Pressure Cookers are Sexist. So I stay single.

Post-millenials – the crowd born in and after 2000 – just don’t get it.

The urban post-millenial has seceded from India and settled – with visa and Pringles – in Utopia. About five days ago, one of them and I were talking about something and the topic turned to marriage gifts. 

“What!  Tell me again, like how many pressure cookers did you get as wedding gifts?”

I repeated my answer with anticipation, because the next question would be, “But, like, why?” Post-millenials use ‘like’ about 2124 times a day.  If they don’t like someone, they get confused and say, “I like don’t like you.”

She didn’t ask the question, instead running her fingers through the patch of purple in her hair.  The purple was one of the patches in her hair and VIBGYOR was well represented, but with post-millenials you don't ask questions that go, "Like, why have you coloured your hair purple?" because she will then get all offended at having her choice questioned and say, "like, it's kinda like cool", which of course leaves you wondering if grey is even better. 

"I think it’s like sexist to gift pressure cookers,” she said as if I was now entitled to lifelong gratuity and monthly freedom fighter pension for having endured that phase of struggle.

Seeing my raised eyebrows (in case you didn't know, raising eyebrows in the most diligent part of my exercise routine), she continued, “Your parents’ generation – that’s like my grandparents – all thought and like still think that a woman’s role is in the kitchen.”

Now, you must never ever argue with post-millenials if you want them to think, “I like like you.”  I shut up of course and changed the topic. 

The reason we were gifted fourteen and a half pressure cookers at our wedding was not because the gifters saw my wife as a talking kitchenette.  It’s because their kids had got married before us and they had seventeen pressure cookers to gift away.  For three years after, we gifted pressure cookers with touching generosity and indiscriminate sexism, even to a new born baby (who, we hope, never heard about it, because he’s writing the civil service exams now).

Post-millenials, you see, just like don’t get it.

Bamboozled at Terminal Two

Terminal 2 at the Bangalore Airport is a novel – and interesting – experience.  For now, it is hardly crowded and you make your way in surprisingly quickly, taking in the heady cladding of bamboo everywhere.  Everywhere and on everything. 

It’s nice at first, but then sort of gets to you. You walk past one book-cum-toys-cum-chocolates shop that doesn’t want you to buy anything because it disturbs their slumber.  And there’s Liberte-Qualite-Adore – whatever that is, it sounds hideously French, though the inside looks pretty cool - and those shops selling stuff that appears forbidding and for good reason (at Forest Essentials, you need to pay for a soap with a housing loan on EMI, trust me.  Buy a shampoo there and you are in bonded labour for two generations).

You then head for breakfast upstairs, passing by a tribute to that genius, Paul Fernandes, whose sketches of life in Bangalore-as-we-knew-it are without parallel – what a treat those images are! 

At the food lounge, most folks are, as you’d expect, busy with their phones or their breakfast or are talking to each other (often while stuffed with food, as is the case with the two chaps next to you, both of whom need to see a dietician pronto) and they all miss the lamps that have splendid hues of tasteful opulence. 

And then you stand and stare at the work of an unknown artist who has painted Karnataka’s coffee country – Coorg & Chikmagalur - across a long wall.  It is excellent work, and done with a careful brush. Something, in particular, catches the eye.....

It is hard to not be delighted at the careful, fastidious attention to the painting of the Coppersmith Barbet.

Now, who would have thought of that?

...and a tale of two cars.....

What's a nice guy like me doing in a painting of Paul's?

What's a nice guy like me not doing in this painting?