Grey Matter

India is a full of small time traders who are the retailers to major chunk of the population.

My family buys milk from a milk vendor,called palkaramma(meaning: milk trading woman in tamil)whose real name many even dont know,
Since to everyone she is known as and only as the palkaramma.
Palkaramma has some cows and buffallows with which she makes her living.
We get fresh cow milk everday delivered by the palkaramma’s son.Yesterday i attended her grand child’s birthday celebration.
It was a very grand celebration.

Annachi kadai is where we buy the groceries.Similar to palkaramma,
the owner of the shop is known to the world as ”Annachi”(meaning: elder brother).
The groceries are also door delivered by the small boy working under annachi to our home.Annachi recently came to my house to give sweets for
the birth of his son.

My family’s dealing with these traders date back to more than 2 decades.
Its amazing to see that any amount of advertising and other marketing
by packeted milk hasn’t spoiled this relationship.

This is what is the ”indianness” of retailing.Retailers in india are more than just
traders,they have an emotional connect and a lifelong relationship
with their customers.They are more like extended part of the family.

This is what Kishore Biyani portraits in his book”It happened in India”(BTW
you can read this book if you dont mind the excessive amount
of self publicity and extract relevent matter for you)

Now that my company is providing me with sodexho pass there was bit of
argument in the house about where to buy the groceries.While my mother
was in favour of buying groceries in some departmental store with those
passes my father was against it as he did not want to embarass Annachi.
I was in support of my father. Since if the sodexho was not spent in groceries
they will have to be spent in restaurants so that would mean more
eat-outs for me

But at the end we ended up trying the departmental store.While i was coming back from shopping Annachi was staring at me with shock.
I haven’t spoken to him yet after that. :(

If you have never heard of David Lynch or of Mulholland Dr (as i never did) ,if you have inclination towards grinding your brain as opposed to the screen writers spoon feeding everything,if you like the idea of multiple interpretations for a movie,if you have never seen a surreal movie,then the best bet is that you will love this movie.Now please dont google or read the wiki about this movie.Go get a copy of the movie and see it before you know too much about the plot or the movie.

While googling i found that this didn’t fare that well on the box office.Well,thats understandable; since the average movie goer likes plain straight forward stuff. This movie changed the way i was looking at screen writing.

Ms Incredible:I can’t believe you don’t want to go to
your own son’s graduation.

Mr Incredible:It’s not a graduation.
He’s moving from fourth to fifth grade.

- It’s a ceremony!
- It’s psychotic!

They keep creating new ways
to celebrate mediocrity

but if someone is exceptional…

This is a dialogue from the movie Incredibles.As Mr.Incredible says mediocrity is celebrated so much so that people settle for mediocrity.
No, i am not saying no to motivation.But motivation does not come to everyone.When a mediocrist tries to brag in order to motivate someone,
you could see one mediocrist standing with his head high, straight chest,with incessant verbal diarrhea while the other with his head low trying to think about a movie
he watched a previous day, or some other topic for that matter, to escape the verbal mess he has been hearing to.

They may brag about anything. for eg:
1:fighting with some rowdies using his “so called” influences.
2:How he doesn’t get time to do the “so called” menial works.
3:How he does everything according to his wish.
4:How his decision is always right.
5:How nobody ever listens to his gut feelings and run into losses.
6:How he lives is life fearlessly.
7:How he is everyday routine is so planned that he lives the best life one could live ever.
the list goes on.

Well everyone would have come across this kind of a situation.The possible ways to handle these self styled braggers are:

1.If you can be harsh with him then you can either ask him to stop the nonsense or walk out of the scene.(you could always give a excuse of having a important appointment and escape).

2.If the person is a superior then you cannot obviously be harsh with him.In this case you could give missed reactions(for e.g:Laugh aloud for something thats not funny
and don’t even smile and look serious when he/she cracks joke)

3.If you are not good at giving mixed reactions then practice to keep a blank face always.When you keep a blank face many people will start guessing what you are thinking or would get confused and slowly grind their speech to halt.

4.If nothing works out then the only option is to enjoy yourself.Give him more cues and try to guess what he would answer if you ask him some question.
For e.g:Try saying “really?! that must have been very difficult to do.How did you pull it off.I wouldn’t have done even 1% of it” thats it you would have made a trigger
for another hour of verbal vomiting