One Fine Day...

I guess I've come down with a very serious case of "Blogger's block". While there's quite a bit happening in my life of late, I'm unable to find a unifying thread to tie all the pieces neatly together into a post that will even remotely engage either my audience or me. So, I'm going to do what over-the-hill musicians do to convince themselves that they're still in the prime of their careers... I'm going to come out with a "Best of Pushuka" series in which I shall shamelessly plagiarize my earlier works. Here's my first offering in the "Best of .." series. The narrative is a hyperbole of actual events during the time I was a graduate student at the University of Tennessee and first appeared in an edition of the "Indian Students' Association" magazine there. So, here goes....

In our daily existence, we take a lot of things for granted, being reminded of the luxuries that we pursue of only upon their absence or inability to provide us with the desired satisfaction. The luxuries I allude to are those provided by the common household appliances that we don't spare a thought for. The misfortunes that I seemed to be suffering from one weekend shall serve to highlight my claims.

It all started when the overhead room cooling system started malfunctioning and discharged considerable amounts of water which, by virtue of which my room being the lowest lying surface area in the entire house, happened to collect there, turning my room into a veritable pond.
This I rather unhappily realized when I woke up in the morning and got off the bed and into a puddle of water, causing me first to wonder whether I was fully awake. When full realization dawned all that my distraught mind could think of to utter was a startled "oh!!" Not much later it was discovered that the refrigerator was deviating from what could be called normal behavior. The temperature control in it seemed to be defying the very purpose of its existence. Milk and other liquids that happened to be inside at the moment turned into solid ice and the freezer presented a very bleak picture... and for a moment I could envision what the "ice-age" must've been like. More unhappiness was to follow. One of the electric stoves appeared to have gotten burnt out and then all of a sudden and without any notice the oven, which until that moment had been in the best of health, stopped functioning. The epidemic seemed to be spreading rapidly and an emergency meeting was convened to assess the rapidly deteriorating situation.

At the end of the convention, my room-mate and I reached the conclusion that all that could have gone wrong had gone wrong and that things couldn't get any worse. Little did we know how wrong we were! It was evening and the microwave was making happy noises trying to heat some of the aforementioned frozen milk when all of a sudden the happy noise died down and the microwave ceased to display any signs that could be associated with life. No amount of 'persuasion' (which among other things, included delivering sharp blows) could induce the microwave into action and we were forced to purchase a new microwave in haste and at considerable monetary expense. Unhappiness reigned supreme and all that could be said of the apartment was that the roof had not come crashing down on our heads!!

Things have considerably improved since and a semblance of sanity returned... but as regards one's belief in the infallibility of household appliances, things will never be the same again... Yes, it was a fine day indeed!!

Until later... cheers.. 8-)