how to tell home address

today' s evening was booked for a promise, to attend the birthday of my youngest sister whose house is not very far away, although the traffic jam in the city road connecting made me wonder if i would ever reach her house.

there i was also expecting to meet my younger, actually youngest of brothers who gels well with the sister in limelight.

it was a yellow light of a candle with which we were greeted. but i chuckled it was better than darkness. we had no choice, the state electricity board has failed miserably. it has failed to provide darkness to every household in the city. some coal still finds way to power plants.. to keep some lanterns glowing.

And so the proceedings went the usual way, the way which would make children happier. I played chinese whispers , the robot i had brought was walking, the cake was cut, gobbled, metabolized, with help of one glass of rasna and while i might sound nonchalant, it was lovely to be in a birthday party after a long time! i asked my brother who's in class 4 that how can one reach his home. he told that for this i would have to stop after haldiram's outlet, enter phase 1, and there would be a long road ahead, as i would walk along, i would encounter a cut on left, a narrow lane, but this wasn't where i was supposed to go, so i should continue walking , take a right( he actually turned positions to make his description in sync and aligned with his body, soul and spirit) and reach a field. i interrupted to help him ( actually help myself, given his discourse) and asked him his house number. he replied it was 20D/8. but added, that there were two 20D's once i would reach the field, there would be a flag-pole no farther than our refrigerator is to the sofa on which we were sitting. from that point i was supposed to turn left, and there would be a building path to my left, and on the first floor, counted from the ground floor there would be flat number 8 . and then he yells,' so simple n easy'

but he continued that if i wanted a shortcut ( as if i was interested in knowing only the longest route) , i would have to stop before phase I, enter haldiram's , and get out of its back door and not make a silly mistake of entering the main door of food outlet. at the back door, we would be facing a pillar reading' Anupama apartments'. i should walk in, and take a left, then right and then again take a second left to reach the field.

then came a philosophical statement ... see there are two ways to reach the same place !

then he told there was another way to reach his home, the one thru gorabazaar, but that road had 50 lanes left and right, and so was complex..

( as if this wasnt enough :))

then i realized that he would grow up to be a true represntative and champion of all his senior brothers..

NOTEBOOK: by IAN JACK

Thanks to my children I’vebeen watching the latest British sensation on YouTube,which is a three minuteclip called “GapYah”. An upper middle-class student,Orlando, is talking on his mobile to his friend, Tarquin, in west London.Orlando is apparently in Burma, travellingthe world in his “gap yah” —gap year — which is what studentswith rich enough families tend to dobetween school and university. Youmight call it “poverty tourism”. Hetells his friend that in “Tanzanah”,meaning Tanzania, he met a woman who had “like, flies around her eyes”and who looked at him “with this vacantstare but with this sense of enduringhope, yah?” For a second herecognized her as a fellow humanbeing. And then, he tells Tarquin, he vomited all over her. That’s what Orlandodoes: he skips through poorcountries, has adolescent insightsinto their condition, drinks too much,throws up, and then chortles cheerfully at the mess. A hundred years ago asimilar young man might have had “Isay you fellows, what a lark!” as his verbal tick. Orlando’s equivalent is alazy way with vowels and consonants,so that ‘yah’ can mean ‘year’ or ‘yes’.Orlando is, of course, a parody. Ayoung actor and writer, Matt Lacey,created him to satirize, in Lacey’s words, “the great number of peoplewho seem to be leaving these shores tovomit all over the developing world”.In Britain, they’re known as ‘Rahs’and what they have in common is a private education and a place on offer at one of the older universities:Durham, St Andrews and Bristol are among the favourites, though Oxbridgecan never be ruled out. Their sense of entitlement often outweighstheir intelligence.None of this is new. You can catch glimpses of Orlando’s riotous ancestors in the memoirs of William Hickeywhich record with a fascinating detailand candour Hickey’s adventures in Calcutta in the late 18th century.Like many of his compatriots in Bengalat that time, Hickey drank astonishing quantities of claret and brandy (a detail I remember is his spewing from a carriage window, perhaps in Chowringhee) and persisted with a heavy English diet of roast beef and dumplings however hot and unhealthy the season. Diet alone should have secured him an early resting place in the Park Street cemetery,but he survived to live a long and happy retirement in London.The moralism of the Victorian empire put an end to this kind of public excess — the whoring and gamblingas well as the eating and drinking— though the English upper-class buffoon survived as a comic element in literature. In this way, you can see Orlando as a character updated from the novels of P.G.Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, as the latest twist in a long tradition.The surprising thing is that despite all that has happened to British behaviour in the years since— the changes, for example, produced by pop culture — the stereotype still endures. How many people are like Orlando? Quite a few, because my children recognized him as a type immediately and it’s the parody’s accuracy that has made it such a hit.And now a paradox:Orlando and his kind are the butt of popular comedy,and yet within a few weeks it seems likely that Britain will elect a new government that has at its heart a group of men who in their youth were just like Orlando. If all goes well for the Tories, the new primeminister will be David Cameron and his chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne.They and quite a few of their expensively educated colleagues share a common background:prosperous families, the very best schools and Oxford University. At Oxford,Cameron, Osborne and BorisJohnson (now the Tory mayor of London)were all members of the celebrated Bullingdon Club, a socially exclusive dining society the purpose of which, so far as any outsider can tell,is to trash restaurants in drunken sprees and then pay handsomely for the damage. Members dress up smartly in dinner jackets and waistcoats.History records quite a bit of throwing-up. The dry-cleaning bills must have been expensive.Today, nobody in the Tory party is keen to remember the BullingdonClub. Copies of official club photographsfrom the 1980s showing Cameron, Osborne and Johnson can still be found on the web, though theTory party is reported to have tried hard to have them withdrawn. Their membership is excused in terms of “ayouthful indiscretion”. Being an Orlando doesn’t win votes.How then not to be like Orlando?The answer is to sound more ordinary— no more yah-ing, chuckling and braying, no mention of previous pastimes such as hunting and shooting, a new emphasis on pop music and other demotic pleasures. Cameron now likes to be known as “Dave”, just as his political model, Blair, was known by all as “Tony”. Osborne is rumoured to have taken lessons todown-class his voice. The most notable example, however,comes with Cameron’s wife Samantha — “Sam-Cam” in the tabloids — who has an impeccable social lineage. Her father is a baronet and her mother by as econd marriage is Viscountess Astor.The family has large estates in atleast two English counties, and Samantha was educated at one of the best girls’ boardingschools. And how does Samantha sound now? He rvowels are those of a woman who grew up in a London suburb and attended her local stateschool. Orlando, we laugh at; Samantha,we like. If her husband wins, as he looks very likely to, he’ll know that he owes his victory at least partly to social disguise.