and a crumbling folded piece of paper with clear directions of how to get to "Tilak Raj", a tailor in Darya Ganj who stitches great blouses within a day (I left Delhi 22 years ago, but this may be a useful address to pass on to anybody in Delhi).And it's also time to come out of the closet, if you'll pardon the expression, on the clothes we cling on to, even if they may never cling on to us as they do on those hot models on Ftv. One of these days we'll surely sort out why the cupboard is overflowing , but not just now; there's a big sale on at Lifestyle and we haven't a thing to wear for tomorrow's party... But should the Reality Show chaps ever show up in your house suddenly, I hope you have good explanations ready for why this thing is there and that thing is here, all around your house.And the next paragraph is going to make us all say, "Oh no! Don't let the cameras go into that box, please!"
Remedies for every illness
Too late my friend, says the reality camera, as it relentlessly seeks the one box of impossible-to-throw-aways every single household in the world has kept stooged away and yes, you better come right out and admit you have this one too it's the In-House Pharmacy of left-over medicines no patient ever has the patience to finish taking (despite nodding earnestly that we will at the doctor's clinic) to cure a bout of laryngitis, arthritis, hepatitis, synovitis or colitis or just a good old fever. Somewhere in this Box of Cures is a handy remedy to every ill in the world. However, should we wake up in the middle of the night and imagine that we are getting, say, malaria, and immediately rummage around and swallow a remedy from this handy emergency box, our own expiry date will immediately follow, as the expiry date on the foil clearly says December 2000. But do we throw away this dangerous box next morning? You know the answer to that one.Meanwhile, should the Reality Show guys ever come near my handbag, admittedly a dwelling house for several random, mysterious objects that I cart along wherever I go, I have some pat answers to any question that may be thrown at me."Why do you still have this ticket stub to the Shankar Mahadevan Concert that finished over a year ago?""Because I have written down an important phone number on it"."So why don't you just transfer the number into your mobile, or even a phone book of which, incidentally you have three in your bag?""Because I can't remember whose number it is!"Even the toughest Reality Show guys cannot argue with that one.
More things
And the relentless camera may well go on snooping further into my bag, but I have ready answers, should they find the two raffle tickets from the Porur Ladies Club Annual Fete of 2004 ("I think I may have won an Idli Grinder, but I don't know where to check") or five unused tokens for the Giant Wheel at a Dizzyworld ("we may suddenly go there while driving on EC Road") or the DVD of "Madagaskar" from Tic Tac ("I'm too scared to return it as the fine by now must be over Rs. 3,000") and a green stapler ("so that's where it is!").Meanwhile, while you look around your own house just now, and wonder about the purpose in life of about one hundred Things staring back at you, enjoying the art of doing nothing, I am happy to say my own life is going to change. I have just picked up an amazing book called How To Unclutter Your Life. I am going to read it one of these days as soon as I find it in my handbag. It's definitely in there, somewhere...
This article was featured on http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/objects-with-no-objective/article2275004.ece
