Pig and the Elephant are as different as donkey and the horse.
But they have this in common: both have disproportionately tiny tails.
Likewise I and RKN have this in common: we both love strolling along marketplaces, looking for 'material'. For instance I posted a series of as many as 26 blogs on Gole Bazaar. Must be a record of sorts.
By marketplaces we both mean the good old dusty and sunny bazaar streets having rows of shops owned and manned by different shopkeepers with rainbow colors of humanity, both buyers and sellers...the interest is in people, not in goods. They come not just to buy but to meet friends, relatives, strangers we haven't met yet, talk, smoke, sip chai, exchange news and gossip, haggle, argue, come to blows, embrace and in general have a great time.
The antithesis of this is the modern-day mall, like say the Inorbit Mall in our Hi-Tec City. My son once took me there and I promised I will never visit it again. It is monochrome, garish, sunless, dust-free, air-conditioned and cold as a polar bear's arse. (I think I told you the gag...there was this army colonel, Kamat, staying for a while in our Faculty Hostel...he is the one who one evening entered my room without knocking and started reading Feynman's Lectures for a couple of hours. The second day he came down to breakfast, he threw his quota of rotis at the face of Narayan, the bearer, saying they are as cold as polar bear's arse...all of us were curious and Tyagi asked him politely: "Why arse?" And he replied: "It has no other place to sit on than those bloody icebergs, no?")
This mall where my son took me was forbidding. Its silence was sepulchral...the customers were all young couples, the bespectacled geek with his kangaroo pouch holding their infant in his backpack and following his hi-tech wife like a deaf-mute shadow and she pushing a heavily loaded wheel-barrow with their fatty-bratty toddler sitting legs apart in its potty-seat and sucking his quota of choco-bars and wiping his frothy mouth with his shirtsleeve. There are no shopkeepers...only helpers as gloomy as vergers in a church about to start its Requiem Mass.
Malls were not always like this. The word is a misnomer. Take the Colonial Shimla Mall:
http://www.indiatravelblog.net/places-to-visit-in-shimla/
See how sunny it is. Or take the Boston Mall a century and half ago:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/5553749079/
Anyway, we shifted and moved to four localities in Hyderabad during the past 7 years. And every time we resettled, it was fun for me to go about walking along their marketplaces trying to make friends and acquaintances with the shopkeepers because they are a storehouse of information. By and large the shopkeepers here are a suspicious lot and wouldn't open up to a stranger. So, the trick is to keep on being seen but not talk much. Just buy a trinket or two every other day and stay quiet.
At the end of a month they get curious and start probing into your cv. That is when you can open up and they would respond. It is just about a couple of months for me here in our new locality with its upcoming shops.
The other day, the Telugu veg vendor got curious and asked me point-blank: "What is the salary of your son?" And I said, as usual, "Guess maro!" and after a few attempts he gave up because, like Dalia and her pets, I would be saying: "More...more..." Finally he placed us in the right pigeon-hole and respects us accordingly. But within a couple of days I got all his bio-data effortlessly.
But our Marwari Shopkeeper is not like that...the gene pool is different. He asked the same question to me about my pension, but when I said: "Guess maro!" he kept resolutely quiet...posing as if pondering and calculating. I insisted again and again but he never fell for it. Finally when I quoted my figure, he nodded his head and said: "I guessed precisely as much....with your 40 years of service..."
The other day, my son and I walked to the Puja Saaman shop for buying some special dhoop katis and there was this familiar figure of a Pujari-cum-Purohit sitting there and obviously looking for custom. He made bold and asked me: "Is he your grandson?" And my son was embarrassed enough with this routine question and came out with his default answer, "No, he is not as old as he looks; it is I that is older than I look." The Purohit got interested and asked: "Is your son married?" And when I answered, "He has a cute daughter too," he stood up, lashed his towel a couple of times to de-dust it, and left disappointed...
Sorry, Boss!!!
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